It was a bizarre cross between a cub scout meeting and a D&D game, and we were trying to solve some sort of puzzle.
There were other groups “competing” at the same time as we were, but after a few steps of rolling dice we came to learn that the puzzle wasn’t solved by the results of each step, but simply by taking a step back to look at the steps themselves and how they related to each other. When we finally came to realize that “the answer” was Back to the Future, we ran upstairs to tell whoever was running the puzzle, only to find that it had all been a facade and we were lost in this strange, urban area once we left the basement behind…
* * * * *
For whatever reason, I was grocery shopping when the power went out at the store, and no one really knew what to do. All of the employees had randomly disappeared, leaving just a handful of us alone in the dark, empty store with things in our carts that hadn’t been purchased yet.
After much deliberation, I decided that the things I had would spoil either way, so I reluctantly walked out of the store without paying for them, only to be confronted with a very large, billboard-sized sign in the parking lot citing that food taken when the store had been abandoned was still stealing and considered to be a very bad crime.
By the time I had everything in my car, I was being chased by several police cars as I zipped through the darkened city, desperate for a place to hide. Eventually I came across a row of miniature compartments – not like houses, but akin to the mailboxes found at an apartment complex, only large enough to fit inside. So I did.
As I was stashing a few items away in the back of the locker and stuffing my pockets with anything that would fit, Lisa Simpson appeared and asked if I’d like some help carrying the rest of my items home.
* * * * *
We were canoeing in a tropical area and suddenly came upon many sharks in the water, all no more than probably 4 – 5 feet each. Though they were mostly harmless, our guide reminded everyone to keep their hands out of the water as we cautiously glided among them.
Eventually we came upon another boater whose boat was filling up with water, which made everyone nervous because he himself was in the water and dangerously close to the sharks.
Just then – a hundred or so feet away – a much, much larger shark took down the larger guide boat that had brought us all out to the area.
I paddled away as fast as I could, following the shoreline that soon became cluttered by all of the discarded boats that had come before us and too had fallen for their trap…
* * * * *
We were moving into a new home that was much smaller than the apartment where we previously lived. It was going to be tight quarters, but it seemed all for the best as we struggled to find places for our essentials and get rid of the excess that we didn’t need and frankly didn’t have room for.
We still had one load of larger things (which we didn’t have room for) left to bring before we handed back our keys, so I was trying to shuffle things around to make some space. As I was sorting through the small bedroom that was to be shared by the kids, I was interrupted by a large, older man who proved to be our new maintenance man. He was friendly enough and seemed to already be taking to the kids when our neighbors suddenly began playing their music very loudly.
Without a second thought, he walked over to the bedroom wall where there was actually a door dividing the two rooms and pounded on it to prompt them to quiet down. A moment later, someone opened the door and showed that it wasn’t another home on the other side, but a store of sorts. The maintenance man and the store owner chatted for a few minutes while I looked around and saw mostly displays filled with candies nearest to our door, with one of our other neighbors eventually walking by inside the store with an armful of candy telling me, “You’re really going to like it here!”
After the maintenance man left and closed the door, I noticed that it could only be locked from the store’s side and looked around for something I could put in front of it to help remedy the situation. There were pieces to one of the boys’ beds nearby, but all were too light, so instead I considered an old, ornate dresser that had been left behind.
Opening its top drawer, I found the inside scrolled with seemingly satanic rituals, and began to wonder why the last family had left it behind.
It’s no secret by now that one of my most recurring dreams typically involves my move to Florida, however this one was a little different in that apparently I had already moved and this time had simply returned to retrieve the rest of my bulkier possessions – something that I’d actually planned to, but was never able to do in real life and instead got them over time via UPS and visiting friends…
As is often the case, I started back at the warehouse where I used to work, however that didn’t seem to last long because after a quick calculation in my head of what they were paying me to work on the side, I decided that it wasn’t worth sticking around to make a few bucks and I was probably better off just packing up and hitting the road instead.
So I returned home to start loading up a rather large pickup truck – no idea who it belonged to – with a trailer attached, presumably to help haul the bigger stuff like the speakers to my PA system … which in fact have never made it down to Florida in real life. There were a lot of people around to help – extended family, friends of my parents – and the whole thing was much more of a group effort than just me carrying bags and boxes out to my car like it had been in real life! 😉
Also as a strange aside – throughout the entire packing, I found myself uncomfortably exchanging text messages with a girl back in Florida who I was presumably dating, though it wasn’t clear who she was or whether she’d for certain be waiting for me when I got there.
When it came time to go, I looked out to the truck and found that my sister had stowed away in the back seat of this truck, more or less buried up to her eyeballs in my belongings! After acknowledging that she could make the trip with me, I explained that 24 hours on the road would be a long time to be buried in stuff, and so we worked to reorganize a bit so that she’d actually have an empty seat to sit in for the ride down!
One item that got left behind – a red mattress like what you’d see on a cot at summer camp … in this dream, an aunt had bewilderingly gifted it to me, though we all agreed that I didn’t like to go outside any more than necessary and thus there was really no point in trying to bring it along. As it is, we had boxes of magazines, huge speakers and guitars, buckets of fish from my aquariums, Lego sets and video games – pretty much all of the random, non-essential stuff that I’d deemed unnecessary to cram into my car for the first trip down.
Leaving home, there was an unmistakable urge to get away as fast as possible – something that didn’t occur in real life, mind you – and after sending one last text message … a picture of my old home in Michigan … we hit the road in this gigantic rig of a pickup truck, eager to hit the highway and put as many miles behind us as possible.
I had a dream last night that I’ve had in variations many times before involving a fancy office in a big, high-rise building with sweeping views of the surrounding area and surprisingly little actual work getting done! 😉
In a way, it’s reminiscent of the couple of years that I worked 31 stories up in one of the buildings in Downtown Tampa, where I was lucky enough to almost always have a desk by the windows – as tiny as that desk may have been – to the point where I still have a print of this gorgeous view of the sunset that I used to have sitting at my desk in the new office that I almost never go to because I currently work from home…
In my sleeping dream office, I had this great, private working area with plenty of room to spread out and make myself at home, including this incredible attached balcony where I could step outside to enjoy the view when simply looking at it all through glass wasn’t good enough. Coupled with a private elevator reserved for a select few with offices like my own, it seemed like a pretty sweet place to do … whatever it was that I did for work in that place.
Of course, back here in reality, I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that such a working environment is impractical for so many reasons. For starters, the dreams that I’ve had never seem to include episodes of me writing the exorbitant rent checks for such a lavish office space or the 30-60 minutes of driving each way that it would take to commute back and forth to said dream office!
Mind you, my commutes when I worked downtown could be upwards of an hour in moderate traffic, offset from bad traffic only because I worked later hours, whereas now my office is maybe 15-20 minutes away at best and I still hate the commute, often times feeling it a gigantic waste of time if I don’t at least stop for lunch on the way… 😛
It’s certainly fair to say that my standards for a dream office have changed over the years, no doubt influenced greatly by being lucky enough to work out of my own home and thus reducing my daily commute to dodging toys in the hallway from sitting in traffic on the highway!
Realistically, my ideal office space would simply be an improved version of the home office that I have today.
- Still at home because commutes and paying rent for office space suck, plus it offers much greater opportunity for flexibility and customization.
- A space that’s probably double the room where my office resides today – basically enough to also add in a couch and a nice table, and more trinket space for all of my toys. 😉
- A nice, watery garden view through big, glass floor to ceiling windows – ideally because attached to my dream house, the backyard would have lots of tropical plants and a waterfall feature by the pool, though granted this might conflict with…
- …isolation from household noise!!! Seriously probably my only real complaint about working from home, my dream office is still technically part of the house, yet also far enough away from the bedrooms and living areas so that the sounds created by three boys growing up don’t prevent me from getting any work done whatsoever!
- And maybe I can have a ridiculously oversized TV on the wall that I can swap out images of incredible views from other offices on…
Did I mention that in my dream, apparently my office also had a concierge who would deliver food and snacks and diapers, of all things?! Not sure why the kids are hanging around Dad’s office long enough to require a change of diapers, but hey, dreams are weird sometimes.
I was on a flight that was getting ready to takeoff, trying to assure my Mom over the phone that everything would be fine despite a crash that had happened recently with the same airline. The plane was actually transparent so we could see the sky as we began to takeoff, and then just as I reassured her that everything was fine and went to say my goodbyes before I lost my cell signal, it happened.
The crash was quick, and surprisingly without injury.
One minute we were looking up at the blue sky and the next we were back on the ground, a group of maybe twenty passengers trying to shuffle our way away from the wreckage – which was still falling from the sky – as quickly as possible.
I had been flying with the twins, so somebody soon called me over to a stroller that they had been pushing and showed me that the babies had survived ok, and told me to call right away to let everyone know that we were ok…
When my Mom answered the phone the second time, I could hear the news playing in the background and she was mostly in shock. I simply told her, “Yes, we were on the plane that just crashed. The babies are ok. I’m with a group of survivors and we’re trying to find shelter.”
I don’t think I heard a single word from the other end of the phone before I had to hang-up so that we could keep moving.
The accident had happened over downtown, so there was lots of debris and it was vital that we find someplace safe, however the more time that passed and the darker the sky got, I think we all started to get the feeling that something else was wrong here.
Pausing to sit and rest on a few park benches, we all talked about what had happened and that’s when a few people commented that they’d seen something flying towards the plane moments before we crashed. Considering the idea that whatever happened had somehow been deliberate, we pressed on and talked about heading to my apartment on the other side of town to take cover, though we never actually made it that far.
Disappearing into a tunnel that ran through one of the tall buildings, we began coming across other people that were also running. One man was very cautious and immediately pulled his gun on us, though his itchy trigger finger soon confirmed that it was actually empty and we were safe as we left him behind and ran in the opposite direction.
Inside an abandoned shopping mall, we came upon a stage that was setup for a rock band – instruments and all – so very much at random, one of the guys in our party jumped on stage and started belting out some old tune. Several of us soon joined in at a brief attempt to blow off some steam, with myself grabbing a guitar from an Elvis dummy that had been on the stage, and we played and made all sorts of noise until one of them finally appeared…
It took on a recognizable shape – one of a giant Bill Cosby, but made out of Legos – and its strength was quickly confirmed as it threw members of the audience around like nothing until I approached it … guitar still in hand … and saw it cringe as it heard the music that we were playing.
It reached out to grab the guitar from me, but then my other bandmates appeared over my shoulder and our collective music knocked it back. Then taking the offensive, we all swarmed it until it was nothing more than a pile of red and orange bricks.
Realizing that we might’ve stumbled onto a key to fight whatever these invaders were, we turned and headed back towards the city, walking carefully along the edge of the chaos until we came across sort of a makeshift hospital up in one of the tall towers. Thinking it would be safer for the babies, we went inside and found a small medical crew treating some people who had been injured, and left the twins in a soft-looking room away from all of the chaos.
This was also our first chance to catch up on what the rest of the world was seeing, and we watched as the news described the attack that was currently underway. Strange, blob-like creatures – in all colors and sizes, that could take the shape of just about anything – were falling from the sky.
A dozen of them had taken out a passenger jet trying to takeoff…
So far, resistance had been futile and the military was organizing their own attacks, but nothing had been successful … except for the strange reaction that we had just seen in the mall.
As we attempted to communicate this finding with anyone of authority, somehow the aliens knew and began to swarm the building we were in – entering through ducts and vents, and some even transferring themselves through the walls.
We fought back as many as we could before deciding that it was time to leave for higher ground, however as we ran down the corridor in retreat, I noticed that one of the babies had somehow been infected by one of the green blobs.
He otherwise seemed ok, so we just kept going.
Back outside again, we were destined to come up with a solution to defeat these invaders because the military’s attempts seemed ineffective at best, and through brainstorming several of us finally determined that it wasn’t the music, per se, that had quelled the beast, but our enthusiasm for the music that had disrupted its destruction, which is why we came to the conclusion that being in Florida, our best bet was to mobilize Disney’s cast members to put on their biggest smiles and win our alien invaders over with impeccable kindness in order to stand a chance at defeating these monsters.
The dream faded with a phone call to Disney devising a plan to have their cast members deliver pies to the enemy…
I found myself apparently stuck in a time traveling loop.
It almost played back kind of like the movie Memento, but way more exciting and creative because it was in an adventure-like setting with wizards and warriors. Eventually I realized that the storyline was some sort of puzzle to solve, and each time I was on the right track, the story would reset and I’d have to do everything over again, but now knowing an additional step of the way that I needed to complete.
Although I’m fuzzy on most of the details, there was a lot of running and hiding from whoever was chasing me until finally one time when I reset I found myself as a different person altogether, which was when I realized that I must be making some sort of progress because I’d reached the limit to where the first person … who I thought was me … could progress in the story. Now watching the entire story unfold from a different perspective, I needed to figure out what that character’s role was in it so that I could move her storyline forward.
All I wanted to do was go home, but first I had to figure out how to get there…
* * * * * * * * * *
Staring up at a wireframe tower that climbed hundreds of feet into the air, for whatever reason – possibly “to work on the lights” – me and two friends needed to scale this gigantic tower all of the way to the top.
It was reminiscent of the Empire State Building, but not nearly as sturdy looking. More like a radio tower, but even taller.
My friends tried to convince me that we’d all be on safety harnesses so the height wasn’t a big deal, and they even “fell” in front of me a few feet off the ground to prove it, but all I could picture was myself scaling this tower to hundreds of feet in the air, and then looking down at the city below before losing my grip and falling to my death.
We had no experience doing this, yet they were both gung-ho about the prospect and how cool it would be from the top, yet all I could think about was falling.
* * * * * * * * * *
My wife and I were renewing our vows, and I was running incredibly late.
She had booked a ballroom at the top of this hotel overlooking the water very similar to where we first got married, however I was several landmasses away and needed to cover a lot of ground in order to get there.
This dream segment was also loosely tied into the previous one, in that if I wasn’t willing to climb that gigantic tower which would somehow help me get closer to my destination, my other option was to take a series of bridges that were entirely too close to the water’s surface. And traffic was at a near stand-still, so I just sat there in my car staring at the waves lapping dangerously close to the side of the road.
Eventually the first bridge was behind us and we stopped to grab lunch at Arby’s, which was a particularly bizarre choice both because A) who stops for lunch when they’re late to get married?!, and B) this was one weird Arby’s, with a menu that featured some sort of crab dip sandwich that I actually got because it looked intriguing, though I never ended up sitting down to try it.
While we were waiting for our food, I wandered off into a room on the side that was apparently a child’s bedroom filled with GI Joe-sized action figures. I played with a couple for a while, and then I tried to eat one, upon which I remembered that we were there for lunch, so I went back out into the dining room as I found one of Sara’s sisters – who was escorting me to the vow renewal – waiting, having already finished her food.
Back outside, I was riding in a very small car with Ted Danson! And he wanted to drive, so of course I let him – it seemed only fair because he had been wanting to drive earlier and I was happy to not have to deal with the remaining bridge that we still had to cross.
By the time we made it to the venue, my groomsmen – the guys who wanted me to climb up the crazy tall tower – were already dressed and waiting, though they didn’t seem too shocked about my late arrival. I took a second to admire the view, which did look impressive even with the ominous concrete bridges criss-crossing the water that we had taken to get there. Then I took my suit and disappeared to get ready myself.
And that was it. 😕
I’ve always been kind of curious about dreams, hence for the past several years I’ve occasionally blogged the more memorable ones here for entertainment and posterity’s sake!
Last night I had a particularly interesting one, in that it was peppered with details that were both true and untrue – enough to lead me to wonder what exactly it is that makes up the content of our dreams … sometimes they’ll be completely fictional, sometimes an erie re-creation of past events, and every once in a while they’ll be like this one where fact and fiction seems to be sort of intertwined … and even more strangely enough, there were definitely a couple of moments where I knew that throughout my dream… 😕
I had returned to the auto parts warehouse where I used to work back in my hometown, and it was as if I was already working there again, but I also seemed ready to make my departure … again.
Walking into work one day, I found a note from the boss saying that I wasn’t supposed to keep personal items at work. It had been left in this upstairs second floor that the building had – which was true, however the part about getting in trouble was false.
The note had said that I could get my things – presumably some t-shirts and other clothes – from the manager who was holding them, but when I finally hunted him down, a bunch of my co-workers had gathered into sort of a dinner-type setting because they were all throwing this goodbye dinner for me.
This definitely didn’t happen, although the faces were all real!
What was particularly strange was that both old and newer employees alike were present – in reality, the warehouse got acquired by one of our competitors midway through my time there and some people left while other new faces joined – and yet here was a mix of both, though for some reason it sounded like somehow the original company had returned and managed to make a comeback.
At one point I found myself prompted to give a speech, and so I re-told a few anecdotes from working there through the years which everyone enjoyed, including a rousing story about the actual acquisition … which was booed, but then later applauded when I shared how the actual brand behind that company had still managed to survive.
Parts of this were actually true, in that the brand technically did survive and exists elsewhere today, though it no longer has nearly the presence in Michigan that it did before the acquisition. In fact, I even remember a few of my co-workers hoping that maybe someone else under the same brand would come in and “save us” from being acquired, but nothing ever came of that…
Eventually it was time for me to go, and I was packing up my things – which ended up being far more numerous than just a couple of stray t-shirts – though it was strange because around my desk were mementos from Florida, some rather personal from several girlfriends whom I certainly couldn’t have been dating all of at the same time! 😕
The references were real, and peculiar, and we’ll just leave it at that. 😛
As I was putting everything in bags, I started thinking about my future and about how instead of sticking around, maybe I should just hit the road and head back down to Tampa the very next day. Presumably there was some indecisiveness in my itinerary despite leaving my job up north, though the dream didn’t do much to elaborate.
I had vague recollections of a life that I once had down in Florida, but nothing definitive, and I think I thought that maybe once I got down to Tampa, more of those memories would come back to me.
This is a dream fragment that I have a lot, though admittedly not much as of recent – I’ll be back home, knowing that I used to live in Florida, but now I don’t … and I’m trying to put the pieces back together because I can’t quite remember how they fell apart and I had to go back home.
Mind you, none of this is factual, but I used to have nightmares about it for a long time – I think because moving was one of the most pivotal moments of my life.
The dream essentially faded away here, except for one other random fragment that was just too weird not to share because it involved somebody somehow flooding the warehouse – like an aquarium and we were all just swimming around underwater having a grand time until I finally had to come up for air because one of my children … it was unclear which one … was swimming with us, too, and he was having trouble and just needed to get flipped over!
While I was doing that, I had a pleasant chat with the manager who I’d worked with all of those years reflecting on everything that had transpired, so that was nice. 😉
And though I don’t recall a specific conversation that aligned with this one in the dream, I do remember leaving on a high note where he wished me luck and whatnot whereas it had taken many years for our working relationship to get to that point.
I guess it’s just both interesting and a bit odd to me to look at these subconscious, creative stories that happen inside of my own head and wonder how exactly they get put together in there … though now that I think about it, that’s how most of my creative work gets written, really. I either start with something outlandish and occasionally sprinkle in pieces of reality or maybe focus on a moment of truth, but then exaggerate it into a story that’s more funny or shocking or generally enjoyable than the original ever could’ve been on its own.
I’m not sure what the stats look like now, but I know that when I moved to Florida back in 2003 something like 700 people moved to the Sunshine State every single day. And as I sat there in my stately motel room, eating pizza and trying to write freelance articles for the newspaper that was now the polar opposite of the new world right outside of my motel door, it kind of blew my mind to think that in one form or another, there were another 699 people around the state – many of them right there with me in Tampa – who were going through the same thing!
So while the story itself wasn’t particularly unique, there were certainly bits and pieces that when blown a little out of proportion like any good humorist does make it a fun story to reflect back on, and so maybe that along with its significance in my life is why it seems to keep bubbling up time and time again while I’m trying to get a good night’s sleep, too.
And it makes me wonder if other creative folks find themselves dreaming like this as well. My wife, for example, says that she almost never dreams, which I’m about 95% sure isn’t just because she’s up every 2.5 hours to breastfeed the twins yet again! Despite all having the same general biological stuff on the inside, it tends to function a little differently for each of us … beyond that, though, there’s a reason why I’m a writer and not a biologist!
I did perform Dream On by Aerosmith in the talent show during my junior year of high school, so maybe that has something to do with it??? 😉
I was an astronaut sent with five of my companions on a very important mission.
It hadn’t been long since they had shown up, their gigantic ships hanging ominously in the sky but otherwise not yet giving any hint to their contents, and so that was my team’s job to try and figure out from above. We would launch into space to get a better view of the situation and try to determine the fate of mankind…
We were a tight-knit team that had been up together many times before, however with so much at stake there were suddenly many new voices in the control room which all wanted a say in how we were to do our job, which ultimately led to our downfall … quite literally.
I recall the argument being about something as seemingly innocent as where each of us would sit in our own craft.
Astronauts train for the very worst of conditions using the buddy system much like kids do in the swimming hole at summer camp, though it’s a much tighter bond because up in space we trust each other with our lives and in those emergency situations each pair of astronauts really needs to be able to function as one for our best chance at survival.
As such, it makes logical sense that we sit facing each other on takeoff … but the voices that be had other plans because one of them had made their own seating chart that they expected us to follow, and even after insisting that we ultimately followed the command of our captain, not the people back on the ground, time was of the essence and he eventually caved so that we could get to work.
The last thing I remembered was reaching that point where the sky was both blue and black at the same time, and then suddenly I was waking up from blacking out and we were all floating in the ocean.
My buddy, the captain, and I were the only ones that survived, and we were lucky to even make it out of the water because by the time the helicopter made it out to sea to rescue us, there was nothing behind for it to return to because they had taken our liftoff as a sign that it was time to strike. We sought refuge in an abandoned building as best we could, but as three astronauts without a ship we felt especially helpless to fight the situation at hand.
But astronauts above anything else are problem solvers, so our new problem became how we could find ourselves a new ship.
I’ve always fantasized about making Just Laugh real by having an actual office and employees and whatnot, so this was a surprisingly fun dream to find that I had not only found an office to work out of, but also someone to share it with in our humor writing adventures!
Apparently the “space” that we had found was more of a spare room or two that we’d found in the unused wing of a local hospital that we’d somehow convinced them to let us use for cheap.
VERY CHEAP!
For the most part we had the place to ourselves, though occasionally we’d hear doctors and nurses walking by our hallway late at night on their way out to the parking lot.
This became noticeable after being awoken one night overhearing them outside … because apparently I was single, so why wouldn’t I just sleep in this awesome place where I worked into the wee hours of the night to make humor for the masses, anyways?! 😉
Well, the next day i came in to find plastic draped everywhere because our wing was now under construction, and upon confronting the lady with the clipboard in charge, she made it clear that they were ready for us to go so that they could start using our space for actual hospital business again…
I argued that we had a lease, even though it literally had us paying something like $5/month or $50/month whereas the lady claimed that something closer to $5,000/month was what was fair for the space! Eventually the guy who our agreement was with showed up and sided with her, but said that if we really wanted to stay we should make a realistic offer for the space.
At one point he snickered that if we didn’t like the $5,000/month, maybe we could give them a percentage of our gross income, which even he knew sounded ridiculous … but that’s when my co-worker pulled me aside to point something out…
They didn’t actually know what our gross was – they just assumed that it was big because they saw us as this Internet company mooching off of them and not a couple of guys writing humor on the Internet and sleeping in our offices.
So I went back and told him that we’d do it for 1% of our gross, but there had to be some guarantees. Namely, we wanted it locked in for several years and if they wanted to reclaim our current space, they had to find us a better one – possibly over where they had some unused offices that had direct access and didn’t require walking through the hospital to get to them.
The guy snickered again because he thought he was pulling one over on us, whereas in reality we were just barely making enough money to pay for Hot Pockets and server fees and that was about it! We figured that 1% would actually be a decrease from the rent we were already paying, and if things really took off we could still handle it for a couple of years…
So in the end they fell for it and we got to move to an even better office that we stayed in until we were able to bring on two more people full-time. And even though the construction lady was being kind of a bitch, even she admitted that she read our site and thought we were really funny, so that was pretty satisfying, too. 🙂
It has been billed as The Ultimate Superhero Movie, meant to put viewers in the middle of the action like never before … and that was certainly an understatement, to say the least!
It started out like any other Marvel movie – we watched as Galactus slowly gained powers while the Avengers muddled about … a little 3D here, a bit of audience interaction there … until one way or another, the audience itself found ourselves all gaining mild superpowers – mostly limited flight or something non-threatening like that…
The battle started in some sort of mall and was a lot like the Spider-Man ride over at Universal Studios where Spider-Man keeps warning the guests to stay out of the way because it’s too dangerous. We seemed to spend most of our time flying around the area, dodging projectiles and trying to get a better vantage point to view what was happening on top of shelves or buildings or whatever they were. It was after the Avengers themselves were nearly defeated by Galactus that things really took a turn for the worse and we saw the ultimate angle that the show had been boasting about.
Our audience watched in awe as the theater itself seemed to open up into a much larger area that combined the audiences of several theaters together while we watched Galactus himself grow to the size of a small building before turning his attention to us and causing the audiences to run and scatter. Balloons fell from the ceiling, which we were told to pop in search of power-ups that could help us to defeat Galactus, though it was tough to focus on them because the giant would randomly pop up from behind the buildings that had appeared for us to take shelter behind, glaring down at us menacingly as we did whatever we could to avoid his gaze.
Occasionally if we were lucky enough to make it up to a rooftop, we could see the likes of Iron Man and Thor and Captain America planning a new assault on our foe, though it always seemed to fall short as he just continued growing larger and more powerful still…
At one point I actually found myself crawling underneath one of the buildings to evade detection, as the buildings in real life seemed to be inflatable like the decorations people put outside of their houses for Halloween and Christmas. Making my way to the back of the stadium, I frantically saw a corridor in the rafters and flew up high to take shelter in what appeared to be a storage area where a couple of other audience members had already taken refuge.
It was then that we all watched through the cracks as Galactus gathered his power into a laser that fired from his head in all directions at once, pretty much taking out every superhero around him as he slowly stormed out of the building, though we were lucky to miss his death rays on account of being all cowardly and hiding and whatnot!
Eventually as he disappeared into the distance, several of us decided to follow just to see what would happen next, commenting how the technology that enabled what we were watching was neat, however due to how expansive the arena was we really had no idea what the actual plot of the story was at that point because we weren’t always able to keep our eyes and ears on the main heroes on account of all of the running that we did ourselves.
In fact, when we finally reached the next area where the heroes had planned to confront Galactus one more time, by the time we arrived the entire scheme was actually in motion and although it looked like maybe some of the audience members were enlisted to help, it was still hard to tell.
What we thought was the last confrontation took place on a rooftop that I was able to fly up to see just as Iron Man was finishing shrinking Galactus down to a normal size and disassembling him, thus stripping him of his powers … though one way or another, Galactus enjoyed one last laugh as the heroes were celebrating their victory by emitting his rays one last time – now weak enough not to injure, but instead to strip the audience of the mild superpowers that they had gained at the beginning of the show.
…of course, the main heroes were able to avoid this blast…
The dream ended with masses of us walking back to where we first starting watching this epic movie, discussing both the highs and the lows, with just about everyone agreeing that it was definitely cool, though we all needed to watch it again in a normal theater to actually be able to follow along with the story that we had just participated in ourselves! 😕
I had rented out office space in a really cool tower downtown to work on my writing, and had just shown up to do some work, however as I was getting settled I noticed some other people gathering in the shared space nearby, gazing out the window, so I went to see what was going on…
The most breathtaking view could be seen out the floor to ceiling windows of the skyscraper – a luscious display of gigantic mountain tops with a blanket of green forests at their feet and the clearest blue skies overhead. I never really made the connection why we saw these images that weren’t at all local to our area, at least until I took another step closer.
In addition to these amazing windows, the building also featured an observation deck that overlooked the same view … two long and curving walkways extended out from each end of the floor and eventually came together to meet in the center where we could climb up to experience the even more expansive view that was now impressively immersive. I stared in wonder and even took a few photos for online bragging purposes later, until my ear caught one lady who seemed to be curating the area and was explaining everything that we were seeing.
It seemed that the incredibly realistic scenery that we were now almost surrounded by, despite our offices being 50 feet away, was actually computer-generated. We couldn’t wait around to see it because they specifically only changed it up at night to avoid giving away the illusion, but the entire viewing area was surrounded by this sort of IMAX dome projection screen – but way higher resolution – and this woman could program it to show whatever she wanted … luscious mountainscapes, endless oceans, even the moon!
Eventually we all walked back down the dual walkways and disappeared into our own personal offices to toil away at whatever it was that we did there. It sure seemed like a hell of a bragging right for having found the perfect office space to inspire my creativity, though, that’s for sure!!!
