The Dream Machine Hiding in Super Mario Bros. 2

More often than not, I don’t think every dream is trying to deliver a message. Some might be, I’ll allow, but a lot of them are just weird and don’t mean much. Why did you dream you were in your grandmother’s house but it was a *different* house and also your kindergarten teacher was getting married there? There might be a reason, but also there might be no reason, especially if this little story your brain told itself was actually a byproduct of a nightly defragmentation process during which random memories flash by and your brain stitches them into a narrative because that’s how humans best understand the world.My approach to Super Mario Bros. 2 works similarly, not just because this is a game that is very centrally about dreams, but also because not every element in that game is going to give insight about the people who made it.Take the scary cave at the end of level 6-3. I remember being somewhat scared of it when I first encountered it back in the day, but I don’t think it means…