Make of This What You Will, Dr. Freud

So I had this dream the other night in which I joined a Live Action Roleplaying Game.  (I’ve never joined a LARP in real life.)  The game was rather action oriented, in that I carried a weapon and had to infiltrate a heavily defended area, evading bad guys and fighting the ones I couldn’t avoid.  I remember battling my way up a canal or river, and that a medium-sized motor yacht was blown up and sunk by a rocket-propelled grenade as I watched.

And then I got “killed,” and the game stopped and I trudged back to the beginning, and then had to do the infiltration thing all over again.  The yacht, which had been raised from the canal bottom, got blown up and sunk all over again.  I was deeply impressed by the level of skill and commitment of the game designers.  Sinking a whole yacht?  Wow.

Anyway, I kept getting killed, and the game kept rewinding, and the yacht kept going up and down.  It was like a first-person shooter video game, where if your character is killed you respawn at the beginning of the scenario and start over.

I believe I finally achieved my objective, and then the game ended and so did the dream.

So what does this mean, Dr. Freud?  Was it a metaphor for life, in which I keep having to perform the same acts over and over again until I somehow get them right?  Was it a metaphor for birth, in which I had to fight my way down the birth canal; or a metaphor for conception, in which my spermatazoic self traveled in the other direction?  Was it a metaphor for battling the forces that stand in the way of my fully-realized personhood?  Or was it just my idea of the coolest game evar? (I’m inclined to doubt this last— in real life I prefer games I can play from armchairs.)

Occasionally I have a dream that inspires a novel.  (Hardwired, Knight Moves, Implied Spaces.)  I don’t think that this is one of them.  Maybe I’d get some imagery out of it, I don’t know.  (Maybe I could have sinking yachts in all my books, in the same way that Ballard had empty swimming pools.)

But dude, if this dream inspires you to write something, go right ahead.  You can have it for nuthin’.