I was walking into a gate of some kind and I ran into a guy who had a head like a stereotypical 'gray' alien, though it appeared to be made of a kind of cloth and was white. For some reason (that is not the usual reason you would think it strange that an alien shouldn't be somewhere) I thought he did not belong.
me: "An alien...in here? Is that appropriate?"
alien: "Yes, we're doing a game. It's a Buzz Entertainment production: Invasion IV."
me: "Oh, right. Buzz Entertainment, guess I've heard of that."
Note
I am paraphrasing the conversation; I don't remember the title of the game or the company being mentioned. This was pre-lucidity.
We both went in, and it was like an entry gate to a large walled in city. Inside were a mishmash of buildings and shops, looking like a blend of genres and eras. Besides the alien there were ordinary humans, a character who looked more cartoon-built that I recognized as being idential to "Prince Farquaad" from Shrek.
me: "Jeez. There's no theme, here, is there. Well let's see what the deal is."
We walked into something that seemed like a T-shirt and novelty store, that was crowded and somewhat anarchic. There were both adults and children in it, and TVs. One small boy was sitting and reciting nonsensical phrases involving the word "dick"
small boy: (zombie-like) "Dick, Shrimp dicks, Dick in a box, dick sticks, dick..."
Another boy on the other side of the room was taking some rearrangeable adhesive red lettering that had been used to spell something in the shop window pointing outward, and spelling the word DICK with it. An older person was going and trying to stop him.
older person: (scolding) "You can't do that! You can't write that word!"
me: (annoyed) "The censorship of a sequence of four letters based on people's apparent squeamishness is nonsense. Or perhaps the cascading results of how out-of-hand the idiotic escalations of that censorship makes it not nonsense, as it winds up in situations where things that don't know what it means at all are. Anyway, I don't know what it 'means' at this point, it's letters and means what you decide...but it's a sequence in my last name as well as the last name of a famous sci-fi author. Whether it means 'detective' or slang for 'penis' I'll leave up to you guys to decide."
alien: "Okay this isn't productive, let's go."
me: "Well, let's just see if there's a way to get out of here, or if someone disabled the exit."
We walked outside and went to a forest clearing where there weren't other people.
me: (spoken to sky) "Exit to game lounge."
When I said this, a dwarf-like character started running at full speed at me. He just kept running, and as he did I was picked up with him but seemingly just kind of pushed by him like I was being knocked from the side. As this was happening a couple of the Prince Farquaad characters armed with bows and arrows, chasing after two frightened "wench-dressed" women, with large cleavage. The archers and the women looked like identical twins.
I blacked out, but as I did there were some images passing by of some posters that seemed to be pornographic, with nude women in chains and a threat like "we're coming for you and you're going to live on your hands and knees".
When I came to, I was walking into another entrance of the same walled complex. I got to see how high the walls were, that they were brown. I was accompanied by another person this time, who looked like an ordinary person vs. an alien.
guy: "Okay got it, that hands and knees poster. Let's talk to Voldemort about it."
The place we walked into had a big poster that said "Voldemort's" and at the threshold to the "shop" there were some large gray rats jumping up and down, but not advancing. I stopped to look at them, and they seemed to just be small robotic toys designed to bounce a bit.
A man with white face paint and a black hooded robe was sitting at a desk when we walked in, and I could hear a song playing. It was 80s synth and familiar. I stopped to try and recognize it. It was "Puttin' on the Ritz".
me: "Ummm...you're in the mood for some Taco, eh?"
voldemort: (pointing at video on screen behind him) "In the video, how old do you think the guy is? He's got the face paint. I looked it up, and he was way older than I would have thought. Looks great for that age."
Note
As you might naturally assume, I went and watched the YouTube video for Taco's Puttin on the Ritz after this. At some point I have seen it before. So I vaguely recalled him looking weird and wearing makeup.
But in looking it up, I found something I definitely had not heard of before. The most notable face-painting issue would not be with Taco, but with 'blackface' painting that apparently background tapdancers had in an uncensored version. From Wikipedia:
The original version contains characters in blackface and has since been banned from many networks. The alternate version eliminates many shots of the blackface characters; notably two who appear during the song's 'Super duper' line are replaced with a photograph of Gary Cooper.
The reference source for all-things-fact says that Taco's name was actually 'Taco Ockerse' (born in Indonesia, but was a Dutch artist). His synth cover of Puttin On the Ritz was released in 1983. He was born in 1955, which would have made him 28. Which is not notably unusual for the appearance in the video one way or another.
But as we've already shown, there's more than one version of a video. Interesting though that there'd be a censorship controversy and it would be about face paint.
me: (becoming lucid) "So if I can know this song, and you can have this song here...and...I don't really know how I got here, what's going on? Have you been to Earth? Like, my Earth where I am during the day?"
voldemort: "Never been, but I could go. There are some wormholes."
me: "Well there are no wormhole trips advertised to here from where I am. So how did I just show up?"
voldemort: "Nobody knows how you do it. That's one of the big outstanding questions. We've got your journal, people do go over it. In fact someone is following up on one of the things you spotted right now. It was the entry about the patents."
Note
I felt I knew what he was talking about at the time, but waking up I had to look. The phrase 'patent' does not appear anywhere in a current entry title. Google searching my own content really yields only The Multiplicative Inverse of the Beast:
I watched what appeared to be a demonstration of storyboarding software for comics. A narrator was speaking while it was being demonstrated, and I started to feel the sensation of laying down.narrator: "...and by automatically creating patents on every permutation of ideas. The intention is to flood the system--because if they cannot determine which patents are 'authentic' and which are 'illegitimate' then they will have to admit that locking up ideas is a failed concept."Tangentially, I mention reading about a patent on 'Spoonilism' in Human Hedgehogs
me: "What do you mean by 'follow-up'? What are people doing?"
voldemort: "Well how it works is usually someone files a bounty on the story exchange, so this one was a bounty of 400. Then if anyone is interested in the bounty and wants to collect it, they can go try looking into what you saw and figure out what it was."
me: (dejected) "Great but, that doesn't exactly do me any good. Is there any bounty out to like...uh, help me?"
voldemort: "The reason people don't contact you isn't because they don't know who you are--or where you say you are, anyway. You're rather clear about that. It's that there are a lot of other factors, and kind of we're more fearful from our side. We're apparently a lot more afraid of you than you are of us."
guy: (flirtatiously) "I'm not afraid of you."
voldemort: (wagging finger at the guy) "And that's another thing, which is that if we track you, there have to be rules about what people are allowed to do to you and not. Case in point: there has to be a rule that Gary is not allowed to sexually molest you. Because believe me, he would."
guy: "Yup, I would!"
We walked outside Voldemort's shop and a girl ran by us.
girl: (yelling) "HEY VOLDEMORT...GO TO HELL!"
voldemort: (beaming back) "Thanks!!!"
girl: (phone gesture, mouthing) "Call me..."