Tag: trap

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Dream Journal

Billionaire’s Birthday

I am specially invited to the over-the-top birthday party of a billionaire — already in progress. Individual areas of a landscaped hillside are dedicated to showing off his different interests. Part of a cohort of other guests, I experience a sequence of fully-themed gardens and rooms. One building contains a pool where the water level rises and falls, revealing more amusements. I point out in another that a sword, casually mounted on the wall, was one of the most expensive ever made for a TV show.

Yet I remember, when I was young, I used to walk a trail through the dry grass nearby. Maybe it was a former family home. It all looks so different now, it’s hard to believe.

Eventually we catch up with the billionaire birthday boy. His manner is underdramatic, overly familiar in an unsettling way. Maybe I do know him from somewhere before — the sale of the family home perhaps? — because he seems to act like he knows me. It slowly dawns on me and the other guests, though. The glittery bombastic showcase was essentially a distraction. This place is a trap; once at the bottom of the luxurious hill one must serve one’s betters in order to escape. I become a butler, or something like it.

I have become a lone warrior on a long-term mission. Lately I’ve been hunting in the corridors of a building which feels like an attic bunker, with inadequate lighting and unfinished wood construction. By piecing together and following old training instructions I locate and make entry into a small interior room. I’m led to believe I can recharge there (the resource is perhaps a powerpack, perhaps water or food, etc).

But waiting in the room is an adversary: a deceptively-presented large fat older woman with wispy greying ginger hair and bulging yellow low-class outfit. She attempts to poison me with urine in a cup. We engage in a heated struggle and are equally matched. Other characters appear also, led to the same room in the same way. One is like King Mob from The Invisibles comic series. All are formidable. These six fighters crossing paths in a small room reach a grueling stalemate and eventually, I’m forced to search for further options.

Upon consideration, such a confluence of skilled warriors seems not likely coincidence. I notice a soft-spoken Latina girl who’s gone overlooked until now — cowering, or perhaps simply willing herself to go unnoticed. Her name is Garan. I get her to sign her name, and share whatever advice comes to her mind with the exhausted group. It fits in like a puzzle piece, a tangram that somehow finishes a set. We are released from combat and from that room, all of us. There then remains though, among we six formidable folk, the strange knowledge that this shy young woman, with her reserved manners and heartfelt words, is akin to us somehow… for all our quite considerable collective violence.

I’m still serving the same billionaire. I’ve been doing it so long, while working off my debt, that I’ve been endowed superpowers — temporarily for the duration, at least. Today I happen to be in a cheap portable building waiting on a job, idly examining a small lizard wrapped around my right index finger. Powerful critter; my digit circulation gets cut off. I infer when I awake later that this means I was left-handed in the dream — an odd detail.

After that I inspect a performance stage below a tent. The backboard features quotes which Mr. Billionaire liked, which given any amount of self-awareness are monumentally ill-advised and cringe. Much like the man himself. I still recognize him for what he is, even though by now I’m supremely skilled at my job for him. Not that I’m any happier with being tricked into the work in the first place.

There’s an issue I have to deal with. As more people filter in for the performance, I need to lure a giant monitor lizard (a komodo dragon) away and out. This is an energetic, determined beast, always focused on something. Even with powers of flight this is a challenge as I can only go so high up. While I can get it outside, and can reliably distract it away from other people, it manages to climb a tall Christmas tree growing among the dry grass field. I’m finally able to shepherd it outside a containment boundary. I am granted, or perhaps simply remember, that I can utilize a very useful power — invisibility.

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Dream Journal

Alien Sarcophagus in Space Smells like Mulberries

A puzzle occuring at the end of a story, the long story which took up most of the night. The trick is how to trap a malicious woman (the villain, like Debbie in Addams Family Values perhaps, perhaps one of the Fox News blondes). There’s an extra-dimensional storeroom, with bars on the windows triggered by levers. And within is the prize we are both after: a replacement kid. So trap the woman, get the kid. We have set up many layers of causailty and physics-bending to get to this point — the kid is a version a purple-haired enby kid in my neighborhood that I help out with, extracted from a different universe. Something happened to ours; maybe they died, or gell into a black hole, maybe were abducted by some yet another universe.

I reflect how this is one of my favorite movies, but like Lifeforce it’s critically hated and mostly forgotten. And just as I’m beginning to wake I discover the order of latching, and locking, and I successfully get the kid. Leaving, back for my world.

Alien sarcophagus found in deep space smells like mulberries, bears inscription stating it has no idea who Kelly Kardashian is. This clearly sounds like an AI art prompt, and if I’m honest that’s probably why I thought of it in my hypnopompic ascent.

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Dream Journal

Evil Ph. & Sh.

A pair of new friends, who I’ll call “evil Ph. & Sh.”, lead me through a series of enclosed spaces. There’s some end goal, and we’re engaged and friendly as we progress through colonnades and sandboxes and garages.

Near the end of our journey I peer down a narrow gap into a long dim wooden hallway with stacks of repair materials, or perhaps boat equipment. An old man focuses on his work a far way down.

Everyone has some variety of superpowers. My friends leave me, suddenly, in a low-walled oval. It’s designed to steal some of my powers. It’s a trap, but I’m not even surprised. I’ve been carefully faking camaraderie for awhile since I sensed something amiss. Having expected something, I break free relatively easily. But I’ve been betrayed, which is why I call them “evil Ph. & Sh.”

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Dream Journal

Which Witch Was It?

My wife and I are considering moving to Hawaii. I see a map with a border marking the cutoff, where one island close to the others technically is in the French Frigate Shoals.

Scavenging just down the street in my neighborhood, I come across an inflatable armchair. The dirty mismatched arms have come off. I have to fiddle with them for awhile to get them inflated and finally decide it’s comfy enough to drag back. Perplexingly, I don’t even think I want it — there’s already so much furniture in my apartment.

Down another street in the perpendicular direction there’s an art store with a notable elevator tower in front, which some neighbors have started slurring as the “hatelift”. In some recent incident they were accused of bigotry, but personally I believe it was misrepresented and they were slandered.

I enter a rival small art space/shop on the other side of the street, diagonally opposite from our apartment. It’s a low-ceiling place with white walls and a vaguely Spanish feel. One of the people there is like Ted Danson’s character Michael from The Good Place, but he’s drunk and chaotic. He offers me some delicacy from a fancy hexagonal box, which opens with elaborate unfolding rose wrapping paper inside — though actually plastic, not paper. This is what got him drunk, apparently. Another odd gadget he rakishly offers is a tiny non-functional crossbow with a rounded pin at the draw end, easily workable if the pin were removed.

There’s a plan hatched to trap him into being alone with a young 17 year-old girl in the group (there are ten people in the store now), then accuse him of taking advantage of her. In the end he actually doesn’t; I’m then asked, as the story’s observer, to decide who was indeed the ultimate schemer among the diverse motives of the assembled cast. Like a game of Clue. This is phrased in terms of all of them being artist/magicians, and with the question “which witch was it?”