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soft-cookie-aka-aquadrop · 9 months

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The long, vivid dream I had about Barnaby the ghost owl from Billie Bust-Up

Buckle up, folks, because this is a long one.

My family and I were in a haunted mansion. It had a rule that if we touch each other three times, or if a ghost touches one of us once, we die.

Of course, this wasn't true in the actual game- Barnaby was able to touch Billie just fine- but it does remind me of the final round of Trivia Murder Party, where if a ghost player passes the living player, the ghost player comes back to life while the player they moved ahead of becomes a ghost in place of them. None of the ghosts in my dream came back to life this way, however.

Both my family members and myself fell victim to this death touch multiple times, because they kept forgetting that they weren't supposed to touch me in the haunted house, and because some ghosts here and there did it to me just to be jerks.

The only reason the death touch seemed to work on me was because I was paying close attention to it. I didn't "die" right away from it, instead I'd take a moment to realize I'd been touched, then I'd go limp and play dead until someone prompted me to move again, after which I'd become a ghost somehow.

This happened more than once, but I don't remember how I kept coming back to life in order to die again.

As a ghost, I was mostly able to explore the mansion freely since I could go through walls, floors, and ceilings, except for the ceiling on the top floor, and the floor in the basement. I remember passing through at least four fancy-looking bedrooms, along with a ballroom, a dining hall, and an upper walkway near the ceiling of the top floor that reminded me of the top floor of my old house.

There were a lot of other ghosts in the mansion besides Barnaby and I. Some were cartoony while others were more humanoid. Some were on Barnaby's side and would touch me just to be mean, as stated before. Others were more benign and left me alone.

Some even seemed like they didn't want to be there, and I remember at least one who let me know after I tried to pass through the roof that he couldn't, either. Another advised me that to get out of the mansion, I'd have to go outside the normal way, through an open door.

Somewhere near the ceiling of the top floor I met a round, white, puffy ghost who was glowing like a lantern and floating very slowly. When I got close to it to tell it how cute it was, it backed away, like a fish in a fish tank would if you leaned your face in close to it. I felt bad and apologized for scaring the puffy ghost.

Alright, now we get to the good parts...

The iconic chase scene from the game happened, and I could hear the “Million Gruesome Ways to Die” song playing in the distance, and I caught a glimpse of Barnaby chasing Billie from “out of bounds”. Once I managed to catch up to them, I began following Billie while positioning myself between her and Barnaby like this...

But if you remember how in the Casper cartoon “There’s Good Boos Tonight”, the hunter’s bullets flew right through him, that was what happened to the projectiles that Barnaby launched at Billie. My attempt to stop them was fruitless. Among them were, for some reason, giant cubes of water that slid down the hall and through me (and I will admit they actually felt kind of refreshing), and either ice cubes or snowballs or something, which also went through me and felt chilly. (This probably happened because I was disappointed that Barnaby never mentioned any cold-related deaths in his song.)

Thankfully Billie did manage to get away despite my inability to help her, though Barnaby clearly wasn’t pleased with my interference, because after Billie escaped, Barnaby did a roll call of some ghosts from the upper floors (mostly humanoid ones resembling teenage bullies), and then singled me out as “the one blue ghost” from the lower floor that we were on, and told the other ghosts to get “the PG-13 manual” (apparently a guide for what can and can’t be done in a PG-13 movie?) and do everything that the manual said inside it, to me. Whatever the heck that meant. Notably, Barnaby never raised his voice or otherwise sounded angry while saying any of this, though it didn’t make him seem any less creepy.

What actually ended up happening was that the teenage bully ghosts surrounded me in a pillar formation, kind of like this...

(No, I don’t know why they’re taller than me even though they’re supposed to be teenagers. They just were for some reason.)

They then proceeded to poke me, pinch me, pull on me, etc. It sounds kind of stupid now that I look back on it, but at the time it was really annoying. I did manage to escape by floating all the way to the top of their pillar formation, though.

I don’t remember exactly when I got my body back, but I somehow came back to life multiple times throughout the dream, only to die again from being touched by a ghost or by my family members. The same happened to said family members, too, though their reactions were more of the “oops, well, this is inconvenient” type than the “oh no!” type.

At one point after coming back to life, I found my family in a bookstore-like room on the first floor, and decided to escape with them out the front door, where a grim reaper-looking ghost was waiting to stop us.

The problem was, my grandmother was walking too slowly and fell behind, so when I went back to grab her arm (that was one touch out of the three-touches-and-you’re-dead rule, but it was an emergency so I was willing to risk it), the grim reaper ghost touched everybody who was ahead of us, then came back for me.

I fell limp on the ground and lay there until I felt the grim reaper ghost drag me back inside the house, through the dining hall, and into an empty bedroom, one that looked like it had just been moved into, unlike the others I’d seen. I remember looking at myself in the mirror, either in this bedroom or one of the others, and seeing my wispy ghost tail.

I was floating upwards through the mansion’s floors in desperation, and heard Barnaby's voice call out to me from somewhere, asking me in a mocking tone if I was floating up "to meet Peter Pan", probably because he knew that I couldn't escape through the ceiling. And when I asked him why he was keeping me there in the mansion, what he replied was downright chilling.

"Because I accept you, Colleen."

Yes, he called me by my real name. He said that he wanted me there and that he wanted to be friends, and that I'd "had a good life, right?" And then I felt him tug on me from below, pulling me down into one of the fancy bedrooms, where his wings turned into hands (kind of like his feet) and began slowly reaching towards me as he glowed rainbow colors for some reason. (Rainbows not depicted here)

His voice sounded... different, less like his own and more like that of the Mysterious Stranger from The Adventures of Mark Twain (who talked in two voices, one low and one high, at the same time) as he said something like,

"Come play... come with me, into eternity..."

I backed up as far as I could, but that somehow made Barnaby's wings-turned-hands move faster to "catch up" with the distance I'd moved. When I floated up to the ceiling, they angled themselves upward to keep facing me. Since I couldn't get myself through the wall or ceiling, it seemed like there was no escaping from his grasp, but then in one hand he offered me a pair of "friendship tassels" he'd made for us. Yes, tassels, with pins of our faces on them that he'd made.

This gave me an idea. I pulled on one of them, then let it go, and its rope retracted so quickly that the tassel slapped Barnaby in the face, giving me a chance to float up through the ceiling and get away.

I continued to explore the mansion and look for other ways out while evading the terrifying ghost owl, but I couldn't seem to shake him. I think I came back to life again somehow after encountering my brother and his friend in a room on one of the higher floors, but Barnaby found me and death-touched me just because he could.

After that, I tried hiding inside a TV, where a videogame with two giant robots fighting each other was going on (Billie Bust-Up is already a video game, so... a game within a game?), but Barnaby followed me in there, too.

No matter which room of the mansion I flew to, there was no losing him, but I was determined to escape. Alive or dead. The last thing I remember before waking up was trying to squeeze my way upwards through a narrow opening between a bunch of pipes, like this...

I couldn't phase through any of the pipes, but I figured that since I was a ghost, it didn't matter if I got squished between them since I didn't have any insides to get crushed. And yet, it was still uncomfortable, slowly floating upwards through this gap that was getting narrower and narrower, wondering if I'd ever reach the top...

...and that was how the dream ended. I think the reason I had this dream was because I was having another existential crisis last night, so my subconscious mind had a lot of feelings it needed to work out because of that. It still bothers me how much better my subconscious mind is at coming up with cool stories than my conscious mind is, though.

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