I had a dream about Bluelight for the first time in several years last night, and it was pretty intense.
There was a Bluelight meetup, and it was being held in a large open space in a mall. As per real Bluelight, it was mostly men, with the few women who were there getting quite a bit of attention. I talked to a few people and we mostly discussed the goings-on of the forum. One guy pulled me aside and warned me against being involved with a certain clique of posters, and showed me a piece of paper with their names written on it (I don't remember them but none of them were real Bluelighters' usernames). Then I hung out with a heavier guy. He had his eyes on a thin German redhead woman who was there and mentioned this to me. I looked at his eyes and they were impossibly huge black saucers. He was clearly on some sort of psychedelic, or maybe MDMA. I mentioned his pupils and he got uncomfortable, so I dropped the topic.
I started hoping someone would pull out some drugs to share. Not too far from me, somebody made a joke about crack cocaine and laughed. I was wondering if somebody would pull out some crack, and considered whether it would be worth indulging. (I've always enjoyed it, but that level of physical stimulation would be a bit much for me these days. Who am I kidding, I would do it if someone offered, and I'm sure I would have in the dream as well.) Alas, nobody did.
Finally, I met with the only real Bluelighter to appear in the dream. It was
@arrall, and he was there with his girlfriend. He was a redhead with freckles and had a sports-team baseball cap on. He introduced himself with a drawl that sounded Texan. I introduced myself ("Hey, I'm [real name], S.J.B. on the forum"), and for some reason, emulated Arrall's accent. Somebody else who was there laughed at me for doing so and I was mildly embarrassed. In the dream, the accent made me think he was Albertan, so I asked him if he was. He said no, he was from [rural town about two hours from where I grew up], and that his girlfriend was from that general area as well. I was happy to hear they had grown up near me, described where I had grown up ("south of [large city] close to the [river]") and asked his girlfriend whether she was familiar with [small city that was very close to where I grew up]. She smiled and said yes.
At that point things went south. An emaciated, rat-like man who was twitching and laughing and gibbering like a lunatic walked up to me and began shooting me with a paintball gun. The paintballs were yellow and were lobbed in slow arcs toward me. I was hit multiple times. I told him to stop and he did briefly but then began shooting me again At this point, as I tend to do in dreams, I completely lost my shit and beat him to the point that he was, literally, a pulp with little shards of bones sticking out. For some reason this pulp was in a cardboard box when I was through with him. If this were reality anything that looked like that would absolutely be dead but in the dream it wasn't clear whether that was the case or not. Everybody was shocked and uncomfortable -- the vibes were bad. I felt nervous and was wondering whether I would get in trouble or whether it would be considered legitimate self-defense.
A large, powerful-looking man then clipped half-way out of the floor like a poltergeist to talk to me. He introduced himself as the man who had sent the paintball guy after me. He commended me on how I had readily dispatched him, but he was just a peon and actually I was surrounded by this gangster's men. He pointed to a fancy car (maybe a Porsche or a Corvette) just outside the glass facade of the mall and said that they were after the person who owned that car, which they believed to be me. At this point I realized I had no shoes on, and my feet were dirty. I said: "That can't be my car, I have no shoes!" The gangster in the floor stared at me for a second and then a look of doubt came over him. Soon after, we all looked at the car as a procession of teenage boys in clothing that suggested wealth came out of it. We all realized that these were the actual targets of the gangster, and they left.
Most of the Bluelighters were still milling about. The paintball guy wasn't actually dead; he had reappeared in human form, but was beet red, as if he had been skinned. He ran out of the room. One of the Bluelighters mentioned to me that there was a CCTV camera in the room and everything had been caught on it. I became very nervous. Near the exit to the mall was a restaurant without any staff. I saw a running sink behind the counter, went over to it, and used it to wash the blood off my hands. As I was doing so, the restaurant staff came back, saw me leaning over the counter, and yelled at me then ran towards me. I ran out of the mall away from them.
I appeared to be in New York City. I hadn't run far when I started getting nervous that I had slept in and missed work, and then I woke up suddenly with that concern in my head.*
*I often wake up well before morning with the concern that I've missed work. This low-level paranoia is, I think, due to (a) the fact that I often flip my sleep schedule from diurnal to nocturnal on the weekend by staying up 36+ hours on Friday, then have just Sunday to readjust and (b) I actually was late for work a couple months ago because I did this on a Saturday instead of a Sunday and had consumed an excess of alcohol and poppy seed tea. I had somehow turned the volume of my alarm off and couldn't remember it going off in the first place. I am determined not to repeat that experience.