A while back I had this really bizarre dream in which I was wis my family at Disneyland. But it was really more like a combination of Chuck E. Cheese’s and McDonald’s, and, as is often the case in my dreams, only Disneyland in name. I had just gotten out of the shower (what shower, I don’t know, but since a quarter of my dreams center around my needing to take a shower but not being able to find one, I should simply consider myself lucky and move on), and was wearing only a towel around my middle items. Later, I believe, this turned into a bathrobe. So I was going off to play the basketball game, which is my favorite game at Chuck E. Cheese’s. Now, at the real Chuck E. Cheese’s, the basketball game is right next to this Barbie/Ken jet-ski game where you try to shoot water from this gun at a target to get Barbie and Ken and their jet-skis to move. And sometimes when you’re playing the basketball game and the basket is really close to you, your rebound will actually bounce out of the game and fly across the room… or sometimes just fly into the water at the bottom of the nearby Barbie/Ken game. Because of this, my dream decided that the basketball game actually just has a lot of water at the bottom. There was also some large part of some other game inside it, which I had to move out of the way before I was able to play the actual game.

So I finally start playing, but pretty soon after I start, it turns into this lame-ass beanbag game where I’m trying to get beanbags into a little hoop. It sucked. And since the hoop was tiny and the beanbags were tiny, I pretty soon found myself (don’t you love how often I switch tense in these?) standing inside the game in the water holding the hoop in one hand and the beanbag in the other hand and just putting the beanbag through over and over and over and over and over and over. The really sucky thing was that I had to put it through the hoop about ten times to get one ticket, and my hands were getting tired.

Now this is where the dream started to get truly bizarre. Somehow, and how this was I’m not entirely sure, this basketball/water/beanbag game was a game starring Ronald and Birdie, who were lovers. Birdie was super depressed, and Ronald was supposed to cheer her up, and somehow this was involved in the game and/or the game was involved in this. But presently, somehow, I was Ronald, and the hoop thing, which by this time resembled a plastic 64-ounce 7-11 mug similar to one my coworker Rachel has, was Birdie… still with a hoop, through which I was still putting the beanbag over and over and over. This Birdie continued to be emo at me, and requested that I whisper sweet nothings into her ear as part of the up-cheering process. This is fundamentally disturbing to me, and if there is any sexual meaning to it I’m avoiding all thought on that subject.

So. Since the game was getting phenomenally stupid, I decided to wade out of it and go elsewhere. But looking around, I found that there was a semi-hidden passage at the back of the game that led up a dusty ramp next to some old windows to a door that didn’t seem to have been opened for years. Did I mention I was soaked from the game and still wearing either a towel or an open bathrobe and nothing else? This didn’t bother me at all in the dream, but thinking back on it I find it highly amusing. Anyway, the door had glass panels in it, so I could see through it into what appeared to be a dusty, rusty old room in a castle or manor of some sort, but what I realized after a few moments was actually a prop room merely containing items that might be thought to fit in a dusty, rusty old room in a castle or manor. (This was Disneyland, after all) Finding this terribly exciting, I decided to go into this prop room and look around. I tried to open the door, but found it locked. On examining the rusty knob, however, I discovered that the lock was a simple latch and on this side. But then, as I was opening the door, I woke up.