The Bakemonogatari Girls Tried To Kill Me In My Sleep – From the Dream Diary of Digital Boy

At any given time, the amount of anime culture that i consume is directly reflected by it’s presence in my dreams, and when I’m ‘in deep’ like I have been the past couple of weeks, then I’m bound to have some crazy-ass anime influenced dreams. Last time I was turning into one of the Strike Witches, which was a pretty cool dream, but I knew that this couldn’t last because 99% of the dreams that I have are nightmares. Sure enough, last night I had a nightmare wherein the Bakemonogatari girls tried to kill me.

I am fairly certain that this dream had a pretty long beginning, but I can only remember about from the point that it started to become anime relevant – though it actually began as some sort of Kanon parody. At the earliest point that I can remember, I was standing around in a Gamestop store, just because I was bored. However, at the back of the store, I noticed a rather large special edition game container. This was, apparently, my friend Derrick. Derrick hates being stuck at home and really loves video games, so I guess my brain combined that into a character who loves to hang out at Gamestop, since it was apparent that this wasn’t the first time that I’d found him crammed into this special edition game.

They want me dead! Art by oimo http://gelbooru.com/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=oimo

When I opened either end of the box, I saw clothes and other things for, apparently, living in this box, and asked ‘how the hell do you fit in this thing?!’ after which he grotesquely removed himself from the case and reformed into his regular body. He said ‘you know I do this every weekend!’ or something to that effect. This is where it becomes a Kanon parody of sorts – I apparently felt bad for Derrick, but it wasn’t that I felt sorry for him so much as that I felt moe for him. I actually identified this emotion in the dream itself. Apparently, I thought of Derrick’s condition as a ‘moe point.’

Next, my 12 year-old brother MegaShaidu walked into the store – apparently I had been waiting for him and was supposed to be looking after him or something. My dream representation of my brother was ultra-cute (well, he’s an ultra-cute kid anyway, but the dream seemed to be forcing this) and I remember immediately thinking that my little brother was moe, too. This actually felt very natural to my brain as my brother and I are extremely close in real life, but that simultaneously made me a little uneasy about it. Oh, and he had a ‘moe point’ too: apparently he was dead.

It was actually when the ghost of my brother and I were leaving Gamestop that I even thought in the dream ‘oh, this is just like Kanon, with all the moe characters.’ As an afterthought, I wish I had some female friends to be moe in my dreams LOL. As we left Gamestop, I was expecting to find a mall (90% of my dreams feature a mall at some point, and my dream-self seemed aware of this) but instead we were on the rooftop of some kind of builiding. There is actually a good chance that this was a mall roof, though, because my 17yo brother and I actually went ‘exploring’ on the 4th-story roof of a mall the other day (part of he and his friend’s ‘parkour training’). On the roof of this building, there was inexplicably a bathroom, which I went to go use.

B.... bro?!

As I entered the bathroom, apparently i was recounting the situation about my brother’s death and the special conditions that he has to have as a ghost, which somehow involved not being able to enter bathrooms – I don’t remember the details. When I left the bathroom, MegaShaidu wasn’t there anymore, which I didn’t find surprising – perhaps because the dream was now about to change directions altogether, and suddenly I no longer had a first-person perspective, but now was viewing everything from above, and myself and the world around me were being rendered as a Super Nintendo game. When the sprite of my character left the bathroom and walked to the right, the screen actually went black and transitioned to a new area.

This is where things get particularly strange, because I was now apparently in a room on the second floor of a house, but it wasn’t any house I’d ever lived in – it was designed very linearly like a video game house that was three screens across on each floor. The first room was a living room, which linked to a bathroom off the side of it. The next room was a weird sort of design I can’t even describe, and the third room was actually outdoors, like it was just an undeveloped area over the third room below that had been left open for access. The only notable feature of this ‘room’ was a ladder leading down to the first floor. Well, that and Nadeko Sengoku.

In all three of the rooms I just mentioned danced the sprites of Bakemonogatari girls – more specifically, I remember Senjougahara, Tsubasa, and Nadeko being in each room in that respective order. I think that I said something to one of them while I was passing through, but don’t remember for sure. When I reached the third area, I headed down the ladder, and suddenly the entire dream got a graphics boost up to Gamecube level, and I was now a 3D sprite, being viewed from a side-angle like a 3D-gen RPG. The room that I emerged into was a huge mess that looked like it was a rotting room in an ancient house that time had abandoned. It was kind of creepy – maybe that’s why, on a table in the center of the room, the typewriter save point from Resident Evil was there. I saved my game.

The door into the next area of the house was locked, leading me to believe that there was some large mystery section leading off of the area. Suspicious of this, I thought that one of the girls would know about it, so I headed back up the ladder. At this part, apparently my head was pretty unclear about what girls had what animal representations, because Tsubasa and Nadeko were both cat. Except Tsubasa only had cat ears, while Nadeko had actually turned into a cat. I can’t remember what either of them told me, though I remember the incredibly cute genki cat pose that Tsubasa made while she explained to me in an uncharacteristically cheerful voice. It seemed as if the girls were hiding something from me, as neither had given a clear answer, which i knew that they had.

Her pose was like this, but she was in her normal form. Art by yukianhttp://gelbooru.com/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=yukian

I went back into the first living-room area where Senjougahara had evidently left (and now I was in first-person view again). I was shocked to find that there were snakes crawling around in groups on the floor in places. I quickly got paranoid that the girls were trying to kill me and, avoiding the snakes, I headed for the bathroom. Bad move – there were snakes all over the place in the bathroom, having apparently spawned out of the overpopulated batthtub. I was bitten on the leg almost instantly, and began screaming and freaking out as I desperately turned to the shelves of medicine in the bathroom. I found that all of them were poison antidotes of different kinds, but that only certain ones worked for certain snake bites. There was also a hand-guide to identifying types of poison and their cures. That’s when Tsubasa’s face appeared in my mind again. Hadn’t she said something about a game?! Was this their game?! I was to fight against time and a thousand snakes to try and find the right cure before it was too late?! I was now frantic and sure that I was dying, and I began screaming for Funeral desperately.

That is, apparently Funeral had been sitting in the living room now watching TV, because I guess the living room was now in our house, and that Funeral was unaware that a room away was a whole asston of snakes. Funeral didn’t seem to hear me, so I scooped up some relevant-looking antidotes and the handbook for curing poisons and began hopping on one leg down the hallway from the bathroom to the living room still screaming desperately as a noticeable mark was apparent on my leg. He wasn’t hearing. As I made it into the living room, I fell to the ground and was now just flailing wildly and screaming his name – he was right there in front of me!

Funeral looks at me and says ‘SHUT THE FUCK UP, I’M TRYING TO WATCH TV!’ To which I reply ‘I’VE BEEN BITTEN BY A POISONOUS SNAKE YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE, GET OVER HERE!’ He gets up like it’s the most aggravating thing in the world, and has a look at my leg. Pulling me over next to a couch, he starts trying to examine the wound, and hands the poison guide to a third party, whose existence had only just become apparent, and I’m still not really sure who it was. Funeral and I started talking about random shit to take my mind off of the apparently encroaching death while this guy seemed to be reading the book all-too-slowly.

Wait, WTF?! Art by nalia http://gelbooru.com/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=nalia

I said ‘dude, did you find the fucking cure or what?!’ To which this idiot replies by explaining that he had actually been drawing a picture. Apparently, the titles of the snake antidotes were the names of anime characters, and there were blanks next to them where you could draw their pictures. I was extremely angry, so I took the book from him and began flipping through myself. Sure enough, next to each antidote name were two white squares that were labelled ‘artist rendering’ and ‘annoyed professional rendering’ leading me to believe that the other block was for the people who were annoyed by the anime pictures and doing accurate art of the poisons. This, however, was no the case, as almost every block in the book was white, and the only ‘professional rendering’ that I found was a picture of Wilhelmina from Shakugan no Shana, because there was apparently a ‘Wilhelmina snake.’

I believe I screamed something along the lines of ‘I am going to die because of this stupid shit!’ and then, simultaneously to waking up, I realized that the reason I wasn’t dead yet was that this was all a dream. However, when I wok up, I actually found that the spot on my leg where I’d been bitten felt really weird. I don’t know if it was that funny feeling that inspired the dream or vice-versa, but it was definitely an interesting feeling.