The Big Applesauce Dreaming

Picture a house. Actually, picture two houses. They're (almost) identical structures that share an uneasy coexistence, tangled together on a quantum level. One of the houses is Good: bright, cheerful, full of comfortable furniture and a pervasive feeling of safety. The other house is Evil: dingy, dilapidated, and haunted by the dreamers' greatest fears.

The good news - and bad news - is that travel from one house to the other is as simple as passing through a door. All a dreamer has to do is walk through a doorway, any doorway, and they'll find themselves in whichever house they weren't in before they crossed the threshold. Perhaps they'll step out of a beautiful library and find themselves in a threatening hallway - or perhaps they'll flee a menacing kitchen and find themselves in a perfectly safe dining room. That is the nature of the houses' entanglement: every door is a portal between the two.

There are, of course, complications. Dreamers in one house can't perceive the other; if you're in the Good house and looking through a doorway, the space beyond will look as nice and inviting as the space you're in now (until you step through that doorway, of course). Dreamers also can't really perceive one another if they're in the same room, but in different houses, though they might see a flash of movement out of the corner of their eye, or think they heard something.

Perhaps the greatest complications are the houses themselves. They have rather strong personalities, and they aren't very fond of one another. Each house will want to keep you if it can (keep you safe, in the case of the Good house, or keep you for itself, in the case of the Evil one). Dreamers may attempt to cross a hall and find the door that looked open and inviting a moment ago is now barred shut, leaving them trapped in the hall - or have doors suddenly close in their faces before they can end up anywhere unpleasant. Still, there's only so much either house can do, and even a locked door can be jimmied open or busted down.

Escape from the houses is possible, but the formal gardens beyond are similarly entangled, with neatly trimmed lawns and expertly plotted flower beds becoming overgrown tangles of nettles and algae-choked reflecting pools. An archway is as good as a door, as far as the gardens are concerned, and there are plenty of arbors and arches over the paths. Of course, dreamers may find that a sound arbor in the Good garden has collapsed in the Evil one… and heaven help anyone who dares to explore the hedge maze.





[ooc: y'all know the drill. ALL characters are welcome, regardless of whether they're in the game. Characters can remember or forget the events of the dream at the players' discretion.

Also, this dream party marks the aforementioned calendar freeze. For the next three weeks, the IG date will sit on July 3rd. Posts dated July 3rd or earlier are allowed and encouraged. The calendar will resume forward motion at a 4:1 ratio on Saturday, July 26th.]

The communal dreams of Manhattan have been downright pleasant lately, haven't they? Here's another sunny day for dreamers to enjoy in their sleep, though of course the tropical climate may prove just a little uncomfortable for northerners. The verdant jungle has its own sort of charm, though, teeming as it is with all sorts of exotic animals.

Make that very exotic animals.

Those who arrive close by any of the old buildings or fences will see that it's been a long time since the humans that made them disappeared. Everything here was once sleek, shiny, and state of the art. Now formerly electric fences stand bent and torn, automated SUVs sit rusting on their tracks or lie smashed to pieces where they were thrown by some enormous creature, and the jungle slowly works to reclaim a mildewy hotel and visitors' center.

Whether one finds oneself in the formless jungle that was once paddocks, in the aviary that would have housed a luxury resort, or even in the halls of what should by all rights be the most heavily fortified hotel in the world, one is always in danger here. The barriers that once separated human from dinosaur have long since fallen. Here dinosaurs have eked out a new ecosystem, the carnivores not particularly bothered about eating herbivores from entirely different epochs…or, for that matter, the funny little hairless apes that have appeared here on occasion. Here one is always in danger of running afoul of hungry tyrannosaurs, stampeding triceratops, or cunning deinonychus velociraptors (they're totally velociraptors, yup). Enjoy the eye-searing venom of that strangely undersized dilophosaurus, by the way, as well as the toxic bite of the swarms of compsognathus. Or maybe the dreamers will luck out, and the worst they'll encounter is an indifferent, bumbling brachiosaurus or an unassuming microceratops. Who here is ever that lucky, though?

Welcome to Jurassic Park.



[Mod note: Same drill as always. All players and characters are welcome, current members or no. Characters will remember or forget any and all dream events at players' discretion. Death in the dream does not result in real death.]

To what dark realm will the rift bring the dreamers of Manhattan tonight? Another dark, craggy island? A deathly, abandoned place where they will be forced to confront their deepest, darkest demons?

No, not so much. Tonight the dreamers of Manhattan will find themselves alighting in a beautiful, sunlit zoological park. Well-kept paths wind between spacious enclosures, state of the art habitat design allowing visitors close-up views of the animals without depriving the latter of room to roam. One might wander into the indoor aquarium with its tropical microclimate, or go for a stroll in a shady arboretum. Food stands dot the pathways, each one serving up a variety of oddly themed foodstuffs, free of charge. It's hard not to be happy in such a wondrous place.

No, really, it's hard not to be happy. Feelings of well-being permeate the air and the people and animals breathing it -- one has so much to be thankful for, after all.

Oh, and those animals? Probably not what one would expect to find at a typical, earthly zoo. Creatures of myth and fantasy occupy the many enclosures: sea serpents in the aquarium, winged horses in the aviaries, and everything that flies or crawls or slithers through the imagination of the universe's many cultures in the various enclosures.


[Mod Note: Once again it's time for a shared dream! We're back to optional themes this month, so players are free to choose whether and how much to have the happiness whammy apply to their characters. As always, all players and all characters are welcome, including players who are not members and characters who are not in the game. Memories of this and of all dreaming threads may be retained or forgotten at players' discretion.]

It's that time again! The rift has caught the good little dreamers of New York (and beyond) in its currents and washed them ashore on a desert island in a dream wonderland. This time, however, quite a noticeable change has come over each of the attendees of this nocturnal party.

All the people who arrive in this shared mindspace will find that they have been transformed into some sort of animal they find familiar or that resembles them. They will find that they can still communicate with one another and that they still have all their mental faculties, but might be a little…well…influenced by the forms they have taken on.

They will also find that they have been deposited in the middle of the largest, most elaborate playground they have ever seen. Climbing equipment and slides of the sort meant for human children are in evidence, but so are cat trees, meadows, tunnels, pools and ponds, aerial obstacle courses, and anything else the mind can imagine, for as far as the eye can see.



[OOC: The usual dream party rules apply: players apply the party's theme (in this case, transformation) to their characters according to their own discretion, and both members and non-members are more than welcome to use this post to try out characters not yet in the game. Usual dreaming rules also apply, in that players can choose whether or not their characters will remember this in the morning. Have at!]