Had an interesting dream about Pokemon: Red/Blue Version.

[guardians_song]

The gist of the dream was that an area called "the Wild Hunt" had been dummied out, and that this area was supposed to be where you could catch all sorts of rare Pokemon that you couldn't get in the wild any other way. The Bulbapedia article had a very large subsection showing the official art of all the Pokemon you could catch there, and I remember distinctly that Charmander, Charmeleon, Charizard, Venusaur (and by implication the rest of the line), Lapras, and Gengar were on there, amongst many others.

I got to the article via a list of the various game's Elite Four/postgame Elite-Four-like-Trainers, and noticed that there was a member of the Gold/Silver Version named "[Surname]". Confused, since the Pokemon games don't allow you to input a surname, I clicked on it, and was taken to an article about a Glitch Trainer who had been dummied out and was supposed to be your relative(/future self?) and who you would fight on a cruise ship like (but distinct from) the S.S. Anne. His team was pretty weak, as I recall, being level-56-ish Pokemon that weren't very strong, but his "ace" was a level 30 Arcanine that you would obtain after the battle as a way of "catching" it. When I looked around the article to see if any other Pokemon could be caught that way, it changed to being a level 50 Gengar (without my noticing it), and it turned out that was the default Pokemon for the Wild Hunt.

(Incidentally, his appearance was somewhere between the Veteran trainers from Black/White [the pose, but turned in a 3/4-ths view away from the viewer] and a Cue Ball [with the bulk and leather jacket].

So either think that...

...or this, but with a solid black leather jacket and a black hat.

He also had a three-word alternate name describing his appearance, but I can't remember a single word of it.)

Now, I was curious about whether his Pokemon was the only one for him and there were other Trainers with the "Wild Hunt" or whether his Pokemon was randomized and different every encounter; the article, in complaining about how it had left Red Version and Blue Version without any other way to catch these Pokemon in the wild, vaguely implied that the you had to level a fully-evolved Starter Pokemon to level 75 in order to unlock the area. (And yes, I had noticed that the article was Red/Blue rather than Gold/Silver, with nothing more than a passing thought of confusion as to why the sprites for his Pokemon were the Red/Blue versions rather than the Gen 2 versions.)

So then I had a dream about Red/Blue Version being played with the game at nighttime. (Yes, I know Red/Blue Version had no night. Bear with me.) The gist of it was that the person playing it had enabled either a Walk Through Walls cheat or an any-door-open cheat, with the latter being used as a possible explanation for why no other hacker had discovered it (because the others had all been using Walk Through Walls to get into areas where they weren't supposed to be able to go).

So they were able to go through either a "middle" door in Pallet (which was implied at one point by commentary that there just shouldn't be never-opened doors at that point in the game and how the area being dummied out was bad for game balance because it kept novices from getting enough Potions) or an un-openable second door on the outside of the S.S. Anne, which is the area of which I have a really clear recollection. No, it didn't exist in the game, but I was solidly convinced it existed in the dream. Originally the pier leading up to the S.S. Anne split into two paths, the left of which led up to the regular door and the right of which led up to the door that wouldn't open... and then it switched to the regular pier connecting to the S.S. Anne and a separate pier off to the right connecting to a little three-spriteblock tugboat onto which you couldn't normally get. I did not notice the disconnect.

Long story short, when the person playing it went through that door, the player character either went through a short cabin area (??) or exited directly from a cave. I think that the cabin area preceded the cave... well, the idea WAS that it was a glitch to access this dummied-out area, anyway.

So the area was pretty badly glitched. It was obviously a coherent desert-area map, but random parts of the left hand side of the screen were overwritten with random text characters. It was advised to take frequent savestates to get through intact - and the area was a reasonably long walk, with a Scientist trainer and multiple in-and-out-of-caves mini-areas. The layout was Mt. Moon-ish (-ish, not a glitchy replica), even though it was switching between outdoors and cave areas rather than cave and tunnel areas.

Finally, just as the corruption was about to overtake you (?), you got to a Pokemon Center, which was implied to be a lot more stable. Inside, it was fairly normal, even if it was a Gen 1 version of the Gen-5-ish Pokemon Centers (!) without the Mart. The player didn't talk to anyone.

The journey continued, and it was clear that this was a dummy area - the memorable dialogue was a Jr. Trainer overworld sprite coming up to the player and saying something along the lines of "Welcome Dendoro Town!" or some other weird thing. The important part was that this dummied-out area WAS called Dendoro Town.

Then it switched to an in-universe setting with Red (with his Fire Red/Leaf Green appearance) being in this area and witnessing a rain of boulders from the sky (you know, in the special effects/video game tradition of an eruption), and running into a connector station of the sort that you infamously have to go through to get to Saffron. The boulders buried the entrance, so he couldn't go back to that area, and people he talked to said that area didn't exist.

So he went to get Mr. Fuji and Sabrina, as the experts on the paranormal, and together they returned to that area. Mr. Fuji did indeed say it was a ghost town, and Sabrina elaborated by saying the paranormal phenomena there weren't so much even ghosts as trapped remnants of psychic energy without minds which could only repeat the same fragmentary phrases over and over again. It was implied that Dendoro Town had been destroyed ages ago by an eruption, an echo of which Red had seen in the 'catastrophe' that blocked off the area for him.

And then the dream ended.

In case you're wondering what first part had to do with last part, Dendoro Town was at some point the area where the Wild Hunt was supposed to take place (like Fuchsia City to the Safari Zone).

So... yeah, that was the dream. The last part would have made a decent creepypasta with some cleaning up, I thought.

At any rate, thought I should share, because I had unusually good recall of this dream. And it was unusually detailed and complex, too.

Hope you're all doing well!