: Ultimately, the mistake I think you're making is treating the dream levels
: literally and diegetically. Which I warned against in my intro. Trust me,
: you'll be doing yourself a huge favor if you let go of the desire to
: connect the dream levels directly to the plot of Infinity.
They're still mandatory to progress, which to me raises the question of what they're doing there if they're borderline non-canon. (As opposed to the Vidmaster and carnage break levels which are clearly out-of-universe and, well, optional.) At the very least, none of the dev comments I've read indicated that they're supposed to be totally out-of-universe.
And Grek Kirkpatrick did say that the dream levels' narrative(s) directly pertaining to the SO is a valid reading, so, there's that.
I guess it's the specific idea of "they're not plot-relevant, therefore they literally didn't happen" that really bugs me here, as even for the purpose of this discussion, I feel that's treading close to numbers-only.