GAMES : Video Visions : Is there really a new game calling on players to save Fillmore from dragons and bats? Or is it only a dream?

Someone, I can’t remember who, once said that pain has a great way of focusing the mind.

Obviously, the poor fool must have been delirious at the time.

Everyone knows that the only thing you focus on when you’re in pain is how to get out of it. And if you’re desperate enough, that you’ll do things no person in her right mind would do:

You’ll place your body in the hands of a person who makes his living twisting necks like a scene out of “The Exorcist,” and believe him when he tells you that such treatment is physiologically indicated. You’ll take drugs you likewise are told are physiologically indicated--although you can’t figure out why anyone would think you needed to feel as if you’d been placed in a fish tank for three weeks. You’ll agree to let your children have anything they want--ice cream for dinner, your PIN number to your savings account, a Porsche when they turn 15--if they’ll just stop bouncing on the bed.

All I can say is, if it hadn’t been for the outpouring of cards and flowers from all you faithful readers, I surely would have been lost.

Actually, that’s not quite true. I was lost anyway, suspended between day-to-day life and theater of the absurd; between lines of reality and a strange, indecipherable string of events I can only assume I hallucinated.

Because clearly I must have hallucinated them. How else could I explain hearing and seeing the things I did?

*

It started when I saw the city of Fillmore, surrounded by the forces of evil, being invaded by creatures too horrible to mention.

But what the heck, I’ll mention them anyway:

There were bats that beat their wings furiously, threatening the people in the city.

There were blue dragons in underground caves.

There were lightning bolts that forked down through the sky onto the undeveloped land.

Fillmore had fallen into chaos, and its only hope was the skillful hand of a 9-year-old boy as he directed an angel of mercy above the town.

Crazed? No. I hadn’t imagined it at all.

What I’d seen, my son informed me later, was a new home video game he’d played called “Act Raiser,” which centers around the imaginary town of Fillmore. The object of the game is to defeat all the monsters, populate the area and then build a city of peace and harmony.

“Well I’ll be darned,” said Mike McMahan, mayor of the real city of Fillmore, when he heard about the game. “I guess that’s one way of getting our city on the map.”

McMahan said the object of the video game isn’t at all unlike what he is trying to do in Fillmore--although what’s hampering his vision has nothing to do with bats or dragons. Still, he said, if he could build the city with a joystick, he knows what he’d like done.

“If I could have my wish come true, it would be for everyone to have a house, a job, plenty of recreation for everyone and more retail shopping,” he said. “We need more stores so everyone could stay in this paradise we’ve built.”

Meantime, McMahan said he might get a couple of ideas from the game: “I think I’ll rent it for my daughter and see how she does at building Fillmore.”

*

OK, so maybe I wasn’t a few croutons short of a salad when I thought I had imagined everything about Fillmore. But something else still bothers me.

I could swear I read about a fishing buddy of George Bush’s telling a crowd in Alabama--just moments before the president walked onstage--that Bush, Bill Clinton and a Secret Service agent had been in a men’s room at the same time and that “Bill Clinton ain’t nothing like George Bush.”

But that couldn’t be right, could it? Even if Newsday reported it, no one would really suggest that voters consider such things, would they?

Naw, it must have been that last prescription of mine.

Maybe I’d better stick to aspirin.