Tag: trap

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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.”

Categories
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?”