Dearest Rachel –
I think I may have the bed piled with too many ‘reindeer skins.’ Oh, it’s a comfort in the evening, when it’s just a little too cold to just sit around in, but by two o’clock this morning, I was waking up in a sweat. Then, again, it may have been the dream I was trying to make sense out of; a literal fever dream, judging from my overheated reaction.
Interestingly – or perhaps, ironically – enough, it actually involved an individual who goes by the moniker ‘Dream.’ We never followed him, even back in the days when you were around and we were watching a lot of ‘Lets play’ers, but I know enough about him to give you a rough sketch. As I understand it, he hosts a massive multiplayer Minecraft world, and he and a number of his regulars basically make a series out of their antics within said world. Even MatPat has made several theories about what he thinks is going on in Dream’s world.
However, my dream about Dream had him reaching out of the parasocial world of Minecraft and YouTube into something much more sinister. I don’t know if he was addressing members of his world, or fans of his series, but he was challenging certain fellow Youtubers to what basically amounted to a life-or-death game of hide-and-seek. He would reach out to someone and challenge them, and wouldn’t begin the ‘game’ unless they accepted, to be sure, but the rules were simple and deadly: he and his opponent had to basically dox the other, and try to find them. Upon finding their quarry, they were to kill them; on camera, of course, as this was for views above all else. It was part “Running Man,” part “Battle Royale,” part “Hunger Games”; you get the picture.
And from what I could tell, Dream was particularly good at this (which I suppose he would have to be, if he’s the one doing all the challenging – clearly he was supremely confident in his abilities to hunt down his opponents). The fact that he rarely reveals his face adds a certain psychological dimension to his side of the hunt; until fairly recently, his ‘prey’ wouldn’t have had a clue as to who, in a crowd, might be the individual trying to hunt him down.
Indeed, it was one of these very encounters that shook me awake in the first place, with a kid who barely looked to be in his double digits confronting this visage on his doorstep. After an attempt at running away, only to find Dream now standing at his back door, blocking his exit and brandishing (of all things) a rapier, the kid simply charged at Dream head-on, before staggering back, bleeding like a stuck piglet, and collapsing.
Yeah that’ll wake you up, no matter how dark it is in the real world.
I found myself assuming that it had to be staged; he wouldn’t be the first YouTuber (or even the first gamer on YouTube) to stage something like this. The idea that someone would just run at an unsheathed sword is just too preposterous – if nothing else, if it had been real, there’s no way the site would have allowed it to stay up, to say nothing of getting Dream arrested for murder. As ridiculous as this seems, I was already concluding that Dream would be able to say, “But Officer, I didn’t kill him; he just ran into my blade! Check the videotape, you’ll see!”
Indeed, when I got back to sleep (and yes, I managed to; two a.m. is just too early in the morning not to), I was envisioning graphic novels as well as YouTube videos of his kills, with the artists and performers being his ‘victims.’ He even had a list of people he was trying to contact, and an old pseudonym of mine was actually on that list. Yup, I could get the chance to write my own death scene as he tracked me down, apparently. However, since I’ve been out of the fanfiction game for several decades already, the email address he was using to try and get in touch with me, while legitimate, has long since been defunct.
And personally, I don’t think I’m really in the mood to write such a scene with the fellow; “The Most Dangerous Game” has already been written, and Richard Connell did a better job than I could hope to. So I’m not about to reach out to Dream and update his contact list with my current information. I appreciate him thinking of me, though. Or was it just me thinking of him thinking of me?
In any event, maybe I ought to watch my back as I go out and about this morning. So keep an eye on me, honey, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.
Letters to Rachel 