Visiting the Dolphin Hotel

So I had the weirdest dream tonight. Yesterday evening, I was sitting at home in my sofa with a bit of a cold, reading Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase. Without spoiling too much of the book, the Dolphin Hotel makes an appearance in this book, just as it does in Dance, Dance, Dance. The funny thing is that the protagonist in the latter book has dreams about the hotel. So did I.

The setting was a large, run-down hotel, which in my dream changed as I walked through it. There were corridors that disappeared when I turned my back as well as wallpapers that changed their colours between various drab pastels. I especially remember taking the elevator as high as it would go, floor eight, in search of my room. I was, for some reason, carrying a lot of bread and vegetables, wearing only slacks. I then took the stairs to floor nine, where there was only a large wooden panel at the top of the stairs. Realizing I could open it, there was another door behind it, which I dared not enter. Instead I went down to the lobby where a tall, blonde man greeted me, speaking softly in a German far too fast for me to follow. I indicated that I did not really comprehend his wishes. He then switched to English and gave me two tarot decks. The cards were identical, save for their size. One deck was much larger than the other. I proceeded to pull out one of my own, a design called Basic Tarot (which I actually own in real life, because I at one point in time thought the cards looked nice for some reason). Having looked at the decks he gave me, I queried him as to why he had not given me Crowley's Thoth tarot instead, and that I would have preferred the edition with three different versions of The Emperor. He then gave me a very strange look.

There was also much ado about some glassed-in area in the centre of the hotel, but I cannot for the life of me remember exactly what it was about, except for the fact that the hotel's owner looked like Chuck Norris.

In the non-dream world, I have been playing some games due to my convalescence. World in Conflict is quite nice. The graphics are good, the story is more or less plausible and the explosions are, for lack of a more subtle description, gratifying. My first impression of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, however, is crap. It is just like Battlefield 2 except it is no fun. Maybe I cannot grasp the mechanics, maybe I am not in its target group. I dunno.