A Visual Recreation of My Least Demented Dream

When “no self-castrations” is the highest standard you hold your mental imagery to.

CONTENT WARNING!

This post contains sensitive material that may not be suitable for all readers. The material in question includes:

- Political topics

One Image, a Thousand Feelings
Target #1: E-106 Eta
Target #2: E-107 Theta
Target #3: E-108 Iota
Target #4: E-109 Kappa
Target #5: E-110 Lambda

One Image, a Thousand Feelings

Remember the music discovery and lost media update post? No? Well, here’s the link, and trust me, it’s somewhat relevant. On that post, I detailed the vast quantity of Pinback songs I found to have grown up with from albums I either have or haven’t brought up here before, including their Too Many Shadows EP and Blue Screen Life. From the latter album, I related tracks like “Offline P.K.” and “Concrete Seconds” (the “P.K.” in the former’s title is a gaming abbreviation for “player kill”, implying that the song refers to a real-life death) to a mental collage that’s easier felt than described. See, I visited my aunt Leslie, uncle Stephen, and cousin Ali at Redondo Beach when I was five or six, and a dream I had shortly after involved the same relatives joining us at a surreal New England location. It was a narrow several-hundred-yard sand bridge that broke off from the mainland, ended in a cul de sac of small beach houses, and was surrounded by nothing but blue. Whereas east-coast locations my family’s fond of like Ogunquit Beach certainly contributed to the formation of this setting, I seem to remember a beach from some episode of Dora the Explorer playing an unknown role, as well (after its discovery, the unaired pilot felt familiar to me, but it couldn’t have possibly contributed to the dream due to having been lost at the time.) The dream ended up cutting the Jacobsons out entirely, and as discussed in the aforementioned post, most of my family played on the beach behind the house while Mom picked up and examined a human hand with cybernetic internal components for… some reason.

Here’s why this callback is relevant. In the same post, I managed to find and screenshot a remote coastline on Nantucket called Smith’s Point, which at least echoed a similar feeling to this dream while capturing less than a quarter of the setting (the same Pinback songs also went along with it well.) Granted, this was before a week or so ago, when I used this stock image and Google Earth imagery of Smith’s Point to craft an accurate rendering of the dream’s location. As you can tell, calling it remote is an understatement, and for an extra bit of context, the house we stayed at is on the far right.

Are you feeling it now, Mr. Krabs? Between this and the nostalgic surrealist YouTube channel GAKHED, I’m starting to think analog horror is overrated. Turns out, analog beauty resonates a whole lot more! Why discuss this, though? Well, the realistic prosthetic hand Mom found certainly wasn’t the most disturbing visual from my childhood dreams, but there were some dreams of mine that lacked anything creepy period while carrying the same fuzzy resonance. See, I’ve shared a mod of mine for Sonic Adventure DX called The E-Series Survivors, which adds three new E-Series models for E-102 Gamma to defeat… well, technically four, but the last was to be found functionless in an adventure field where adding an E-101 Beta Mk. II equivalent was more or less impossible without coding knowledge. So, this is what you tuned into, folks: this other dream portrayed in its most accurate form to date, that is by the way of screenshots and image editing rather than mods. Glad I could contradict my love of mods expressed in the last post with a slap in the face to the whole practice! Hey, at least it tops the not-as-accurate depictions I’ve shared here using the same alternate method.

Target #1: E-106 Eta

For the record, if you’re wondering what the transition was between Gamma being obliterated at the end of his story and him returning to Emerald Coast, not even my initial dream cleared the air on that. You haven’t been missing anything if you’ve used the mod I made. Regardless, we can go full “what if?” and see him hunting Eta, who uses E-103 Delta’s model while painted yellow to match the sun above the coastline (no, not for the coincidental SpongeBob resemblance), in the “Windy & Ripply” act because he already completed his Froggy capture mission in the “Azure Blue World” act. He starts where Sonic begins his layout and faces off against Eta where Sonic rescued Tails, which happens to be a circular point at the end of a thin stretch of sand like my east coast dream location. Keep in mind that my dream wasn’t detailed enough to show his exact layout up until this point—not even the full battles were visualized, as all it really offered was their appearances and locations. The mod I made had their positions and/or acts changed for gameplay’s sake because the ones I dreamt didn’t always make a lot of sense. This is the only case I can recall where the ones from the dream and the ones from the mod matched up perfectly, but Eta’s jet booster paths are nonetheless screwed up in the mod.

Target #2: E-107 Theta

This is a weird one. Kind of. See, the stage, act, and even location are all for certain. Kind of. Throughout this dream, a critical element is that Gamma’s given layouts for acts that only one character had a layout for originally. Granted, there are some exceptions where Gamma was given layouts in acts with multiple pre-existing character layouts, and this is the first instance of that. See, both Sonic and Tails are already playable in the “Run Through the Speed Highway” act of… well… Speed Highway, yet I dreamt Gamma as fighting Theta—who uses E-105 Zeta’s model while painted green because it’s a unique color—in the same act. Like his model and color, I can’t judge the scattered logic of my dreams; however, it makes sense to set the battle here as opposed to the “Goin’ Down!” act, which is the only one where Sonic alone gets a layout, as it’s a high-speed automated segment down the side of a building and therefore isn’t fit for slow-moving Gamma. The “At Dawn” act has layouts for Sonic and Knuckles, after all. For simplicity’s sake, Gamma disarms Theta en masse atop the cylindrical building with a hollow interior by the end of Sonic’s layout. This is the same interior Sonic drops down before taking a rocket to his second act, and it contains Theta’s lower components in Gamma’s layout.

Target #3: E-108 Iota

Whereas I was conflicted about which act is best for Theta in a logical sense, I can’t even give a surefire answer as to where Iota was located in the original dream. The only certainty is that it took place in the “Snowy Mountain” act, which only Sonic has a layout for—Big has one for “Limestone Cave” and Tails for “Be Cool, Be Wild and Be Groovy”. At this rate, the site that rings the least distant bell is the ledge outside the tunnel to the limestone cave, although this obviously wouldn’t be an ideal location for a boss fight. Again, the goal here is to depict the dream as it was, not how it would be if it were gameplay-friendly. Regardless, Iota uses Delta’s model while painted cyan because it’s an icy color.

Target #4: E-109 Kappa

This one is crytal-clear to me for… some reason. In the dream, I had the stage down, the act down, and the position down, although it did not make for an especially long level, to put it mildly. Kappa, who I take as using Epsilon’s model for bearing his official render pose at one point, was encountered almost immediately after the start of the “Tricky Maze” act of Lost World, that is in front of the mouth of the winding corridor above the snake fountain after the first right turn. This also isn’t a great spot for a boss fight, but not as terrible as Iota’s. This is the world of dreams, after all, where practicality has no value. The one confusing detail is that, although it makes perfect sense to give Gamma a layout for this act, the mod drops Kappa in the middle of the “Leading Lights” act as it feels more like a boss fight location (also strange is that, although Knuckles’s Lost World is the end of the “Danger! Chased by Rock” act, it uses the music for “Leading Lights”.)

Target #5: E-110 Lambda

Lambda, Lambda, Lambda! This was the conclusion of the dream and the sequence that felt the most comfortingly liminal, which of course means it was the only part I couldn’t add functionality to in-game. See, after Kappa was defeated, a brief cutscene saw Gamma somehow joined by his fully intact bretheren, all of whom have adopted his model akin to the original E-100 badniks prior to their banishment. They followed him out of the tunnel to Angel Island in the dead of night, a time that’s always been calming for me in both reality and fiction, and he counted off each unit followed by, “Rescue complete.” For reference, none of them had their proper Greek alphabet characters because, other than Omega, I didn’t know any past Zeta (there was E-121 Phi from Sonic Battle, but I didn’t even know Phi was a Greek letter at the time.) He may have trailed off at, “Units remaining…” like he did upon Zeta’s defeat, then stared off the edge of the cliff towards the Emerald Altar while accompanied by nothing but nighttime ambience, but this is vague. Lambda, who awaited Gamma in front of the altar and above the slope to the left of the bridge’s starting point, amounted to an inverted Beta Mk. II with red lights instead of blue. A delay occurred before Lamdba’s first attack was thrown, and… poof. Nothing. The dream ended there, or at least any recollection I still have. I mean… it looked like it had a finality to it, and it featured the analog horror quality of turning unsettlingly quiet at the end. The soothing lighting and ambience were really the only qualities that kept it from creeping me out. Thanks to the mod, you can still visit Lambda at his intended location, but it’s far from the best visual representation of its origin, and I’ll in no way attempt a Nick Crowley plot twist here by looking back on this dream and the off-putting way it came to an end.

Or, so I thought.

Target #???: E-111 Mu

Then, came a twist I never could’ve seen coming. I’m reading this aloud in a very downbeat tone, by the way. No, in all actuality, Lambda was where the standout models ended, but I have the vaguest memories of a couple extra units found in other levels for which Gamma lacked any prior layouts. One was to be fought in Casinopolis, but this was in the “Dreamy Stage” act containing layouts for both Sonic and Knuckles, either inside the vault or on the red carpet leading there. Based on how hazy these instances are, we can treat Mu specifically as having been pink—this is exactly the color I remember him boasting—but that creates a small problem: another unit was likely to be fought in Twinkle Park where pink is a more appropriate color, but any trace of a unit somewhere in that stage is long forgotten by now (this would’ve best taken place within the “Fakery Way” act, as only Amy’s given a layout there, but a part of my brain’s telling me it was the end point of the “Pleasure Castle” act where the capsule’s located.) Same goes for a unit in Sky Deck’s “Sky Deck a Go! Go!” act, leaving a couple of stages that even my wildest dreams couldn’t work Gamma into. Of course, doing all this is a testament to how the dream embodied my indescribable emotional link to SADX, and it means the ex-automaton gets a new lease of life after completing Emerald Coast for the second time. Ba boo ba ba baby.