Another winner bubbled up last night from the Gneech’s Action Adventure Dream Vault. Most has been lost in the intervening time since then, but I do remember some highlights…

The whole dream takes place on a dark, wet night of course.

I was a smart-alecky wandering adventurer-type in a post-apocalyptic world somewhere between Escape From New York and Full Throttle; not exactly what you’d call badass, but capable enough and a quick thinker (with a snarky sense of humor). Circumstances unknown (or possibly forgotten) had brought me to a small town that appeared to be the remains of an amusement park, repurposed, and with suitably eccentric inhabitants. Like any good village full of post-apocalyptic degenerates, they were superstitious, fearful, and downright stupid, and prone to feeding anybody they didn’t like (which boiled down to anybody who wasn’t born and raised in the village) into a thing they called “The Cruncher.” Naturally, as a smartass, it wasn’t long before The Cruncher and I had a date, along with a handful of other people the villagers had been saving up for their periodic Cruncher-feeding ritual.

The Cruncher itself consisted of a large concrete bunker with a round main platform inside that looked more or less like the transporter room from Star Trek, and a small control room off to the side. Six to ten people would be put out onto the platform, the villager operating the controls would twiddle some switches, and a giant white ceramic thing would plunge down over them, there’d be a loud noise and some yelling, and then it would rise back up and they were gone, leaving no trace.

Naturally the villagers, being both stupid and insane, believed the victims to have been crunched out of existence (hence the name “Cruncher”). While I didn’t know what happened to the victims, I knew they hadn’t been crunched, so I was more curious than frightened when shoved onto the platform and “crunched” myself.

The Cruncher, it turned out, was actually an elevator; the white ceramic thing was a protective shield designed to keep out harmful radiation of some kind (possibly from the inevitable nuclear war that creates these post-apocalyptic settings). The yelling was the result of it being, well, a very fast elevator, that unceremoniously dumped its passengers out at the bottom of the shaft and shot back up again to reset.

Under this amusement-park-turned-village was a large underground installation, the purpose of which had been lost to time. Mall? Offices? War-proof housing for the duration? Who knows. But now it was dingy, derelict, and dangerous. As for the inhabitants, well, if the people above were degenerate, the people below were downright feral. They knew the sound of the elevator under the Cruncher meant feeding time, and they were there and ready for a free snack.

This led to the most action-oriented part of the dream, essentially a chase sequence through the tunnels and warrens of this underground installation, fleeing its deranged inhabitants and all manner of “WTF I don’t even” things that the other Crunchees and I found along the way (such as the room full of broken and disused animatronic clowns).

As we fled, various members of the would-be escapees fell to chasing degenerates or other hazards; at least one fell down an open elevator shaft as I recall. Very few of the images from that part of the dream lingered much past me waking up, but I remember that the chase ended in a pit full of junk and muck that was basically the trash compactor from Star Wars. There was a narrow metal ladder bolted into the wall, which the remaining escapees and I climbed for dear life (after the requisite wisecracks), feral tunnel-dwellers climbing up behind us using their fingernails in the cracked walls.

At the top of the ladder, for no reason other than It’s A Dream Deal With It, there was a helipad with a running and prepped helicopter. Fortunately, it was a futuristic pre-post-apocalypse helicopter, all electric engine and intuitive “drive it like a car” controls, so I could fly the thing. Unfortunately, as my fellow escapees and I got to the top of the ladder and made a run for the helicopter, the feral inhabitants of CrazyTown came surging up after us, bringing down all but myself and one other (whose identity I have since forgotten upon waking up).

The dream ended with myself and the other escapee lifting off and into the night in the helicopter, speculating on whether or not the ferals would raid the village of degenerates now that they were on the surface and trying not to think about it.

And then I woke up.

-The Gneech

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