The dream started out as me in a castle, I think I was a prince, and I’d invited a bunch of my friends for a sleepover. I told them I’d recently discovered a really cool hidden room, and that I’d been told it used to be a place for the royal family to hide in case of invaders or whatnot. So naturally we all wanted to explore it, so I took them to the passage where I’d found it, and one of them insisted on being the one to press the buttons that opened the passage (they were in two rows, and you needed to know the exact sequence to open it, which I’d found out through trial and error). Once the buttons were pressed, however, suddenly the floor dropped out from under us! Almost all of us managed to race to the edges of the room, but one person fell, and on landing found that they were now face-to-face with a nasty monster! One by one my friends jumped down to join the fray, while I stayed above and loudly protested that this wasn’t supposed to happen (I was sort of in shock). Finally I jumped down to join them, managing to land the killing blow. It was a very D&D type encounter, I even cast Featherfall on myself and another friend to soften the blow from jumping down.
At this point I was telling my friends that this was entirely new, I had no idea what was going on, I’d explored the route a bit before and when the buttons were pressed it just opened into a narrow corridor, no falling floors or monsters or anything. My friends didn’t act like they blamed me, and said they believed me, and that we should continue on to figure out what the hell happened.
We climbed up a staircase to enter a new room that was entirely filled with pianos. Some of them were gigantic, easily five times the size of a normal human piano, while others ranged from regular to huge. We could hear a rhythmic thumping noise along with some piano music, so we proceeded with nervous caution, until one of my friends bumped into a piano’s keyboard and accidentally struck a jarring chord with their butt. Suddenly there was a whooshing sound, and this enormous round wheel came crashing down from the ceiling. It had a vague piano-like structure (aside from being round) and I cautiously knocked at the top to find that it had little flaps that I could open, and inside were big silver hammers. For some reason it made sense to me to yell to my friends to remove as many hammers as they could before the boss came, so we all started frantically reaching in and pulling out hammers, throwing them willy-nilly around us. Then a huge “whomp” sound rang out and we were thrown off our feet, and when we looked up there was an enormous Nutcracker/Santa type wooden doll that had landed on the wheel and started to fight us. It was very much like a video game boss battle, I was one of the weakest party members so I kept having to be healed, and halfway through I realized that it could gather up the hammers we’d removed, so I shouted at my friends to throw the hammers out of the room (there was the stairwell we’d entered from, which it couldn’t fit through). It heard me, though, and savagely blocked the stairwell. That was when I noticed there was a row of windows opposite, so I gestured to one of my friends to gather up some hammers and toss them out the window. It caught on before he reached the window, but was too far away, and roared in frustration at losing some hammers. While it was thus distracted, we gathered up more and threw them down the stairwell. We ended up going back and forth like this a few times, before managing to beat the thing into submission (as it’d grown substantially weaker with the loss of its hammers).
At this point we took a quick break to breathe and rest, and suddenly the dream became a novel I was reading, and I looked up and saw myself on a bus with all the friends from earlier, and I realized I was the author of the novel, I’d sold the movie rights to a studio, and I was sitting on a bus riding back into town after a long day of shooting with the cast. They were joking around and goofing off, like kids on a bus are wont to do, and I went back to the novel to read a bit about what was going on. Apparently, the whole set-up was the doing of a particularly evil god (there were almost a hundred gods in this fantasy setting), who was trying to glorify his own name by taking credit for the torture and subsequent slaughter of the royal heir and his friends. He was the one who’d warped the original tunnel to lead to this “dungeon” that they were going through, where each level would be harder and more horrific than the last.
After finishing that bit of exposition, I put the book back down and spent the rest of the bus ride laughing and singing with my new friends (although I was now an adult, while they were still kids/teens). When we arrived at the studio, I went into a dressing room to change, but I kept having people come in to congratulate me on a good day of filming, the success of the book, etc. Finally I managed to get everyone to leave, and turned to take off my shirt to change.
That was when everything went sideways. My vision started blurring, and I was seeing red, and then hearing cackling, and then at the edge of my sight I’d see a wickedly grinning face. I kept turning to look at it, only for it to vanish. Finally I stumbled over to the mirror, where I saw the evil god from the book. Only he wasn’t my imagination, he was real. He explained in a horrific voice that he had planted the idea for the book in my head, and now that it was becoming a movie, he would be able to infect other people with his image and thoughts. He told me that the filming would become sickeningly real for the young actors, that they would all have close calls on set and then later on mysterious deaths (after the film’s release). He told me that I was to blame, and that his name would live on forever after this.
I begged him to reconsider, but he merely laughed and showed me an image of my fiancee in her car, which morphed into this red, evil-looking version of itself and careening out of control until it caused a huge accident, and her mangled body half outside of it. That was when I had an idea. I told the evil god that the filming would continue, but he should invent even more horrific bosses for the kids to fight. I argued that it would glorify him further, if they managed to get past those bosses and eventually work their way straight to him, and battle him. How much better would it be, I suggested, for him to personally dismember and disembowel them? He seemed convinced, and made me promise that this would be written into the script (which wasn’t a problem, as I hadn’t finalized the script yet). Then he disappeared.
At that point I ran out of the room and gathered all the kids to come to a props room to tell them what had happened. At first they thought I was joking with them, pretending the story was real, but when it became clear that I was deadly serious, they started getting nervous and trying to figure out if they could escape the room. They were suddenly trapped with an adult who was acting crazy, and needed to figure out how to get away. I was still trying to convince them that I wasn’t crazy when I woke up.
sehnsuchtundfernweh 