Iron Sideshow

[michaelpatrick]

Became friends with a guy who could fly (just like I could-in most of my dreams effortless flight on my part is usually a given). We had a bet to see who could fly the highest. Ended up finding the ceiling of the world. Literally. It was a drop ceiling. We pulled out a part of it and found another above it about ten feet. Then we removed that one. We surmised that above all of the densely populated places on earth there were ceilings to hide the cosmos. The stars and other sky related items were just painted on (how do they move?) . So my friend and I flew a little further up and found islands in the sky. They were covered in lush beautiful greenery. One of them had a house on it. We ate the purest sweetest fruit from one of the trees and then went to the house. Some people were gathering outside the house so we followed them in. There was some sort of AA type meeting going on inside. There were cookies and other refreshments on a table. I ate one. It had M&Ms in it. It was not the greatest cookie I ever ate, but it wasn't bad. I asked one of the people at the meeting what this was a meeting for. She gave me a snide, "You know what" answer. I said I knew it was "anonymous", but I didn't know what it was anonymous of. But I realized somehow that it was a support group meeting of people who could never return to earth. They told me their leader (he had a name, but I can't remember it now) was coming. When he came he was an Asian man who was either much younger or much older than me (yeah cliche inscrutable Asian of indeterminable age in my dream sue me) and spoke English with a generic American accent. He asked us all to write down what we were seeking on a piece of paper. I was the only one who wrote nothing. He looked at each person in turn and told them out loud what they had written down.

Then he looked at me.

I asked him how he knew what the people had been writing. Was it a trick or was he a mind reader? He said he was a mind reader of course. He wanted to know what I was after, but he somehow couldn't do it unless I let him. I decided to trust him and let him probe my brain. He found something ( don't know what) and then said it was time to go. My friend and I were led to another room.

What is this place? I asked. Why is it hidden behind a drop ceiling? He explained that he hid the place so that no one else would destroy/misuse it (yeah, I probably got that idea from LOST). He would only let us leave if we agreed to eat a pill that would cause us to forget ever being there. It was implied that the other people in the meeting were in a similar situation but I don't know whether he gave the same offer to them. My friend and I ate the pill (it was chalky and bitter and needed to be chewed).

We descended past the ceiling on a great glass escalator (like in those old Bugs/Daffy cartoons where they go to Heaven/Hell) on the way down I saw people filming a live action version of the 60s horror comic "The Heap". I'm pretty sure that was unrelated and a sign to me that the first dream was over.

They didn't even get the Heap right (made him look like the Philly Phanatic)and the acting was terrible.
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Tarnation! a comic about stuff!

[Abandon]

A while ago, I had a dream that darth vader was my neighbor. There was a fence between our houses, with a gate in the middle of it. For some reason, he was trying to get through the gate and I was trying to stop him. All I can really remember after that was a lot of clowns with melted faces who all had knives.

The day before, I had a dream that I had two mice, although one was a lot bigger than the other and might have been a pet rat. They were playing, but I was not paying close enough attention and the smaller mouse fell and broke. When I went to pick it up, it was made of paper, and his two paper "arms" had fallen off. I put them back and he started moving again, but he was still made out of paper. Then I woke up.
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An inch. It's small and it's fragile and it's the only thing in the world worth having. You must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. You must never let them take it from you.

[shadefell]

Last night I dreamt that I was a guy and had a girlfriend. We apparently had a baby together? We were visiting my parents and she went to bring the car around. I wrangled the baby into outside clothing (it was winter) and made my goodbyes to family members, who were really clingy and kept delaying my exit. By the time I got outside, my gf was nowhere to be found. I went looking for her, and a neighbor told me that she'd been in a really bad car accident.

I spent the rest of the dream trying to track down the hospital she was in. She was apparently trying to hide from me? In the dream, her name was Louise M--, but I somehow knew she was REALLY my irl friend from highschool Eileen M--, who has cerebral palsy and can't drive. So my brain kept trying to reconcile those two facts as well.

I toted the baby around and wound up climbing up a lot of iron fire escapes of townhouses, up several stories, to dizzying heights. I'm afraid of heights IRL and often have height-related anxiety dreams.

I woke up before anything was resolved.
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[Matt]

Hey, Iron Sideshow. How you been doing all this time?

Anyway, here's a dream I had on Sunday. I apologize for excessive longness. This is actually shorter than what I remember.

Somehow, my immediate family--that is, my parents, siblings, and I--had come into possession (perhaps accidentally) of a text outlining some kind of Lovecraftian ritual. We didn't really know what it was supposed to do (I think it was more of a vague evocation of eldritch powers than a specific summoning) or whether or not it would work, but we were going to try it out anyway. As a family. A night of appropriate occult significance was coming up soon, and also we had access to a cabin on a lake which we thought was similarly significant. I had a little more belief that it would work than my family, and a lot less certainty that it would be a good idea, but I was interested and I agreed that the perfect opportunity to try it was going to come and pass soon. And, anyway, I knew they were going to try it, so I felt I'd better be there and try to mitigate whatever damage resulted from it.

We arrived at the lake in late evening. We were far from any city lights, and the treeline all around us was a wall of solid black, while the sky was a dark and starless blue. The lake itself was black and calm, but there were subtle lights in there from some bioluminescent life, and a rock dropped into the water triggered more of that phenomenon in a tiny, blue-white explosion at the center of the ripples. The whole lake seemed to strain with potential, like a boulder perched on a cliff.

We got to work at once, all of us arrayed across the shore, staggered rather far apart and facing the water, reciting our parts from unbound pages. I don't remember any of what we said. Occasionally, lights and indistinct emanations appeared from the lake at the end of the dock, the point which was the focus of our ceremony. Some of these merely dissipated, while others would stream away from the lake and into one of my family. This had no obvious effect, but still I did my best to prevent it from happening: I held out my hand in a certain gesture, as if in benediction, which--along with proper concentration--pulled the eldritch emanations into that hand, where they apparently dispersed. I felt no adverse effects from doing this, and had no idea just what sort of trouble I was protecting my family from, but by this point I was of the opinion that if we could just get through the ritual with no lasting results whatsoever, I would call it a success. We were getting to see something amazing, and that should be enough.

Eventually, the ceremony did come to an end without serious incident. It was then that we found a package addressed to us: a box wrapped in white paper, with a note. It used language that suggested the whole package was put together and sent right after we completed our ritual--even though that had only been moments ago--and said something to the effect that, since our efforts had gained us nothing of value, the sender wanted to provide us with gifts that might placate "those of an acquisitive nature". Within the box were five smaller bundles, each wrapped in more white paper and marked for one of us.

In a detached, audience-perspective way, I knew where the package had come from. It hadn't been sent moments ago, but instead was left there before we'd even arrived by the mysterious man who had given us access to the lakeshore cabin. He had known we'd perform our ceremony before finding the box, and also that we'd gain nothing in the attempt. His gifts were chosen to satisfy our individual Faustian desires, and thereby prevent us from ever trying this again, and continuing down what he knew was a dangerous road.

Also, I knew that our hidden benefactor was an age-old vampire who had watched over and protected our family.

But the whole package was destroyed before we could take the gifts within. I don't remember how, only that it seemed inevitable.
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the dreams ain't broken down here, nah, they're walkin with a limp