Had a dream last night.  I don’t remember the earliest part of it, think it was CW Flash TV show type bullshit.  Some speedboy was there in villain colors, like purple with green elements.  His costume had angry eyebrows, X motifs, and stylized top surgery scars on it.  But most of the dream involved me traveling to and conducting business in a fake (?) city called Sura, in a predominantly islamic state of the former soviet union.

I had gone there just to interview an aged ambassador at the israeli embassy about some occult stuff and the relationship between judaism and christianity.  He kept having health problems and fading in and out of consciousness.  His wife was there in even worse shape, practically a puppet like the Crypt-Keeper.  For some reason I was in better condition than IRL, younger and not bald.

Near the end of the dream I became confused, seeing multiple versions of my boyfriend at different ages in the scene.  Some of the versions didn’t recognize me.  The dream broke down and I woke up.  But yeah, always fun to go someplace you’ve never been before.

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EDITED – closed comments on the old post because spambots were using it like a chewtoy at an appalling rate.

I was trying to walk from one place to another and somehow ended up on a highway with my boyfriend and his mother. This happens in my dreams sometimes, where I’m just trying to go somewhere and get stuck on a messed up path that is obviously not where I’m supposed to be.

There were other pedestrians stuck in the same path with us. Old timey race cars started coming at us from the opposite direction and I was all personally offended that somebody planned a race on a road that people use for walking.

We barely got out to some safer stretch of road, but when we did, we realized that we had left my boyfriend’s mother behind. I went back for her but I couldn’t find her. Instead, I was stuck going deeper and deeper into a labyrinthine maze of subterranean highway, chain link fences, and colorful pipes.

At the bottom of it all I found that I was now Bruce Willis in 12 Monkeys mode, and the family that I was trying to get back to was a fictional wife and child. There were other human beings trapped there with me, and we were under the fascist rule of multicolored cartoony characters – something like those in the Trolls movies, with maybe 5% Killer Klowns from Outer Space vibes.

They were trying to keep us underground for ostensibly benevolent reasons. I don’t know how they communicated that because they spoke in gibberish.

My fellow humans were more easily cowed than I was, given that I was willing to do ultra violence to our captors. I would pretend to go along with them until I could get into a safe spot to attack, then just beat them to death or cut their throats with a shank.

At some point, one of the trolls was going to check my papers, but I remembered I had the IDs of two people I assassinated in my wallet. I managed to sneak the IDs out of my wallet onto the floor slightly out of sight, but one of my fellow humans betrayed me by flicking them into view of the trolls.

After a bunch of violence and misdirection, I somehow reached the outside world. I did this by always keeping an eye on whatever stretch of blue sky was visible through the cracks in the environment far above. If I was going in a direction with less sky visible, I would do whatever I could to climb up over the barriers and keep moving towards the sky.

So I got outside, and the trees were red and the world was very underpopulated. There were just a few random menacing figures, lurking about their business.

My wife and child were there, but their skin was pitch black. Their eyes were blood red and they looked subtly inhuman in some other way. They pretended to be happy to see me, but I knew they would probably kill me when I went to sleep. I was still happy to be there and went along with it until I woke up.

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Had a dream there was this serial killer dude people had given way too much deference to, assuming he was some other class of less deadly weirdo.  He had a little theater where chicken patties were tacked to the seats, like he was pretending they were other people in the audience for whatever show he was screening, and he’d take dates in there.  Later on it was like, the chicken patties are people maybe.  One of his dates found out he’d bailed on her during the show and left a large chicken patty in his place to fool her.  Because that works, right?

I’m so tired.
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Didn’t have to work today so I went back to sleep after the alarm went off and had a much more elaborate dream than usual, that I could remember some significant amount of detail from.  That sometimes makes me think, oh, should I make a story out of this?  Especially when it’s a more substantial plot than getting lost in an airport.  But no, I don’t think I will.  The scenario was a very well-trod one for sci-fi these days, and the core theme was too macho – look at his guy, what doesn’t kill him makes him stronger, he’s so cool.  Anyway,

The earlier part is harder to recall specifics but there was a giant hole in the ground kind of structure.  There was architecture to it, like a real building courtyard, but no windows save the distant skyhole, suggesting it might be subterranean.  Like that prison in the third Bale Batman, but it was less prison-y.  The architecture was large, light-colored sunny bricks; there were decorative shrubs in ledges and cracks.  I don’t recall any cells, I think people just slept in the corners in the open area.  There was some element of compulsory combat.  People got up every day to fight for some dubious reward.

A fancy lady had some importance, and addressed the masses from a suspended platform in the middle of the hole.  She was of the people who had cast everybody down into the hole but not necessarily hated because of it.  The invisible gaolers of this scenario started shooting star-shaped projectiles at her from the high walls.  She was injured but not killed.  The prisoners decided at that point that they liked her, and they’d avenge the outrage.

This led to a series of riots wherein everybody would just beat down every nook and cranny of the structure until they found hidden stairwells they could use to escape.  In the process, all died, or were defeated and put back in the prison – along with new replacements to shore up the numbers to a similar level.  By this time in the dream, that was the point.  Prisoners were stoked into disastrous revolt and watched for entertainment by unseen masters.  The survivors that were returned had their memories erased, the new blood were taken by unknown means for unknown reasons from somewhere more like our modern world.  This aspect may have been inspired by the TV series Wayward Pines.

During one of the planned riots, a guy got far enough he reached the “overworld.”  This was the reward, and his memories were restored.  Or were they?  He was some kind of semi-rich asshole who, along with several other similar types, were regular competitors in the game.  Maybe his wealth came in part from reward money.  He had fancy dinners in a clean, bright city with his fellows in victory.  But something was amiss.

There were very few people in the city – much less than one would expect for the number of businesses and streets.  All I ever saw were the victors.  One was a lady who clued our protagonist into other details that were off.  Buildings had been lazily painted, books all had blank pages, and so on.  He determined that he was in yet another simulated environment with no apparent means of escape.

As the dream went on, I forgot the new location had ever been posh, and it became quite slummy.  The people there were much like the prisoners in the first part of the dream, but they had some kind of light industrial jobs to do.  The hero again tried to escape and was dropped back in with his memory erased over and over again.  He would look for an exit, muscle his way through, and fight whatever guards lurked out there.

Among those guards was some kind of human/insect hybrid with a bad attitude.  I think it was the same individual and he regenerated between fights.  During one of the escape attempts, the hero was fighting this bug and they exchanged words.  The bug said he only existed for math – as long as he killed three escapees before he died, he was serving his purpose, and didn’t care about anything else.

The main dude remembered bits more on each cycle.  Not a full memory, but just an instinctive knowledge of what he needed to do.  Part of that was making improvised body armor out of tape, cardboard, aluminum foil, whatever, but he began to run out of raw materials.  He kept fighting, turning into an archetypal he-man, but as part of that instinctive knowledge, came to realize he’d never fully escape.  He was trapped.

When he got to a certain point in the daily combat routine, he had defeated enough enemies to not be under constant threat, but instead of pressing on, he turned back.  He went to the home of a lady prisoner who may have been the fancy lady from the hole scenario, in a new life.  She and her (friends? family?) did not have his wisdom, did not know about the imprisonment.  There was a storm outside, water damage creeping through her apartment, and our hero could feel the presence of the secret stairs and the menacing guards outside her thin walls.

She didn’t finish her ravioli and it was getting dry on the table, so he tossed it in the garbage for her.  She was feeling ill and he wanted to just stay in and comfort her, but first he went to one of those apartment walls, parted the secret door, and told the guards to fuck off.  Nobody was going to cause trouble that night.
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