Dream: You've got a puppet foot!
I had a series of strange dreams last night. First I was tooling around with my family in our old red and white Dodge van. (Eventually, we came to refer to this van as 'Old Chugger.') It was some kind of family vacation, driving from site to site, and all I remember is that I became hugely attached to some kind of a drink involving lemonade, chili powder, and lots and lots of green herbs thrown in. I bought a kit to make this drink in the gift shop of a museum, was charged an unexpectedly high amount, and then accidentally left my kit by the side of the highway. I kept seeing commercials for a series of direct to video X-Files specials, possibly starring only Gillian Anderson. I formed the intention to go home and look them up, to see if they would have David Duchovny.
Then I signed up for some kind of church camp on a last minute whim, knowing I would be 'the oldest kid' - by which I mean an adult - there. I spent the whole time conniving to find a place to eat dinner alone and thus arrived at dinner after everyone else had gone through the buffet line, when all that was left were two or three varieties of nearly-identical soggy salad. And chocolate cake. It turned out the chocolate cake had been mailed to camp as a late birthday present for me. Only the camp leaders were frustrated about this, because it really was an actual child's birthday that day, and there was no cake for her. I told them to say the cake was her cake and not to worry about it. (I didn't really think about the likelihood that the truth would eventually come out; it seemed like a foolproof plan to me).
Then, finally, I dreamed I was on a show that was like a cross between Mythbusters, The Muppet Movie, and The Prestige. I was joining some kind of punk experimental team (no doubt to thrill them all with my ENORMOUS TALENTS IN SCIENCE!), and we had a big lab/workshop for doing all our punk experiments. Our leader, who really did look like a younger version of the man from Mythbusters (and I make note of the youngerness, because we also seemed to be some sort of tribe of 'Lost Boys'; we lived in the lab, because we were all orphans with no one to care for us! *sob!*) was asking for volunteers to stand on this little grate in the floor. The kind of grate where the whole floor tilts toward it, so that water can run off instead of standing in puddles.
Our leader had his new device aimed at the grate, and when a volunteer stood on the spot, he would shoot a beam of energy at him. Once hit with the beam, the volunteer would shimmer brightly and disappear - but just before the disappearance, we would have a grief glimpse of the volunteer transformed - into a human-sized foam puppet. Punky Mythbuster, you see, had invented a device that could send people into a parallel dimension - Puppet Land! - but in order to survive Puppet Land conditions, you had to be a puppet yourself. So his device did that, too.
Then there was a sort of accident in the lab. A volunteer was standing on the grate, the device was set to go off, and someone else wandered in to talk with the fellow standing on the grate. Punky Mythbuster rushed over to push the hapless individual out of the way and was accidentally caught in his own energy beam. He puppetated and then disappeared - transported to Puppet Land. Now we were in trouble. Punky Mythbuster was the only guy who knew exactly how to work the device, and he was supposed to use it to bring everyone back and un-puppet them. Especially unfortunate in his absence was the would-be volunteer, who was knocked over before the device went off, but who still had one foot on the grate at the time. A foot which turned into a puppet foot, even though the whole of him stayed in our dimension. Somewhat dazed, the fellow got up and tried to walk around on his exaggerated purple foam foot, but a puppet foot isn't meant to support the weight of a full-grown man, and it kept buckling under him when he tried to move around.
Meanwhile - random but also true - a mysterious woman had infiltrated the lab and was trying to incite us to war against Puppet Land, while, unbeknownst to us, denizens of Puppet Land were also crossing the barrier between our worlds every time the device was used. A puppet sting ray (Yes! A puppet sting ray!) was secretly watching this woman as she hawked for war, and he took her opinion to represent us all. So he crept back to the other puppets to warn them: they would have to find a way to return to Puppet Land so they could raise an army to destroy the threat to their world!
To be continued...?
Then I signed up for some kind of church camp on a last minute whim, knowing I would be 'the oldest kid' - by which I mean an adult - there. I spent the whole time conniving to find a place to eat dinner alone and thus arrived at dinner after everyone else had gone through the buffet line, when all that was left were two or three varieties of nearly-identical soggy salad. And chocolate cake. It turned out the chocolate cake had been mailed to camp as a late birthday present for me. Only the camp leaders were frustrated about this, because it really was an actual child's birthday that day, and there was no cake for her. I told them to say the cake was her cake and not to worry about it. (I didn't really think about the likelihood that the truth would eventually come out; it seemed like a foolproof plan to me).
Then, finally, I dreamed I was on a show that was like a cross between Mythbusters, The Muppet Movie, and The Prestige. I was joining some kind of punk experimental team (no doubt to thrill them all with my ENORMOUS TALENTS IN SCIENCE!), and we had a big lab/workshop for doing all our punk experiments. Our leader, who really did look like a younger version of the man from Mythbusters (and I make note of the youngerness, because we also seemed to be some sort of tribe of 'Lost Boys'; we lived in the lab, because we were all orphans with no one to care for us! *sob!*) was asking for volunteers to stand on this little grate in the floor. The kind of grate where the whole floor tilts toward it, so that water can run off instead of standing in puddles.
Our leader had his new device aimed at the grate, and when a volunteer stood on the spot, he would shoot a beam of energy at him. Once hit with the beam, the volunteer would shimmer brightly and disappear - but just before the disappearance, we would have a grief glimpse of the volunteer transformed - into a human-sized foam puppet. Punky Mythbuster, you see, had invented a device that could send people into a parallel dimension - Puppet Land! - but in order to survive Puppet Land conditions, you had to be a puppet yourself. So his device did that, too.
Then there was a sort of accident in the lab. A volunteer was standing on the grate, the device was set to go off, and someone else wandered in to talk with the fellow standing on the grate. Punky Mythbuster rushed over to push the hapless individual out of the way and was accidentally caught in his own energy beam. He puppetated and then disappeared - transported to Puppet Land. Now we were in trouble. Punky Mythbuster was the only guy who knew exactly how to work the device, and he was supposed to use it to bring everyone back and un-puppet them. Especially unfortunate in his absence was the would-be volunteer, who was knocked over before the device went off, but who still had one foot on the grate at the time. A foot which turned into a puppet foot, even though the whole of him stayed in our dimension. Somewhat dazed, the fellow got up and tried to walk around on his exaggerated purple foam foot, but a puppet foot isn't meant to support the weight of a full-grown man, and it kept buckling under him when he tried to move around.
Meanwhile - random but also true - a mysterious woman had infiltrated the lab and was trying to incite us to war against Puppet Land, while, unbeknownst to us, denizens of Puppet Land were also crossing the barrier between our worlds every time the device was used. A puppet sting ray (Yes! A puppet sting ray!) was secretly watching this woman as she hawked for war, and he took her opinion to represent us all. So he crept back to the other puppets to warn them: they would have to find a way to return to Puppet Land so they could raise an army to destroy the threat to their world!
To be continued...?