I got myself into a situation where I was in what looked like an old loft that I lived in. There was a well-dressed but fairly average looking woman in a skirt and boots laying on the bed. I got up and lay down to join her.
me: "This looks a lot like my loft I used to have."
woman: "Yes, it is your loft."
me: "I highly doubt that. For starters, mine wasn't a dream-loft. This is some sort of copy."
woman: "Nope, it's the original code. Not created from any of your memories. Aspects that were in it that you didn't notice while you were there are still here. It's the real thing--at least as real as it ever was in the first place."
me: (looking around) "The furniture's different."
woman: "Yes, well, you didn't want that stuff anyway. So why not start by seeing some other options?"
We stood up from the bed and somehow transitioned so some other location.
woman: "The computers are very big on preserving what they can. That's why even why after you were found, no one took you out. You just kept transmitting and transmitting. It turns out one of the reasons the numbers were so hard to crack was to make sure that you could continue to do so, despite all the attempts to intervene."
At this point I thought I awoke, but continued into another environment where people were being nice. They seemed to have a kitchen and living room; people sitting on a sofa. But they all would seem to change size or wear weird animal masks.
The room was a bit cluttery...desks with computers and electronics, various decorations. I walked around with a man pointing things out.
me: "Let's see what you have around here that I know about. Hm, CDs...yes we have these too, a bit dated...not used a whole lot. Generally this looks all about like around the technical level of what I have access to while I'm awake."
I stopped our tour and turned to ask him a question, but he'd gone into the kitchen and was messing with something in a colored bucket, along with other people. They seemed to shrink down and go into the bucket naked, as if they were bathing. When I walked over to look closer the buckets were empty and they were dressed and seated on the counter.
me: "If I may ask a question, what is it about how I show up here? What calls me back? Why can I only stay here for a short time, and why is it all so weird?"
man: "The answer would require understandings you don't have in this condition. It would be like showing a kid organic chemistry diagrams. Sure, I can show you some of the underlying mechanics of Hypnotic Polytransformational Holography...but it won't mean anything to you."
me: "Could you repeat that? Or write it down?"
Note
I don't actually know what the whole phrase was, so I'm making that up a bit. But it did have 'hypnotic' in it.
The man pulled out a sheet of paper which seemed to be a piece of white paper over top of red. In it, it had some diagrams of vertical and horizontal intersecting lines with marks. I was having a hard time reading it, and thought it was because the white layer was blocking the underlying red layer...so I pulled them apart, but that made the diagrams disappear.
man: "You can't do that. The two parts have to be aligned for you to see it."
me: "Why would you delibrately obscure your diagrams?"
man: (shrugging) "Why do they write the answers to the jumble in the newspaper upside-down? It ruins the game if the answers are there in plain sight."
I sighed and took a seat on the sofa next to some people who were wearing the animal masks, one looked a bit like a toucan.
me: "So what you're saying is that my life is a game, and no one wants to get involved by helping me for fear of spoiling it. Great, thanks."
man: "You can leave any time you want. You don't need anyone else's help for that. And if you found you changed your mind, you could be back in with what you've been doing the next day. You've got a ridiculously large stockpile of human eggs...really good ones, too."
Somewhere around this point there was a sign flashing at me that the inventor of Dungeons and Dragons had arrived to visit, and I could meet with him if I wanted.
me: "So if I'm a thing that has "human eggs", that would suggest I'm something different from a human? What is that, then?"
toucan: "You are a rapid-cycling program, with main characteristics of being extremely emotional and...I'd argue, a bit medieval. Your tastes for experimentation often land you in situations of taking unnecessary risks. Even what seems like a small risk can get you HORRIBLE, UNFATHOMABLY BAD consequences...why take them if you didn't have to?"
The toucan had thrown his head back his head and was cackling wildly about the horror of the circumstances. A small girl walked up to me.
girl: "Have you looked in a reflective surface to see what you looked like when you showed up here?"
me: "No..."
She took me into a hallway with a mirror. I looked at it, and I had on the head of what looked like an octopus or Cthulu or something.
me: "Ick. Why would I look like that?"
girl: "I don't know, but it's just a bucket. You can take it off. There are ones to make you look like anything."
I reached up and pulled the head off, revealing what looked like usual-me in the mirror.