Epic dreams

I wonder if perhaps my overworked brain is trying to compensate for the fact that I have basically cut out television and movies (even though I assume one of these days I'll work my way through all the DVDs I hoarded all the way through my 30s).  Thus, I have been having these elaborate, baroque dreams where the point is just to show all kinds of elaborate dreamscape sets.  For instance, two weeks ago, I dreamed I was with a small group of people going through a contemporary art museum (quite a bit like LACMA incidentally), though the final exhibit was closed and we could just sort of peek to see what was going to be on display.  While the dream was mostly about some urgency I felt about getting out of the museum, the real goal (I assume) was for me to later marvel at how my mind could completely fill up the museum walls with art that was completely original.  Had I the ability to record dreams, I am sure the art would have been nothing particularly special and probably would not actually have that much definition (would be fuzzy if you looked too closely) and probably had gaps or white areas where the brain didn't bother to fill in the details, but it still felt fairly impressive at the time.

A few days after that, I was dreaming I was walking through an enormous jumble sale in the space of a warehouse.  The local library had box upon box of books (though most of the boxes were in fact still closed up), but I did flip through a large stack of comics (needless to say that do not exist in real life).  As I was leaving the sale, I ran into a small group of snarky teens, and rather than getting into an argument with them, I decided to gift them one of the comics to show that there still is some kindness in the world.

My general rule is that (other people's) dreams are boring, and I really feel relying on dreams in literature is a cop-out, with a very few exceptions, such as Lewis Carroll who sort of started the trend.  But contemporary books where entire chapters turn out to be dreams are a huge turn-off for me, and that goes double for plays, though I suppose there are some exceptions, such as Grote's 1001 where it worked fairly well.

All that said, last night's dream was a doozy with 3 or 4 movie plots all stitched together.  So here goes.

My role/position in the dream was actually a little hazy, though I think I was the sidekick to the main character who was a lot like Matt Damon in the Jason Bourne movies, with a bit of 1970s era Captain Kirk thrown in, but who also had mad MacGyver skills.  Anyway, the dream kicked off with us uncovering some skullduggery at a big bank somewhere in Chicago.  It turned out that some wealthy client was having his accounts pilfered.  Jason (as I'll call him) actually chased the evil manager into the back of the bank, which didn't have a bank vault, but more of a men's health club/spa!  Anyway, the tables were turned on us, and we were ushered into a driver-less shuttle which dropped us off in a kind of crypt belonging to the bank, somewhere in the Hyde Park/Kenwood neighborhood, not far from Lake Michigan.  There were two or even more people stuck in the crypt with us.

We figured it was only a matter of time before they came back and killed us, so we had to escape the locked vault.  Of course, we had almost no tools, so we were trying to take screws and use them as saws, etc.  At some point, we managed to break into a fancy wall clock and behind it was an entire room with even more records of what the evil bankers had been up to, i.e. more records of clients who had died under mysterious circumstances.  The dream kept focusing on one batch of records and artifacts that seemed to imply this client had a secret love child who was a geisha-in-training in Japan.  I assumed that the dream was going in the direction of us breaking out of the vault and going to Japan to try to rescue her.  But no.

All of a sudden, I saw my father-in-law talking on a phone with lousy reception (sort of a parody of the "Can You Hear Me Now?" commercials).  He had stumbled upon the crypt (apparently it was easy to open from the outside but sealed tight from the inside).  Before I could blink, MTV decided to host a Rock the Vote party in the crypt (but turn it into a party that lasted the entire election), and the place was completely full of revelers and plenty of cameras.  We weren't entirely sure we could leave, but it seemed fairly safe inside, so we started plotting our next moves.

The people split into 6 or so groups, aligned with the remaining contenders (also stealing a bit from the Harry Potter houses I assume).  The evil bankers managed to sneak in a bomb in the shape of a small bird statue (unfortunately, MTV's idea of security was tragically lax).  This only impacted one of the "houses" and rather than showing the explosion, there was a jump cut outside the room so I only heard it.  Then the entrance to the room was immediately sealed off with small blue tiles, with the resulting wall looking like a subway wall.  The tiles might have been nanobots (like in Hero 6).

I do remember some older governor-type was thrilled about all government funding being turned into block grants by President Trump, and I didn't feel like getting in an argument over why this was a terrible idea.  He decided to set up a suggestion box that said "Hey, Millennials, what do you want government to do for you?" and they could stuff it with their thoughts. (Unfortunately, this isn't far off from the state of political discourse today, though obviously it should be a Twitter account and not anything that required writing an actual note...)

Then there was an outdoor shot -- we had apparently converted the crypt into more of a compound, still with tons of people running around.  I spent some time looking over the lake, and it had apparently been converted to a launching pad for zeppelins and other lighter-than-air vehicles.  Some of these were launched and they reached the upper atmosphere very quickly, and then went wherever they were supposed to go.  The sky was full of balloons.  One came down far too fast and crashed.  It was probably sabotage by the bankers, since it wiped out another one of the "houses."

We went back inside, and I was trying to find where one of the other groups had gone to.  It was getting kind of eerie, and I went deeper into the "house" and then went downstairs, past an cafeteria-sized kitchen, towards a large shower area.  I could feel that the water was blasting hot.  (Now we moved into HBO-style movie.)  Everyone had been turned into a statue of some sort and then left under the hot showers with the "camera" lingering on the dead women.  I guess the implication was that the paralysis may have only been temporary but then the extreme heat had done them in.  That's basically where the dream ended, with only 3 of the houses remaining, and Jason and myself still deciding on our next steps to avoid being picked off.  It was a lot to pack into one dream, that's for sure...