I have seen the road to the gaping mouth of Hell..

…and there were fuzzy plush toys there.

I had a horrific nightmare last night. Woke me up with a real start. Trying to write up a dream like a story always takes something from it and leaves a lot wanting, but I want to try and get this out in black and white.

I was working as part of a movie crew, on a film involving a popular plush toy. It was some kind of stop motion film, where an actual one of the soft toys was used in the film. My role in the film was to liase between the director and what was called the "art department", which in the dream was for some reason the department responsible for ensuring that the original creator of the toy stayed happy with the way it was being portrayed in the movie, which as part of his contract with the studio, he had the right to dictate.

(I’ve been watching Californication lately, which, by the way, I’m totally in love with, most likely influencing this context for the dream.)

Anyhow, the director kept trying to portray the toy in less than child-friendly scenes, but the creator of the toy wanted a very old-fashioned kid-safe production. I was constantly saying things like "Sorry, but the art department just won’t sign off on this scene. I just know they won’t. It’s not going to happen.". The director, and the film crew at large, didn’t much like me and felt that I was inhibiting the creativity of the film, but I was just the messenger and I couldn’t do anything about that.

Now, for some reason, the entire crew of the film owned shares in the production, and for one of those equally insane dream reasons which seem to make perfect sense in the dream but are nuts in real life, we’d already made a massive return and were millionaires already, and would remain so even if this film never aired.

So, frustrated, I began to ask opinions of some of the crew members. I got responses like "Dude, I’m richer than God. I couldn’t give a damn what happens to the film now.", and "My kids and their kids and grandkids are set up for life. If you want to axe it, axe it..".

So the next time the director set up a scene and I was forced to yell cut, I said to him that this wasn’t working out anymore. I said that I was going to advise the art department and the copyright owner that there was not going to be an accord reached between them and the director and that this just wasn’t going to work out.

We were standing under a soft top roof, some kind of tent or tarpaulin rigged up because it was raining. Suddenly there was a crash on the temporary roofing as a bucket of rain hit hard, and then for no apparent reason, the crash rose to an ear-shattering crescendo, the roof gave way, and then, as you’d expect, the ground tore open, a portal to the underworld opened, and I was picked up and hurtled into the depths of the Abyss to suffer an eternity of torture!

What. The. Hell? (No pun intended.)

Now, I know how ridiculous this sounds. It really was one of those "you had to be there" moments. But I was terrified. I woke up shit scared, and quite frankly if I’d heard a thunderclap, or a car crash, or a door slam right then, I would have fair excreted feces into my boxer shorts without delay. It took me a good ten minutes to sincerely convince myself that I knew it was a dream and that the hellmouth wasn’t going to open here on the physical plane as well. I swear though, if I’d heard so much as a cat jumping off a table at that moment, it would have been all over for Mr. Unsoiled Shorts.

I think that the lesson learned in this dream was that you can never have enough money. Or perhaps it’s that sticking to your convictions and trying to enforce your morals on others is a surefired road to hell. Maybe it’s both. =)

Anyways, I just had to get that out of my system. I went back to sleep and had several other dreams after that, waking up after each one without fail, and, predictably, waking up at exactly fucking 7AM on the dot, of course. I swear I want to put a knife in my eye every time I see that time on the clock. This is just not funny anymore. Give me 8AM! Hell, give me 7:30! Give me back my ability to sleep on MY terms, not some utterly useless schedule that, for a guy who doesn’t work a routine day job, I have absolutely NO REASON to adhere to!! Ugh…