Dream #4

I wrote the basics of this dream the moment I woke up sometime last spring. I have since filled out that skeleton with proper grammar, lucid sentence structure, and some details that have eked their way from my memory.
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I am at some type of camp, though what type specifically is wildly unclear. (Maybe for young singers?) It consists of a gaggle of twenty-somethings (at times supervised by our parents and a shadowy camp leader) in a large house with 3.5 bathrooms. The only other person I recognize at camp is a girl I’ve seen around but had relatively little contact with.

I’m having a fine time at camp (doing who-knows-what) until one day I find out that we are headed to Hawaii in the next twenty minutes. I don’t have a bathing suit with me, and rush upstairs to grab one. We all share the top floor, which is a wide open room with closets lining the wall. The floor is covered with shoes, and I lunge over them to try to get to my distant closet. Though I am the only camper up there, a friendly but demanding midget appears to give me very straightforward fashion advice, at one point pulling off my bright yellow shirt and running to the closet to fetch something else. As he runs he holds the shirt above his head by the sleeves, hiding his tiny body behind its yellow billows.

Suddenly we are in Hawaii, though I only know this through dream intuition, as we never leave a remarkably similar large house. I am in the basement kitchen, cooking a meal with the girl. (At this point it seems the camp might teach young people cooking). We each work on our own dish, and at the bottom of my vision there is a readout recording points for the quality of my cooking & immediately translating those points into a Navy Rank. I want to become a high enough rank to date this girl, who apparently is a high-ranking officer.

I do something fancy with onions in the stir-fry I’m cooking, and my points go up to 44 (Admiral). This rank means that this girl and I can be together, and while she seems quite happy about this, she almost immediately uses the avocados on the table in her dish. This significantly lowers my rank, because much of my 44 points rested on the possibility that I would still use avocados in my dish.

We return to the states, and the camp is in a very late stage. We meet in the special back meeting room of a high-class bar. The room is huge, and our parents are all waiting at a long table in the center of the room. The entire room is intimately lit, dark shadows playing across the mahogany surfaces of nearly everything. As we enter, our eyes are drawn to a long line of mailboxes where we are to send and receive messages.

The camps shadowy leader emerges from the background and tells us to look at the wall behind us. We turn and see a giant portrait made completely from tiny grains of black and white sand. The portrait is basically the heads of every member of the camp photoshopped onto the bodies of famous opera singers, all in one big dining hall. Our shadowy leader tells us that we have been placed next to those we sing the best with. Then he tells us the whole portrait is a piece of shit, and that we can do better with a solid group effort. He blows on it, and the sand whirls away, leaving only an empty grey square.

We are divided into two groups, and each group is given a secret hideout. At this point I leave my own perspective and start watching a man I will call Ernest (this is not his real name, but when he has his face it looks like that of Ernest from the “Ernest goes to ________” movies from my childhood).

Ernest is a member of the other group. He wakes up on a beach, though I cannot tell where. He presses his face into the sand, and from the abnormal and terrifying imprint left therein realizes he has no skin on his face, only a bare skull. In a fit of ill-informed ingenuity, Ernest breaks into a series of shops to make a face for himself. First he uses plain wax, but it looks creepy and inhuman so he abandons it. So he breaks into a seafood shop and rips the meat out of a bunch of crab and lobster and uses it to make his face skin. It looks really good, but he’s allergic to shellfish, so his face swells up and it looks disgusting and awful. He abandons the “make a fake face” plan and decides to kill everyone at camp.

He goes to his own group’s secret hideout, and begins to kill everyone there gruesomely with an almost comically large knife. I see their deaths in graphic detail, though all but one have blurred together in memory. The one is a super obese guy who is splayed across the hideout’s sofa watching professional wrestling, seemingly oblivious to the murders going on about him. Ernest finally goes to kill him, slicing his gut wide open. But the obese man ignore it, and tell Ernest to go away and let him finish the wrestling match. Ernest decapitates him in a fit of annoyance and anger.
Somehow Ernest kills the girl I’m after, catching her outside of our secret hideout. The final third person scene is Ernest floating in a hotel indoor swimming pool, holding her hideout locator, screaming “They’re not here!” The camera pans straight downwards, through three layers of basement and a parking garage, finally settling on our deep underground hideout, and at that moment I realize that she has died.

I decide to turn back time to save her.

We are back in the basement of the Hawaii house cooking dinner. Ernest comes in, still alive and with a fully human face. nonetheless he is a malevolent force, and hates the girl vehemently. He jokes with us in a bullying way, and then tries to strike her with a novelty baseball bat. I grab the bat in midair and tell him to leave, and he slinks away reluctantly.

It is two days after this incident, and the entire camp is playing a game of baseball. The teams are the same as the secret hideout groups, and Ernest’s team is up to bat. My girl is pitching, and has pitched out one player. I am on first, and have tagged out a second. Ernest goes up to bat, and on the first pitch hit’s the girl’s ball right back into her forehead. She falls to her knees, and in a daze says “Tell me this was all a beautiful dream.” She dies. I wake up.