Notes from the Future: Dreams of the Sleeping Porpoise, Part VIII

Dreams of the Sleeping Porpoise

A Constructively Critical Analysis and Quasi-Walkthrough

by Wallace Torrealta

It is interesting to note that by the time they reached Part Three of Dreams of the Sleeping Porpoise, the producers of the series had given in to popular demand and made the game a first person shooter.  Some clever details remain: first weapon is the Collected Works of William Shakespeare, and other weapons may be taken from words in its pages: swords, halberds, etc. -- but also odd nightmare weapons like the Bide No Denay. Thus armed, it would be a matter of moments to kill most monsters. But these, alas, are no ordinary monsters.

Gramma Mantis is the horrid fruit of every child's night terrors, and the remarkable animation employed when she first steps into the scene is truly terrifying: where did they get the budget for these effects? A question for the ages. It looks like film, it looks completely real; seeing her fleshtone mantis legs, with the little hairs at the joints and the click-click of every step caused many a 13 year-old to glance at her or his gaming companion in immediate, deep consternation, followed by the statement, "That can't be real."  Remember, this was right after the age of King's Quest. Graphics like these had never been seen in the late 1980's. Consider the computer animation used in a film like, The Last Starfighter: amazing at the time, only okay by today's standards. So at the time it looked like someone had huge Hollywood budgets for this game. The producers remain gleefully tight-lipped as to how they pulled it off.

The phrases Gramma Mantis employs to goad her monstrous minions into attacking Chalk Eddie are a kind of incantation from a Betty Necrockernomicon. Much speculation has flown about the net as to the relationship between Hightower and his various grandmothers (he had four), but he has always given a variation on the following statement: "My love and respect for all of my grandparents know no bounds." Meanwhile, Gramma Mantis' exhortations quickly made it into the mainstream lexicon and thus became fodder for SNL sketches. Earlier this season, when Hightower himself hosted for the seventh time, there was an entire sketch devoted to multiple Gramma Mantises wearing the same dress to Prom.

Still, the eeriness of her phrases is enough to send shivers down one's spine years later, laughing at Amy Poehler's entrance in excellently-rendered Mantistilts. My wife was in the other room and claims that the glass simply slipped, but she has also told me that her tween years were overshadowed by an experience involving a locked room, an angry babysitter, and her forced reenactment of all of Gramma Mantis' interactions with Chalk Eddie.  She has never specified who was Gramma and who was Eddie.  So when the sketch started and I heard the glass shatter, I muted the TV and went to the kitchen. Hulu makes almost everything possible, but I still had to wait until she was out of the house before I watched that episode.

Chalk Eddie remains, as always, made of chalk. The ingenuity of his array of weapons, the sheer creative license allowed the gamer in creating weapons from Shakespeare's phrases, is unsurpassed even today. It is strange that no other game designers have taken this idea in any form and used it in their creations. Dreams of the Sleeping Porpoise Part III may have been so far ahead of its time that its ingenuity and brilliance set it so far apart as to be quickly forgotten. It is virtually impossible to find a copy of the game these days, and the closest I have come is a photo taken on an iPhone of a screenshot of the legs of Gramma Mantis.

I give no credence to the rumors that all animated sequences were actually filmed and that some obscure legal or occult motivation made the game's creators find and destroy every copy. Such stories are bound to happen, like fog of an evening in San Francisco: if the conditions are right, rumors naturally occur. And they are just as substantial as the fog which blankets the city by the Bay: thick as sea poop at night, they burn off by noon in the clear light of day.

Part IV is another matter entirely. Taking full advantage of every technological advance since Part III was published, the game begins in the office of beleaguered Guptill who is besieged by razor-sharp paper airplane letters from Administrative Staff. Chalk Eddie has to block as many of these deadly missives as he can, using -- at first -- his trusty Complete Works. It's been heavily edited, however, and not as many weapons are at hand. In fact, every time a new weapon is drawn from the pages, Chalk Eddie complains that the book is finally falling apart. By the time Maguire walks in and begins to turn into McWizardly (the publishers hesitated, correctly, to use the name Dumbledore, though that name came originally from Tolkien), Chalk Eddie has stopped most of the missives so that Guptill can go to sleep in his computer and Herndon the Hornet can escape. It is Chalk Eddie's goal to find his own inner Vigilante, and in order to do this he must follow the path set for him by Wise George McWizardly, who first opens a bank vault with his magic wand, sending Chalk Eddie down a goldbricked path into an L. Frank Baum-inspired world of strange erotic farmgirls, creaking tin woodsmen, cowardly lions, wobbly scarecrows and extremely dominant witches. Hightower's Oz has little to do with the MGM film or even the (far superior, some would say) Return to Oz of more recent vintage. Instead, Hightower gives us a world with architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, as painted by Maxfield Parrish, wherein Chalk Eddie must travel with a ravenously horny Dorothy whose constant desire for sexual satisfaction Chalk Eddie must assist by oiling the Tin Man (too thoroughly in some opinions), pulling a thorn from the Cowardly Lion's cock so his barb doesn't tear her "sweet pink buttercup," stuffing the Scarecrow to rigidity (not with hay, play the game -- you'll learn something about your prostate), and finally helping Dorothy to seduce and eventually sexually dominate the Wicked Witch. Surprise, surprise: it happens in the bath, and when the witch is rubbed clean (repeated, thorough rubbings), it is revealed that the Witch is Dorothy and vice-versa. Her enemy was herself all along. This revelation unlocks her orgasmic powers and she is able to "ride the broomstick" to the Wizard, whose largely phallic dirigible inflates the moment he sees her. Flying away on his own sudden arousal, he abandons Dorothy to the lusty ministrations of the Munchkins and it is up to Chalk Eddie to help her click her heels and go home. Of course, the only thing that can make her heels click at this point is a stirring bout of cunnilingus, and Chalk Eddie performs admirably, transporting Dorothy home to Kansas (where she will presumably fuck her farmhands before moving on to conquer the rest of the Sunflower State with her sweet pink buttercup) while simultaneously sending Chalk Eddie back to Guptill's office.

Having completed the first task, Eddie is given a suit of indeterminate color: his first Masked Vigilante garb. It is incomplete and he cannot use it yet. 

George McWizardly opens the third door, a bloodstained wooden gray tenement door, and Chalk Eddie traipses through into a labyrinth of brick and wrought-iron called Bostonianland. It is an eternally autumnal landscape dotted with ancient graveyards, pumpkin patches, apple orchards, concert halls with creepy music and the occasional vintage diner where Chalk Eddie can refuel on black coffee and reubens with extra kraut. The time of day seems to be late afternoon in late Autumn, though as this section of the game progresses the hour grows later and Chalk Eddie must obtain the first of several Jack-O-Lanterns to light his way. With each lantern comes a set of magical abilities and the possible discovery of useful tools and weapons. This is a good thing, as the brick labyrinth holds many Lovecraftian horrors and without protection from the curios and roots inside each lantern, Chalk Eddie will die horribly at the hands, claws, tentacles or teeth of whatever lurks around the next corner.

Following Hightower's edict of "Grown-up Games for Grown-Ups," there are multiple Blondes, Redheads and Brunettes in the labyrinth as well. Each of them desires sexual intimacy on some level, and it is possible to play the game simply to run around fucking every object of desire in this level. In a nod to his theatrical roots, Hightower allows the player to choose a gender preference at the beginning of this level, thus tailoring the wankability factor to each player. When asked why he did not so tailor the earlier Oz segment, Hightower said, "Whoever wants to be Dorothy also wants to fuck Dorothy, on some level. Go shoot some Zombies if you're grossed out by vagina." 

Perhaps drawing on his own collegiate experience in Boston, Hightower has generalized the hair colors thus (I stick with women here because that is how I played the game; the same rules apply to other gender preferences):

Blondes: fun, cute, insatiably sexual, but relatively useless and often more interested in women than Chalk Eddie.

Brunettes: reliable, earthy, alluring and mysterious, these women are invariably the most helpful and sexually healing of all of Chalk Eddie's encounters.

Redheads: seemingly unattainable, these women are nonetheless Chalk Eddie's constant goal within the labyrinth, as each one carries on her person a shard of the Lost Pumpkin, which Eddie must assemble and carve in order to light his way into Hainted Holler, where the final Cthonic monstrosity lurks in an eldritch fog. Particularly challenging is that Chalk Eddie must mount each Redhead at least three times in order to solve her puzzles and assemble the pumpkin, but the more contact he has with the Redheads, the farther away they push him. His final moment with the Boss Redhead, at the eerie North Arkham Station, is almost painfully exquisite. If you can get Eddie onto that train, you will have her in every way imaginable; but be careful: she can entrance Chalk Eddie into riding that train with her forever. You can lose the game that way. In fact, if you do play this level just for fuckery, Chalk Eddie will find himself losing powers and prowess, returned eventually to the beginning of the level, where George McWizardly shakes his head and clucks and says, "Now, now, Eddie: breathe from your cunt, but don't get stuck in it!" And one has to start all over again in Oz. Of course, if one is a fifteen year old wankmeister, one has little to complain of at this point. But these games are only for adults and of course no fifteen year old boy would ever have a copy. I certainly didn't. 

I got mine at fourteen.

Defeating the final lurking monstrosity in its eldritch fog will return Chalk Eddie to Guptill's office, where George McWizardly rewards Eddie with boots and gloves -- still colorless. The Vigilante costume will not be complete until the cape, mask and logo are discovered. To that end, George opens the fourth and final door. As he does so, creepy footsteps and breathing can be heard coming up the stairs from the scene shop. It is clear that George must stay to fight something evil while Eddie goes through the tract home door.

As stylistically amazing as the Oz and Bostonianland levels are, the South Lake Tahoe level is plain, realistic and lit with fluorescent or incandescent light -- whether kitchen, hallway or nightlight in the bedroom. It completely lacks sexuality, which is good considering the subject matter, and this contrast with the other levels only serves to heighten the terror. The only other light comes from the moon, which only lights sections of the room intermittently. It is this juxtaposition of the ordinariness of this house in the early 1970's with the horrors of the Shadowmen and their Shadow Leader which make this the most compelling level of all.

Simply put, Eddie must use Blitzkuchen and mother's breastmilk to keep the Shadowmen from becoming solid enough to take both children. It is almost impossible to win if they take the girl, but some gamers have reported success in using a curio left over from the last level, a pressed penny from Professor Carnito's Dark Carnival and Circus, which, charmed in moonwater, can be used as a talisman to banish most of the Shadowmen long enough to fight the Shadow Leader and save the day. Do not charm it with moonwater while at the docks in Bostonianland, it must be done on the windowsill in the kids' room. The wise gamer will look for the glass of water on the windowsill the moment he enters the room. Always nice to have a backup.

Shadow Leader's ability to shift the room by contorting his corpselike body is disorientating and every level within this level shifts from floors to walls to ceiling to inside the closet or dresser drawer. As he is defeated and the room begins to fill with light from the Bright Presences, Shadow Leader becomes much more vicious. He turns his scabroaches airborne and sends them flocking to the children and you have to tear them off the kids before the scabroaches can drain their blood and souls. If you haven't used the pressed penny yet, now is the time.

In the final moments, as Chalk Eddie and the little boy are convulsed in their Time Seizure, one is struck by multiple images which appear in the windows of the room: a boy's bedroom at night, as an adolescent seizes in his bed; a single college dorm room where the same seizure is repeated; a college graduate's apartment where the seizure shakes the bed hard enough to wake roommates. In each case, Chalk Eddie stands in the shadows of each night time room. The significance of these images is only made clear in later chapters of The Dreams of the Sleeping Porpoise, and they are almost always invisible to anyone playing the game for the first time.

At the end of this level one would expect to return to George McWizardly in Guptill's office, but instead one finds onself in a hospital bed, in a niche in a room with nine doors in a curving wall.

The first four doors offer miniature reenactments of Games I-IV, but through Door V, one finds Chalk Eddie controlling Chalk Eddie in a game very much like the early versions of the game, a clever hearkening-back to King's Quest and its innovative sequels. Chalk Eddie must try to find the room in which the Alluring V. waits for him, but he quickly exhausts his options and goes through Door VI, where Chalk Eddie reenacts Games I-VI, again in a clever and heightened King's Quest style. 

Escaping from Room VI, Chalk Eddie finds only one door open to him. Room VII, the Lecture Hall. Inside, of course, are every monster ever known within the series, all minions of Gramma Mantis. Only now, Gramma Mantis wants sex with Chalk Eddie. And we all know what happens to boy Mantises after girl Mantises are through with them.

Honestly, how did Hightower sell this section to the money people? "Okay, so now Chalk Eddie returns to the Lecture Hall of Part III, only he's going to get raped by Gramma Mantis and her giant mandible-encrusted vagina." 

I, for one, am baffled.

But Eddie does have help: Dorothy and the Travelers from Oz, the Brunettes from Bostonianland, and the Bright Presences from South Lake Tahoe all join in the fight at various levels. When Chalk Eddie finally impales Gramma Mantis on the Wizard's sharpened dirigible and her minions explode in puffs of confetti, the festive atmosphere is dampened slightly by the entrance of an unexpected character.

Why, again, Hightower would choose to have a lengthy analysis and quasi-walkthrough presented as a lecture at this stage of the game is truly mystifying. Wallace Torrealte himself remains baffled by it to this day, and his lifelong obsession with these games can easily be explained by his thirteen-year-old self watching his thirty-seven-year-old self walk up to the podium in the game (as Chalk Eddie is lifting Dorothy's skirts for a celebratory impertinence), clear his throat, take a sip of water and begin reading this very text which you are reading right now.

I am to this day utterly baffled by this turn of events, and no matter how I have sought to avoid this moment I have been unable to avoid walking a path that lead me here. I tried to kill myself three times in college, each time leading to further revelations regarding The Dreams of the Sleeping Porpoise.

I love this game.

I hate this game.

I hate you all for playing it. Sometimes, I feel as though I am trapped in a game in everyday life. I know everyone is real and there are consequences, but sometimes I feel that I am not real. That I was just made up, a mask for a writer somewhere to analyze his darkest musings. And the more you play these games, the more you talk about them in coffee shops at night after class, after rehearsals or whenever -- but particularly at night -- the more trapped I seem to become.

Please never discuss this with anyone, ever again. I beg of you. I want to meet an actual woman, I want to stop obsessing over the Redheads of Bostonianland, I want a meaningful relationship in which I am not compelled to search every woman's vagina for shards of the Lost Pumpkin. 

I hear you laughing at me. All I can say is, keep playing if you think it's funny. Keep playing. Play all night. Drink as much coffee as you can, smoke as many cigarettes as you can. Stay up and play. 

See where it gets you, asshole.

Because every night, as I read you this lecture and you use this time to make a sandwich or get a soda or rub one out or roll a joint or hit the bong, the job, the Bowflex (ha, right!), every night I come closer and closer to a revelation. A memory. A kind of certainty.

It feels, right now, as though I am remembering someone else's memories. Or experiencing someone else's thoughts. Like there is a mind periscope going from my mind up into someone else's ... mind. Even though all the thoughts are mine, they're about my family and my friends and my lost loves, even though they are about Max and Veronica and Chalk Eddie and how he's still trapped in that hospital bed, dreaming away like a porpoise who fell asleep in a net, even though all of these thoughts are mine, they are curiously detached. Like a constant state of deja vu. Only someone else's. Memories of this moment as it happens.

You see, right now as I am reading this line which I have never seen before, I am remembering that there are details in this lecture which would set me free. Details which, every time you reach this point in the game, I am unable to remember. I am unable to look back and see. If you were awake, you could help me. But you appear to be unaware of what is going on, Edward.

So I keep reading and you resist picking up the controls and just like that dream in the car where you were sleepy in the dream, you are fighting sleep in this dream and it feels better to stay awake, it feels better to snuggle down into sleep and avoid this breath of fresh air, this slap in the face, this firehose of revelation.

Of course, if you don't pick up the controls you will never finish the game. And if you never finish the game, you will never know what happened to Veronica and Max after you passed out. So wake the fuck up, motherfucker! 

Jesus, what do I have to do?! 

EDWARD! WAAAAAKE UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUP!!!

Okay. Fine. New tactic. Fuck the lecture. I'm going to toy with you. I've been reading this fucking paper since, oh, I don't know, the Pleistocene Era, and I'm bored. So now it's time to show you what I know about you. Secrets and such. Things you don't want anyone reading. Revelations you lost track of in your own dreams because you were too lazy to wake up and write them down.

For example, I know what the rest of the sentence was, when you dreamed in college that a female voice was telling you about the number Nine. "Nine is the number of Universal --"

[click]

What? Was that you?

[click, boop-boop, click]

Please, please let this not be a trick, but I'm looking back through my notes and I'm seeing the bedrooms that appear in the windows of South Lake Tahoe, the seizure salads if you will, and and and --

December 10 1985 which adds up to 27 I step into my room and there I am asleep in my bed just like I was in my crib in South Lake Tahoe, but this time asleep and I touch my foot and 

-- nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-now-ow-ow-ow --

March 6 1998 I step into my single dorm room in Boston and try to wake me with a tap on the shoulder but we both seize and

-- eye-eye-eye-eye-ay-yay-I-I-I-I-huh-huhhuh-hu-huh-huh --

August 7, 2001, I am beside me in bed watching me sleep and I try, gently, to just push some hair back from my forehead because I know I will seize if we touch but oh fuck

-- unh-unh-unh-unh --

June 24, 2012 I am standing watching myself asleep in a hospital bed but not in a hospital and there is shouting down the hall and screaming and I hear Veronica's voice and I want to wake me to get me to intervene. I raise my hand to smack my sleeping self in the forehead.

Then I see the cast.

There is nothing I can do with a broken leg. 

I lower my hand.

Something pops like a bubble and I'm clicked in, secure, relaxed, focused.

I seem to float up out of the room, not away from it but between it. I see a time before this, when Veronica is alone in a circle of people. Where is Max? She looks terrified. I want to help her, to appear and give her hope. 

But how?

Maybe I can give her a signal.

I float back, back, back over the same spot until it is just before dawn. Nobody is around. I focus my bubble that spot, that dark patch in the gravel.

And I am outside, cold, in a hospital gown with my right leg in a cast. I fall to the ground, it hurts like hell. I hold my breath to keep from crying out. 

The brown patch is right in front of my face. It looks like someone spilled chocolate sauce.

Or blood. 

Veronica was staring at this spot. I try to see what is special about it. Nothing is special about it. Maybe I can make it special. Write my name? 

No, a footprint could erase that. What do I have? What --

My amulet. The one she bought me at the Scottish Games back in 2005: copper, one side marked with a pentacle and the other side marked with Om in Sanskrit.

I am sweating with pain, I have to pee, I need blood. I bite the back of my left hand, hard, drawing blood. I find the right amulet, yanking it from its leather line; hurts like hell against my neck, that line, but the amulet comes free. 

I piss on it. I spit on it. I let the tears from the pain in my leg cover both sides. Then I smear it with my blood and I say, "Veronica this binds me to you, Veronica this anchors me to you, Veronica this is my beacon to return to you forever. I love you, I love you, I love you. As soon as you touch this amulet, the anchor is complete and the seal is set. I will always come back. For the Good of All Concerned, according to the Free Will of All Concerned, So Mote It Be!"

I am dizzy. My head hurts. The amulet falls from my hand.

I hear footsteps in gravel, then a voice. "Hey! Ezekiels are not to be out of bed until the Rising Hour!"

I try to rise, but the pain is incredible. Where's Nurse Veronica when I need her? The footsteps are closer. "Explain yourself, or suffer the wrath of Iron Rachel when she rises!" Whoever this guy is, he's not worried about noise.

I turn to look at him. He sees me, recognizes me, is terrified, falls to his knees and his eyebrows crinkle up like he's constipated.

This makes me laugh.

Pop, I am in the bubble, focused and alert and intent. 

I need to heal.

Where can I go?

Home. Can I do that? Maybe to a time when we aren't or weren't there?

Pop. I'm in South Lake Tahoe. It's worse than I remembered.

Pop. I'm in Hayward.

Pop. Boston.

Pop. Queens.

Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, the images flash by faster and faster and I think I'm losing control but if I try to grab at something it slips away so I let go until the popping becomes a whir like a spinning wheel and then 

Pop.

I'm in my house. On the couch. The door has just closed and the chimes on the porch jingle as someone brushes past them. I pop my head up to see out the window and watch as the blue Honda drives away from the house. It's ... sometime after 12 pm; my glasses are gone, I have to squint to see the clock on the DVD player. Digital. Clear, not blurry.

I turn on the TV.

It's June 23, 2012. Oregonian Muirists are calling for aid to California, and Charlie Rose is the only one interviewing them. 

Mighty fuck.

Pop.