i dreamed something about video games and reality and my siblings were really excited for me to play some kind of suikoden game? i forget what happened but then the family got in a car and drove to a mall where most of the stores were food instead of clothes and there was even a big ice cream store where you could custom order ice cream wigs

also when we were on our way there i realized we were driving away from the night and my dad was saying he was tired of darkness (sadly there was a lot of darkness on the way to the mall, too)

umm while we were at the mall i lost track of my dad and sister and this hispanic couple suddenly approached and tried to give me an insane amount of plastic straws and other fast food eating utensils? i ended up with an armful of straws and carefully rushed to this restaurant where the employees were

I'm not sure if they were gathering more utensils to give away or wondering where all their stuff went but one employee was standing outside the counter with a big black trash bag and seemed relatively grateful when i returned the straws

and then i think she recognized me? she said she had the animal crossing villager i'd been looking for and expressed confusion that i wouldn't have my switch on me

i went and found mama sitting in a...a tree hollow? a tunnel slide entrance? anyway she told me sanyi had decided to take me as an apprentice after all, thus canceling out the part where i make my own decision, and went on to talk about plans i don't remember that probably had to do with where i was gonna live and stuff

she gave me permission to go buy a snack for all of us but most of the stores were either restaurants or ice cream shops so i couldn't find any candy or anything we could share unless she was okay with the three of us licking the same ice cream cone

i also passed by a kfc that had anime art of hot guys where the kfc sign should be, and i told mama that back in china i'd seen one doing a collab event so there were actual hot anime guys mixed in with the originals and that was the only time i ever tried buying kfc

the art was all bright colors, pastel, no darkness

also i kept running into a guy around the mall whom i only ever saw from behind but his hair/body shape reminded me of my brother and the only thing keeping me from accidentally calling out to a stranger was the fact that if i got close enough i could see he had blue tints in his hair

i feel like i decided on ice cream but when i went to discuss it with mama she ran past me instead because there were enemies loose and we had to stop them

i followed down the stairs to the main mall entrance where a creepy tall brown guy (brown trenchcoat, brown pants, brown hair) was controlling huge ratdogs to attack people, and he was also holding something that looked kinda like a raygun or something?

i dodged the dogs and got close to the man and one of his eyes looked almost like a segmented bug eye until you realized it was actually full of...i'm not sure what it was full of but they were stuffed in there like bug larvae and it made his eye look segmented with how completely and neatly they filled it

they were also grayish white

they were grayish white, whatever they were

anyway so my brother and another bounty hunter(?) guy managed to take him down but it fell to me to give the finishing blow, which involved carefully tapping my weapon against the flesh of what looked like a skinny black animal in the cavity of his shirt and figure out where the right spot was

it made squishy spongy noises whenever i touched it but i gradually uncovered a couple areas that looked like buttons or something? and probably crushed them

then i was outside in the sun with a tattered picture book looking for i don't know what inside some kind of live tree wooden structure that loudly echoed everything i wasn't saying

by that i mean i kept hearing a narrator voice booming out around me but sometimes i'd glance curiously at the book and read a few sentences and the narrator voice would turn into my voice instead and it only went fully quiet if i shut the book all the way

but when i say that the book was tattered i mean the cover/spine was misaligned in such a way that it was impossible to properly close it with all the pages covered

but when i say the book was tattered i mean there was something wrong with the cover/spine so it was misaligned and impossible to properly close

it was some kind of fairy tale? but not one i recognized, and definitely not in baby english, and when i eventually gave the book to a food counter guy inside after he asked me how to do these worksheets he had, i pointee out that every picture (nearly every picture?) hid a body part in it

so like this part that was supposedly inside of a tree actually looked like a draining bladder and this other picture looked like a throat

very informative

i think i regrouped with mama and my brother sometime after this but i woke up around here so that's it