I just had an interesting dream last night. I was playing what I call the "quarters game" at an arcade called the Red Baron, when the owner behind the counter told me to give it a rest and not to overwork the old thing, because it was an installation at the original Red Baron many years back. I told him how I used to play the game myself, and he started telling me about its rarity and how it needed to be bolted to the floor and everything.

I didn't think about it at the time, but now that I'm awake I understand why such a game needed to be bolted to the floor (to prevent cheating and theft). I laughed, thinking that he was right and I'd already won a lot of money from the thing, and just wanted to explain to him how I always wanted to be good at the game since my mom would leave me there most of the day with only a dollar to play the games with. I guess I fulfilled that dream within the dream, so while still feeling pretty good about it,

I told him "man, if you'd only been around 10 years ago...". We started talking about the old times for the mall we were in, which looked foreign and unfamiliar to me, and I started reminiscing about a few malls I went to at the time, without realizing (it's a dream, duh) that I was remembering an amalgamation, and not one specific mall. Even though I felt more like an adult at the time, because I picked up some grocery bags full of vegetables (broccoli and cabbage; things my mom almost never bought fresh on her own in those days), after waking up something struck me as strange. More on that in a minute.

The owner walked and talked with me, and left his re-opened arcade on autopilot while explaining that there used to be another attempt to re-open the Red Baron by another guy in another part of this dream mall. I remembered it, and I even remembered the secret nostalgia/retro mode reserved only for the people who could complete all of the owner's little personal achievements. You see, the other owner ended up being a personal friend from my past. I remember this place was an amusement center with mostly ball pits and other "physical" type games, but when the special mode was activated, all the lights went down and the kids were shooed off, and well. It didn't make any sense but was interesting.

The place where this attempt to re-open the arcade was, in the dream mall, had been covered up, and replaced with a false house facade in a cozy-corner kind of arrangement. The earlier owner looked disappointed when we finally got there and said "that's where it used to be". I'd seen that kinda crap before -- an experimental virtual reality arcade in Glenbook Square mall (Ft. Wayne, IN, a far cry from the NW Ohio I had once lived) had shuttered down, and when they were renovating their ice rink, they walled over the entire thing, making it seem like that and an arcade called Gold Mine (a crane-game exclusive arcade) never existed. Ironically, many years later they'd do the same thing to the ice rink, which is now a food court.

Shortly after being shown the location of the special arcade, which had been covered over, I woke up. That's when my common sense started to come back to me. The mall in my dreams wasn't one mall, but an amalgamation of many malls I went to as a child, including the aforementioned one. The one with my favorite arcade, though, the Red Baron, was only open at a few malls in Toledo, all of which are now demolished. Here's the kicker, though. "If only you'd been around 10 years ago" was what I said to the owner, thinking back to when I was around 10. The only problem was, Red Baron shut down more than 10 years ago. The heyday of my times spending all day at the arcade was at least 17 or 18 years ago now. In my subconscious mind, I'm apparently still barely older than 20... :c

Feels kinda sad, man. It's thanks to computers and the internet that I have a life and livelihood at all, but at the same time, they robbed me of my childhood. They've made vast swaths of my memory simply disappear into the ether. Time doesn't move in a linear fashion while absorbed into the internet. One remembers it as a different sorta world; a nondescript blob of information, where some of it is harder to remember than others without a physical record linking to the past.

In a way, nothing significant in my life has happened since I was 21; I contrast it to the years I don't remember hardly anything at all on TV, what was going on around me, etc. back when I lived in Ohio. The years between 1995 and 2000 were all computer/internet things, and a blur for most everything else. I remember all my favorite video games as generally falling into an age range between 1987-1993 (US publishing date). Nothing else seemed interesting anymore; I even stopped going to the arcade. All I needed was the box with the internet on it. These things sadly tell me a lot about my life, in retrospect, but perhaps not as much as a simple innocuous statement that my subconscious made to a simple shop owner. It thought I was still only 21.

---

---

The subconscious mind says, "Forget the outside world, the corrupt politics, and everything else that sucks, and just withdraw" -- I now realize that I probably get some of that antisocial behavior from my parents; but unlike my dad, who reaches out to nature for his zen, I've reached out to the cold embrace of technology. I've lost years of my life to it. The subconscious mind is simply waiting. It's still in there, waiting like a lost child for when it's safe to return, and for when I can take my life back.

I think it simply longs for the past because it seems closer to better times than the future does.