Last night, I dreamt of a combined Grimm,
Minority Report, Matrix, City of Ember inspired future (I’m just
throwing out references in hopes that someone will pick up on one of them). My mind seems tuned to dark, epic, and action-packed dreams which frankly reflect my day to day life (where I of course save the day via awesome adventures). I
only remember fragments of unconnected material, but altogether the dream had
an air of adventure and foreboding and all of them were set in this strangely
familiar futuristic grunge.
In the dream, I was at my first day of work in
a spacious white and blue glass advertising building with a young vibe. All the employees were playing around; some
were throwing Frisbee disks that were attached to cables that could pull you up
the stairs like a zip line while others were standing in clusters joking
casually. Mike had accompanied me in a
riding golf cart, but I told him that he should probably scoot home because he
might make a bad first impression by wearing a tropical muumuu to work that he
thought was hilarious (this part of the dream was inspired by a Portlandia sketch)…
The following was a deja vu dream that I’ve had once before,
only slightly influenced by a passage I read in Oliver Twist last night. My coworkers and I had been given the recurring
assignment to clean and repair the food pulper in the basement of the
building. After finding the camouflaged
elevator entrance behind a set of full-length mirrors, we descended into a
poorly lit concrete passage (much like an underground sewer) nearly half full
with rushing water. It was our task to
re-attach an active wire on the other end of the passage without electrocuting
ourselves. The channel of water was
moving much too quickly to swim across, so after some searching, I found a
button on the Exit sign that lowered the water level to a manageable
knee-height. After wading across, we had
to climb atop a 2-inch wide ledge and pry off the electrical wiring from across
the length of the wall, then with the water level rising again, pull it with us
above our heads and re-attach it to the other side before being swept away by the current…
In the same vicinity not three floors up and underneath a mass
of leaky pipes and electrical gadgetry, dirty pipe workers crawled about like
ants, shouting at each other over the dull roar of ancient greasy
machinery. One such worker descended a
crawl space only to encounter a dark and evil figure (I assume was the devil)
whom he had previously made a shady deal with.
Unsatisfied by the current results, the dark figure grasped the figure
by the throat and lifted him off his feet with one hand. With the other, he reached through his mouth
and pulled (still attached) his whole skeleton out of his body, beginning with the
head. After this conversion took place,
the skeleton took his mark at the beginning of a water maze that wound itself
through the dismal underbelly and down several stories along the waterway
mentioned above. On the devil’s mark, he
began to soar through the water more like a luge racer without a sled than a swimmer. As he raced along, trying to hit all of floating buoys, he
became destraced by the angelic mermaid faces hovering just below the water’s
surface. Diving deep, he extended his
hand to touch them, and the once beautiful and beaconing image became fiery and
livid. No sooner had he laid hold on
her, he was changed into a blob of melted bone that was doomed to haunt the bottom
of the pool forever. When it was my turn
to race, I was battling my cousin Amanda and two others that I new only in my
dream as coworkers. I raced down flat on
my back, careful to dodge the murky figures while hitting all of my floating
marks, until I won the race! At the end,
I had to dissuade ‘manda from pocketing a sparkly hair clip that felt of evil influence…
We arrived at street level and looked around at the
throbbing city of lights. The towering
skyscrapers and flashing billboards overwhelmed me as the cars rushed past at
100 mile an hour speeds. One apparent skyscraper
stopped in front of us; it was more than just a double-decker bus, but an
entire moving motel. The whole thing was
only about 15 feet wide and 20 stories tall.
One could drive into the back while it was moving and the whole level
you were on would rotate up so one could sleep in a chamber while traveling to
their destination (clever idea brain, thank you very much)…
Obviously, you can see why I'd prefer to never wake up. I love that when I go to sleep, it's like I'm turning on an epic movie that I've never seen before but that I feel intricately a part of.
