Unfortunate Dream

I had this dream last night that was loosely based on the Series of Unfortunate Events books by Lemony Snicket. Well actually the movie, I suppose, because stupid Jim Carrey was playing Count Olaf. Anyway. Count Olaf had a dastardly plan to take over the city and my friends and I (I was younger and so were they) needed to stop it.

We went to tell my mom, played by Julianne Moore in the dream, but Count Olaf had hypnotized her through the latest hit fad exercise tape, which was his dastardly plan, I suppose. She needed to work out more and more until she became a thoughtless zombie.

There were other failed attempts to try to warn people, which I don’t really remember clearly. We were wandering around looking for help and hiding from Count Olaf’s quickly growing number of minions all through this depressing fog filled industrial town.

There was a scene where young kids were tied to strings which pulled them out of bed every morning at six to go to work. Apparently a year had passed, according to what one of the kids said. They didn’t want to work anymore, but had to anyway, because of hypnotism and violence.

Eventually I found out that Count Olaf was leaving town with my mom (Julianne Moore), Violet, and Sunny. I snuck into the garage to try to save Violet and Sunny, but by this point it was clear that this wasn’t going to have a happy ending. He had hypnotized the town with workout videos and made children do slave labor for over a year. There was no chance of foiling his plans… stupid Jim Carrey.

So when I was in the garage Count Olaf came in and I his quickly, but could still see what was happening based on the fact that it was similar to watching a movie (as most of my dreams are). Anyway, he handed Julianne Moore a brochure of their vacation destination. The front showed one of those 50’s style McDonald’s. She disappointedly said, “I thought it would be different.” It was clear that she had no memory of life before the exercise video, but had a vague notion life could be better.

Count Olaf/Jim Carrey responded, “Why would you want to go anywhere different, when we have the best of everything right here?” He started passing out McDonald’s snacks to everyone in the car. I was wondering why McDonald’s would agree to a product placement in the movie that was so depressing and made fun of their product. Then I noticed everything was spelled MacDonald’s.

That is when it became clear to me the movie was actually a satirical critique of the American Commercial/Industrial Complex. This is when I woke up, with a great sense of revelation. I’ve always sort of felt that I was cheating myself by dreaming in the form of Movies TV or Plays. But I had a great sense of revelation at having a plot twist in the end of my dream that was very movie like. It is the first time anything like that has happened. And it was pretty consistent through the dream from the exercise tape/propaganda to the child slave labor to the car vacation to MacDonald’s. I thought it was pretty neat, but dreams are never as interesting to other people.