Dream Journal

It began with Rox, Tom, and Jessie taking Rebecca and I to a fancy restaurant. We were sat among other people and decided we wanted to be a little more solitary so we moved to a different table. It took the waiters forever to take our order — I remember that I said it had been two hours. So we were getting frustrated. There was definite friction between us and the waitstaff at this point. While waiting, I had been drawing on my paper menu, and the waitress came and snatched it up, saying they needed it for other guests. This event happened again later, when I had drawn some great pictures on the back of another menu. This time as she walked away, I said “excuse me” louder and louder and got up and followed her, while she ignored me. I followed her to the kitchen and took it from her. I came up with a compromise — that I would simply make a copy of my pictures and give her back the menu. She agreed. A large copier was near us. I put the menu in and waited.

I looked out this large plate-glass window and saw that behind this restaurant was the underside of a bridge over a stream. The water was about a 1-2 feet deep, and there were maybe 80 cats just sitting out there, gathered to the shallows, but since it was so packed, some were resting several inches deep in the water. I commented on this to the waitress, and then turned back to the copier. It had copied the single-page menu into a 120-page stack where it enlarged and expanded on all the text and images in the menu. Upset, I returned to the table and plopped down the huge stack, saying “This is what the copier did.” As I sat, I saw the waitress clear the nearly-full plate of this mentally handicapped guy who could only moan in resistance, but who obviously wasn’t done eating. This happened twice.

Just when we were at the end of our patience, the food was brought out. There were a series of offensive things that happened, though I particularly remember adding to the story later on at some point to justify the violence to come — looking back and remembering new things that hadn’t happened before (and experiencing them distantly as I “remembered” them). The first was that I tried some chocolate thing but didn’t like it so I spat it out. The waiter who cleared my plate came back with powdered chocolate in a little bag — the very chocolate I had spat out, and offered it to me rudely. Then he took our centerpiece as he left. He also brought me this awful orange stew with a squeezed-out orange on top. Those two things were added later. But there was plenty originally. He was saying rude things and acting meanly. As he did, I filmed it with my iPhone. I said I was going to put up a web site showing how rude and awful they were. I had caught a LOT and he was not happy. The manager came over to interview Jessie, and asked her a few questions. The last was whether she would Twitter about this. When she said yes, he wrote her a big check to shut her up. There was a lot more as well. I suggested we not pay and just leave. Someone in our group said we should “go to the restroom” in groups of two and then leave. A group of two got up, and I did too because I was really done with it all. On the way out I yelled at the waitstaff and at the door shouted “Worst restaurant EVER!”

Outside was a big square, and I waited for the others there. I heard this crash and went in to investigate. Our table was upside down, with the rest of our party standing around it. I was so pleased! I wanted to see what happened, and the scene played out — they had lifted the entire full table of food and flipped it over, smashing everything to the ground underneath it. Yeah! I was in. Others in the restaurant were following suit, and I overturned tables and chairs and such on my way out.

The restaurant turned out to be on the bottom floor of the hotel we were staying at and at some point I decided to go back to my room. Every maid and bell boy gave me dirty looks. It was all-out war now, and more and more of the hotel was getting wrecked. It turned into this bitter cruel battle between all these various factions. Nobody could get along, and everything was getting destroyed. At one point, I told Jessie to just assume everything you had ever owned was destroyed, and if any was salvageable, that was a good surprise. When I got to my room, it was more like my room at home than a hotel room, but it looked like a tornado had gone through.

At one point, someone had a great idea to make peace. Everybody got two things that had been lost or buried in the wreckage, and their job was to match them with their owner. It changed everyone’s focus to finding and helping people. I had this bedraggled little dog and a book. Each came with a description written on a crinkly pink paper. I walked around looking for the owner, made a circuit of the room, but had no luck. There were several pets — including a purple guinea pig. But this peace didn’t last and fighting broke out again, as bad as ever.

Somehow, this spread outside into the market square and transitioned into superheroes. Everyone had powers that they were using. It became so bad, this tiny world so infested with superheroes that couldn’t get along that a group of them/us decided to go back in time to the Golden Age of superheroes and nip it in the bud. A group of the most nasty, destructive superheroes were gathered together. One was pure black and could dissolve objects into nothingness. There was Venom, insane with rage, and several others.

I don’t recall if there was any transition into the past, or if it looked any different, but we set about going to comic book stores and just destroying everything that had to do with superheroes, to the horror of the people working there. My own destructive powers were meager. At one point I saw a kid reading a comic book at the counter. I looked over and it had this classic super-powerful superhero fighting against and destroying our group. The kid wanted to buy the comic, so I said “If you let me have it, then that superhero will actually come here to fight them. Either read about it, or it can actually happen.” The kid handed me the comic and I began paging through it. It became a gateway, and that superhero in green started attacking and destroying the dark heroes that were sent back in time. In a moment of panic, I realized that included me, and I escaped down a long hallway in the back of a shop, and took shelter in a tiny rusted bathroom stall. I could hear explosions and great thuds beyond the walls, and two others came in to escape the chaos. I told them to crush in with me, and when the building falls, we’ll be okay. They did. There was a tremendous shockwave and everything faded to black for a few moments.

Then I left the stall and came back out into what was once the comic shop. Now it was a youth dancing school. Everyone was in costumes, but they weren’t superheroes. I inquired and they were the “Libra Dancing Group” — everyone there was a Libra. Outside the building, back in the square, I saw that it was a small part of a larger city, and what I was seeing was this time period without the influence of superheroes. Someone was showing me around. Before long we saw a huge march of people in light purple jumpsuits. They were the “masturbators” or “non-masturbators” or something, and I cringed, thinking that this definitely wasn’t an improvement. I saw that the conflict had poured out in different, bizarre, and unexpected ways, and realized that the superhero phenomenon was just the form of the basic conflict.

References: Venom is a nasty evil spider-man villain.