Dream - The toxic waste collector man, the moving statues, and the doomsday bomb

On October 18, 2008, I had a dream about being drawn into a scene on a TV, to a place after some disaster had occurred, where a toxic waste collector man, running for his life, got into a fight with moving statues, one of which finally got a doomsday bomb.

In the dream, I was in a large house with large rooms, dimly lit, with low dense rugs. There were many TVs, and one room had at least three. My mother was there and perhaps my brother and sisters, maybe just my sisters, and some other people, too. It was night, I think, perhaps evening. A day had passed.

The TV cable company had been working on the system, improving it. Now the TV screens had three little menu-like things on the top, and an LED-like box and numbers in the lower right area of the screen, up a little ways and out from the corner, somewhat above the place where the channel logo normally is. The box showed the time spent and the money spent in bright yellow-white LED-like numbers that changed frequently, updating the count, until the end was reached, whatever the end might be.

All this was taking up more of the screen than I would have liked. The picture quality was mixed, being a little grainy and bright enough but not terribly bright. The technician had been concerned about everything being alright when he was here earlier fiddling with things. I was a little concerned now as I watched the money spent update, wondering if someone had put a pay per view program on somehow or if we had somehow been changed into channels or a system that charged per time used, but I think the numbers finally settled on zero.

Most everyone had gone to bed now and all the TVs were still on. I was looking at them with my mother and we were trying to figure out how to turn them off. I looked at the menu things hanging down onto the screen, trying to see if there was an off button or some way there to turn the TV off. As I was looking them over they changed from things on the screen to plastic things hanging down onto the screen. There were less options now and I still couldn't see anything I could identify as something to turn the TV off.

Finally I saw a switch, like a light gray light switch, underneath the overhanging curve of one of the plastic things at the left. I thought it was an older part of the TV, not part of the newer stuff that was just put on, and that I should be able to use that to turn it off. I reached in and turned the switch, feeling somewhat like I was cheating because I wasn't using the new way, but as long as it worked it would be enough for now. I straightened up and then one of the new plastic things came off, loosened by my reaching under it, and then fell on the floor.

I picked it up and tried to put it back on. More were coming loose, and I was trying to put them back together. It seems they joined at the top, with the middle one essentially hanging off the other two with little plastic peg extensions fitting into holes on the others. It was really kind of a delicate arrangement and I could hardly get the things to hold together without it falling apart again. I thought it would be kind of bad for the technician to come back and find we had already taken apart what he had done. I don't think the TV even went entirely off, just changed to kind of a blank static display.

From time to time though, earlier and now again, I was becoming drawn into the show on the TV, watching it, with the story expanding until I was there.

I was back again at a scene after some kind of disaster had happened on the Earth, with the survivors carrying on. There was a huge squarish mansion, with several stories, set in a misty watery area, with wide open stretches of water through areas of water overrun with reeds, with a gray sky and a misty drizzle and occasional slight, cold breezes.

A man was out in a long, large, flat-bottomed rowboat, slowly filling a barrel or two at a time with something skimmed off the water, some kind of toxic waste, what kind was never explained. It might have been chemicals or it might have been biological, perhaps some kind of mutated bacteria. Most of the time the man just drifted through the area, maybe occasionally paddling, until he came across enough of a concentration to begin collecting it.

Occasionally a helicopter would come and take away a barrel or two and leave empty ones. This time he also left some food items, as the man had requested. Some of the food was more conventional and some was in little squeezable tubes that looked like the paint tubes used by artists. Someone even came down onto the boat with him, briefly.

The man collecting the toxic waste eagerly had some of the food, including some from the tubes. The stuff from the tubes looked strange and waxy, with a slight sheen. Unknown to the person collecting the toxic waste, people at the house had been discussing whether they should get rid of him, and whether this would be a good time. The toxic waste collector man was starting to become a little suspicious of things though, starting to wonder now if something was wrong.

After the helicopter man left, the person in the boat, the toxic waste collector man, went back to the house, into one of the rooms near the center. He fiddled with the food tubes he had been given, wondering about them. He became aware, then, that he could hear someone, out in the other rooms toward the front. Someone was coming for him.

When the man arrived, it turned out to be the man from the helicopter. There was a confrontation then and a struggle. During the struggle the man that had been collecting toxic waste held out a food tube and threatened the other man with it, and I think smeared some of it on him, but then at the end poured some of the toxic waste from a metal container the size of a large glass over the man's hands and forearms and told him what he had done. The helicopter man was crouching there on the floor, leaning forward, with his arms low and extended, a stricken look on his face. He said that others were coming. The toxic waste collector man could hear them, talking and making noises as they made their way through the house toward them, a woman and someone else, maybe more than one other.

He got out into the hallway and they were close enough for him to see, down a slightly irregular hallway near the doorway of a room, maybe two or three rooms away. They saw him, too, and started to make their way forward, hurrying more now. He turned and ran, trying go one way and then another. They ran after him, splitting up some to take different ways. He was on the third floor now, though it's uncertain how he got there. People were coming from both sides. The area was a series of very large open rooms with large open areas around parts of the perimeter and center of the floor.

He went toward some stairs, but then went toward a ladder that went through a square opening in the floor. The ladder was made of metal tubes painted white, and it slid slowly down as he put his weight on it. He was also walking down, trying to hurry. The ladder would not slide all the way down anyway, just part of the way. The others were still after him, trying other ladders and the stairs. I think one was even trying to go down the same ladder, but since it was moving it was awkward to get on, and he kept pulling back from it.

The toxic waste collector man was now surrounded by empty space, in a large open area in the second story. In front of him was a railing and balcony room with some statues and figurines and other art. He decided to climb over the railing and get into the room there. There was something in his mind that made him a little worried about it, but he decided that he had to do it.

When he got into the room, the statues started moving, and he remembered that earlier some people had gotten in and had been somewhat slowly and methodically killed by the statues. They had engaged in a sword fight. The people had even been dressed like someone from Shakespeare's time, but they couldn't kill the statues with their swords. The statues, though of relatively soft stone, wouldn't damage that much, and the statues killed them with their swords. Now they were coming for the toxic waste collector man, who was now sometimes me, though sometimes I also just watched. He got a sword from somewhere and was fighting back. The sword blade was about an inch and a half wide, and was flimsy and wanted to flex and bend even if he just used the edge of it.

He got behind one as it tried to get him and as it leaned out over the railing he was hacking and sawing at the back of its neck. Someone was saying that you had to cut off their heads to kill them. I, as the toxic waste collector man, finally got its head cut off and then turned to the other statues. Other people had gotten there and were also fighting them. Earlier the people had been after me, but were now fighting the common enemy. I think the statues might have been winning at first, but as they were thinned out it became easier.

Then, as I went forward in the room, another statue came forward toward me. This one had a long tapering white sword that spread out backwards from a point in the front, becoming a thick blade with upper and lower somewhat dull edges, to having expanding center edges too, before finally expanding out into a wide circle that acted as a hand protector. The whole thing was maybe eight feet long, and because of its length was the sword that could not be beaten. Earlier in the dream it had killed someone who had tried to fight it. I managed to get past the point and made my way partway along it, where I managed to bend it a little, perhaps even hack it in two. I then made my way along to the statue holding it and killed it, as it talked in a somewhat high mournful voice.

Besides the statues, which were definitely thinning out now, there were also figures and figurines of various sizes in niches and shelves and on tables, though the tables didn't start until past the first room. The figures and figurines weren't all people, some were animals of various kinds or part human and part animal or cartoonish animals. Sometimes they were very abstract. Anything with a suggestion of a head or eyes had to be killed, though.

The first table was covered with them. I started picking them up and just breaking the heads off when I could, sometimes banging them against the edges of the table, though this didn't seem to do much good. They were aware of me, especially as I picked them up, and looked at me with slightly worried looks, like they accepted their fate but were still slightly concerned. They all had to be killed, otherwise it would start all over again. Some of them would be growing into knights and become replacements for the ones killed. If all of them were killed, though, it would all be over and even the people hurt by them would be restored.

After killing some at the table I turned to some display shelves on the short section of wall behind me and started breaking the heads off some of them there, then I went to the side, to the right of where I was now facing, but to the left as I had been in the first room. The area formed an L-shaped room full of tables at which various odd entities sat, perhaps in the range of four to five feet high if they had been standing. They were all animated statues and they all had to be killed.

I grabbed the long neck of an ostrich-type thing and I think partly broke and partly cut it in two as the thing's eyes looked at me worriedly. Something that was apparently a vampire got up and fought with me. It got behind me and did something to me, evidently bit me in the back of my right shoulder. I managed to turn around and kill it. It had a smile of triumph, though its eyes had a trace of pain and worry, and of acceptance. It knew it was gong to die, but was happy that it had got me, too. I, along with the others, continued fighting, killing the things.

An odd thing that was apparently a werewolf, though it was mostly a smooth white and just had occasional indented flowing lines suggestive of hair, attacked me and then got away and brought back some kind of bomb. I and the others tried to draw back and then the bomb went off, spraying everything with a watery substance and mist. The substance was a little thicker than water, and kept coming out, it wasn't something that just went off and stopped. It would die down and then come back, spraying harder again. Some of the statues started murmuring about the doomsday device being used. I thought then that it was a device to kill everyone, including the attackers, when it looked like everything was going to be lost. I could see the statues looking with concerned interest as they slowly started to melt and dissolve.

I got the other people together and they hung on me as I somehow took a long heavy cord or rope and swung out through the window away from the building, which was now much taller and in the middle of a city. We sailed far out over the other buildings, crossing several blocks, perhaps even half the city, before finally stopping at an unusually tall one that I think was part hotel and part museum. We were inside it, then, perhaps swinging in through a window. We walked around inside a bit, looking at things and discussing the situation, sometimes looking out the tall windows.

There was a series of watery explosions, with thick water and dark mist coming out of the building we had left, which was now maybe seven or eight stories high. Windows and parts of the walls were gone in the upper section, though it was hard to see much because of the obscuring dark mist. It was apparently the final stages of destruction.

Then a white figure, upright but slightly tilted, flew out of the building toward us, apparently under its own power. We were talking among ourselves, saying that it must be the werewolf, come to get us. It fell toward us, looking like a statue of a man, with blank statue eyes, and with chips and chunks gone but still mostly there, partially cloaked in flowing pieces of statue cloth and partly in something that may have been a statue toga, it flew toward us unmoving and crashed through the window. I got behind it somehow and got it against the wall and managed to cut and break its head off. It only moved as a whole, and never moved any part of it independently, except maybe for the slightest bit and maybe not even that.

We still thought it was somehow the werewolf, but then we somehow got word about something else, that there were clues in some other building in some boxes, some of them like board game boxes and some smaller and taller. A couple of us went to look through them. I was now a separate person from the toxic waste collector man, more of a helper. He was looking through the boxes and then he left for a while and I was looking through them. They contained odd collections of things, like paper dolls and their clothes and game parts and other things. There was supposed to be some clue there left by the werewolf about his next move. The toxic waste collector man came back and looked some more and then left again.

I was standing now on the edge of the building. We had been moving back bit by bit. It was like the tables or shelves where the boxes were had kept moving toward us, very, very slowly. The room didn't have any back wall here. If it did before it was now gone, not even the corners had walls. I seemed to be standing on something like pale dried mud that had squirted out in a fat shelf from between huge adobe blocks. It was part of a series of such shelves. I was still nervously going through the boxes, moving to the left side and then back as the shelves of dirt were crumbling under my feet and falling away.

It seemed now that the toxic waste collector man had been there when they crumbled and had fallen to whatever was down there far, far below. I worried about that as I tried to continue looking through the boxes. I had to find the clue to save him. Once the werewolf was destroyed, the toxic collector man would be restored, or so I thought. It might only be a clue that led to another clue, but I still had to do it.

Some voice was speaking to me from somewhere maybe ten feet away to the left and above. It was an unfamiliar voice, sounding like an older man. Apparently disembodied, it seemed to be speaking mostly commentary that wasn't directly related to what I was doing, but still seemed to in a vague way be speaking about it, offering indirect advice.

A series of mud shelves to the left had crumbled and fallen and even the faces of the adobe blocks there were crumbling and coming loose and falling. The dried mud shelf where I was standing now was starting to crumble, falling away on both sides, the edges shrinking toward me. I could feel the disintegration coming toward me and the shelves coming apart in pieces under my feet. I was falling, then, too, but I only fell a little way, maybe only a couple of inches, and then I found myself standing on a flat floor-like extension, with little scattered pieces of dried mud on it.

I started to get the feeling that maybe the toxic waste collector man hadn't fallen, after all. Maybe he hadn't been there when the dried mud ledges collapsed, maybe he had only gone somewhere for a while. I still had to find the clue, though. I continued standing there, on my now stable and secure platform, and continued searching the boxes.