Had another dream about a video game in the future.

This is getting to be a little embarrassing. This is the second one in a week, and you all probably think that I go to sleep at night cuddling my X-Box.

This is totally untrue. As a matter of fact, I routinely dream of the entire set of models from every Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue ever made. I'm totally and perfectly normal.

Normal.

OK? OK. So, the dream...

I was in a house with two friends. We had activated some sort of a video game device, only it didn't output to a television the way our primitive 21st century consoles do. Rather, it inserted the game into the real world, which is to say that it used reality as its television.

Am I making sense here? I'm pretty tired. I had this dream during the nineteen minutes of sleep I got last night.

Anyway.

For example, if you were playing Tetris, you might walk into your kitchen, open the refrigerator, and find that the blocks were falling inside of it. The device was pretty clever like that.

I didn't dream about a Tetris game, though.

Each of us (myself and my two friends) had been given some very silly guns by the game machine. They were the ridiculously huge machine-gun/grenade-launcher/missile-launcher/flame-thrower things popularized in movies like Aliens.

Speaking of aliens...

We were outside, and a very comical UFO kind of popped into view. It was like one of the saucers from the old pulp comics. It was futuristic in a 50's Disney reel-to-reel documentary on the "World of Tomorrow" kind of way. I expected it to have a Cadillac emblem on it somewhere.

So, it landed. It was very small on the outside, but must have been very large on the inside, as beings much larger than the saucer itself began to emerge.

The first out was a large, inflatable clown. It must have been nearly seven feet tall, and almost as wide. It didn't walk - it just kind of rocked back and forth until it got to where it wanted to go.

Next out was, as one might expect, a very small inflatable clown. This one was about three feet tall, slender, and had the look of pure evil drawn into its features. From the grimace to the forty-five degree eyebrows, it was designed to instill fear in whatever sort of beings it encountered.

Next was, by all appearances, a man. He was sort of James Deanish. That isn't to say that he had a leather jacket, that the cuffs of his jeans were rolled up, or that he had six gallons of butch wax keeping his hair immobile. He just had that air of confidence about him. It was the "I'm an alien, and these are just a bunch of stupid humans I come halfway across the galaxy to conquer" kind of sentiment that usually gets the aliens killed in the movies.

Last out was a thing that didn't really have any form. It was a big, pink, blobbish sort of thing. I just call it "Bloopy." So, last was Bloopy. I don't remember how Bloopy moved. Probably just blooped along. Makes sense.

There they were, then, coming toward me. The clowns were hideous, and had to be the first to go. The little one was running around, hiding behind things (like the big clown), and just poking enough of its head out to pour a bucket of the heebie-jeebies down your back and make all the hair on your neck stand up.

Wasted. Both of them, quite quickly. I can't tolerate that sort of thing. This left James and Bloopy.

They were coming at me, and I was shooting them. I kept missing, which was rather frustrating.

My friends and I backed up into the house as James and Bloopy advanced. Eventually, the three of us were inside the house, and were all rather scared. It was a video game, we knew, but it was a bit creepy nonetheless.

We were unable to stop the opposition, and James brushed right past us as he entered the house. Bloopy blooped on in, too, without so much as even attempting to bloop us to death. It's like they didn't care.

James sat down on a couch, and put his feet up on a coffee table. Bloopy just stopped and blooped down where it was, which happened to be right next to me.

James started talking. We talked a little about where he came from. He told me that the spoken language of "his people" was a dialect of the C programming language (this is getting so nerdy). He started speaking to me in the language, but spoke so quickly that it was hard for me to understand anything.

"So," you're thinking to yourself, "these aliens, who you're supposed to be fighting, just wanted to come over for tea and conversation?"

Well, dear readers, you're forgetting about Bloopy. See, a game in which my friends and I would just be outright attacked by unintelligent enemies would be like every other "kill-everything-in-sight" game available today, and so would be very dull.

These guys were clever. I quickly learned (I'll mention how in a moment) that the whole point behind James' casual air was to distract us. He was making conversation so that we wouldn't notice what was really going on.

Being aliens, the goal of James and Bloopy was, obviously, to perform all sorts of outlandish medical experiments on us in the hope that their race would be able to find a way to splice their genetic information with ours in order to produce a stronger offspring which might allow their dying race to be born anew, thereby making it possible for them to continue their conquest of the universe. You watch the X-Files, don't you? This is all pretty basic stuff. The basic rule is this: All alien races are dying, and see their only salvation as being the potential mixing of genes with humans to create a stronger race. Never mind the fact that they have the technology to cross interstellar distances - They're clearly not advanced enough to get along without rudely "probing" a bunch of trailer trash (I wonder if the hybrid offspring would have a passion for cheap beer, KFC, and 65 inch televisions constantly stuck on the professional wrestling channel).

As I was saying, the goal of the aliens was to perform weird experiments on us. So, while James was talking, Bloopy took a needle and jammed it into my arm, thinking that I wouldn't notice (note: I don't know how Bloopy did this given that Bloopy didn't have any real form, to say nothing about hands). I, of course, in the middle of noticing that my flesh had been pierced by several inches of cold metal, screamed.

"What kind of a test is this?" I hissed through clenched teeth. "If you really wanted to know if humans bled or not, I could have told you."

This made me pretty mad. I wasn't in the mood for chatting anymore.

I yanked the needle out of my arm and aimed it at the bottom of James' foot.

At this point, I got really melodramatic. I looked at James and, as I thrust the needle into his foot, yelled "YOUR FATHERS WANTED WAR!"

Then, before the dream could get any more embarrassing, my alarm clock rescued me from certain shame.

[Note to self: no more cheap smack just before bed time]