The Dream from the Nap from Day 5.5
This dream began with our fiance walking with us through a long hallway in what seemed to be an hotel or mansion of some sort. The place was opulent, with hard wood floors in gorgeous deep ruddy cherry. The walls and ceiling were all very rococo, with trompe l'oeil paintings at the junctures of intersecting hallways.
We were barefoot, and we were annoyed to find thousands of very small straight pins, as used in sewing, scattered all about the floor. Our fiance tried walking ahead of us in shod feet to kick the pins away, "Allow me!", but they just scattered and rolled back toward us. "I don't know why these pins are here. Sorry." He shrugged helplessly and wore a very puzzled expression. He suggested finding a large shop magnet to drag along the floor, but we pointed out that some of the pins were nonmagnetic metals.
"No worries, Rabbit; we've got this covered."
We crouched down and blew a hard puff of air at the pins, and they rolled away rapidly and cleared a path in front of us. The other pins in the room, even the ones from behind where we were, all started rolling forward to the room ahead of us very quickly. Soon the room behind us was empty of pins, and there was a sound like rain of millions of pins all rolling away from us as fast as they could.
We continued walking forward, and we noticed an elevator to our right. Inside the elevator were two men and a woman. The woman, who had bright auburn wavy hair, wore an elaborate dress with an iridescent white bodice with black, royal blue, and navy blue lace trim, and a wide royal blue skirt with vertical broad stripes in white and black. The dress had an apron front, and the apron dragged down to her feet. It was patterned in orange, red, and gold, and it shimmered and rippled like fire as she moved. One of the men wore a mask, and he had billowing black curly hair and vividly blue eyes (which we later established as resembling the character Jean-Claude from the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series... which thankfully only one of us reads). The other man had mousy brown hair pulled back into a pony-tail with a black velvet ribbon. The three were arguing, and then the first man, who we view as the Phantom of the Opera, opened a right-hinging door into an hidden compartment in the forward right wall of the elevator. The inside of the compartment looked like the inside of a funeral casket, and it was lined with pale blue silk and had a small pillow. The woman, who we interpret to be Christine, settled back into the compartment, and the Phantom closed the casket, and the elevator closed and descended.
After the elevator went down, the pins caught up to where we were, and they started pouring downward into the open elevator shaft.
It was presently established that the pins were actually broken hyperlinks which all direct to the same TVTropes page, which was supposed to be a super metatrope, but which had been taken down because it was only a more specific nuance of another several tropes. The writers of the intended metatrope had failed to notice the takedown, and they were attempting to reconstruct more subtropes around it, so they kept leaving broken links lying around. The metatrope had something to do with being a rookie or sidekick to a professional or hero, and it also had something to do with substance abuse.
The fiance and we climbed down the cables of the elevator shaft, and there were pins pouring into it from all directions. We finally found a landing, and we got off the cables and walked into the room on the other side of the landing. The room was dark, with the only lights visible being those of the monitors of an half-dozen computer consoles, each of which had a TVTropes writer sitting at it wearing some hipster-stereotype attire. We walked over to one of the consoles. A young man with a fuscia mohawk and oversized black glasses (in retrospect, he looked rather like Skrillex) was sipping a vanilla bean frappuccino from Starbucks and playing what looked like Minecraft. On his screen was an immensely tall tower of single blocks stacked on each other, with a magma block at the top causing lava to pour down the sides of the tower onto the land and water below, forming cobblestone. We reached across his body and seized the mouse, selected a type of block from the menu, and placed it- a "pins block" - and placed it on the tile above the magma. Soon, a fountain of pins started falling down the sides of the lava-fall, and the raining noise of the pins down the elevator shaft diminished. Momentarily Lily's and Jade's dreamselves separated from each other, and Jade grabbed the Pink-Hair Skrillex by his black-and-turquoise houndstooth necktie. She grabbed his beverage and dumped it on his computer keyboard, then told him and everybody in the room that if they "don't fix the pin situation, I'll cut off your Internet connections, drown your keyboards in coffee, demagnetize your credit cards, and hang you from the ceiling by your own fucking hideous neckties!"
They appeared inclined to do as Jade demanded, and the next scene was in the main nave of a church or theatre of an opera, or just... kinda' something in between and both at the same time.
At this point, our perspective splits into three different points of view: Lily ended up in the perspective of 'Christine', approaching the stage on foot in the same bizarrely elaborate gown. Ayden ended up in the audience pew seating, and Jade ended up hiding inside a massive indoor tower windmill which was stage right. The struts supporting the windmill allowed Jade to see into the nave easily, and there was a girl to Jade's left with stringy red hair- apparently Christine, now replaced or upstaged or who-knows-what by Lily. To Christine's left was one of the TVTropes programmer-hipsters, who was laying on her stomach, leaning up on her elbows on top of her black school backpack, which was covered in pins and logos.* The girl had a TI-83 calculator out in front of her and was attempting to access the Internet from it.
From where Ayden was standing, he could see a group of men in black masks and garb walking in, like pallbearers, carrying a bier with a man laying upon it, dressed in a full-face black mask, tricorner hat, and draped in black cloths. It was very like Commendatore Pedro from the Don Giovanni scene in Amadeus. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOw1NLizCZA&feature=player_detailpage#t=63s[/youtube]
The pallbearers carried the bier to the transepts of the nave, and then all of a sudden the man on the bier tossed off the black clothes and revealed himself to be the Phantom, in truly astonishing attire. The Phantom was wearing some incredible hybrid outfit of what would occur if Ruby Rhod and Cruella de Vil shared fashion tips. It was like this thing, but instead of leopard print, it was ermine or dalmatian, and the collar was fluffy. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSFg3pAprdg[/youtube]
Immediately some kinda' funky but not really very good 1990's hip-hop music started playing, like something that would be off a Kids' Bop CD. This riff kept playing over and over instrumentally, like the "if man is still alive!" segment from In the Year 2525. At this stage, there were no lyrics. The Phantom started announcing the arrival of "La Divina", and then on the stage a pedestal rose up, and up from the hollow inside of the pedestal rose a woman in a dress made of white and pale blue and purple feathers, with an extremely large ostrich feather in her hair. The Phantom pointed to Lily, who was dressed in Christine's gown and standing at the foot of the stage. He gestured up to the other woman, apparently Carlotta, and said something like, "It is time for your debut performance!"
Lily started climbing up the stage, but her dress caught on the gas lights along the foot of the stage, and she tripped. It took three tries to get all the way up to the top of the pedestal, and when she got there, Carlotta asked, "What is this, a new little diva to upstage me?"
Lily replied, "There is no diva here but 'La Divina' (referring to Carlotta, apparently?), and I'm just a backup singer with a minor part. Don't mind little me!"
Carlotta just harrumphed at this but smiled a little bit at the flattery, and she opened her mouth to sing. As soon as she did, the Phantom started walking around with a microphone in his hand, shoving it in people's faces while they said single words into it.
This was apparently an 'audience participation' sort of song. The Phantom started asking for different Latin parts of speech to be translated into single English words, but none of them actually makes sense, looking back on what words he was trying to get, except when he said, "Now tell me, tell me, what is 'Quid'?"
He shoved his microphone into the face of a Latino teenager who looked exactly like the cover images of Marco in the Animorphs book series, after Marco had short hair. Marco shouted, "WHAT!"
The line before that, the Phantom had gotten somebody to say, "WHO!"
Next, he walked around the room, prompting over and over again, "And what is the past participle, now tell me Quando!"
Jade was inside the windmill and kept whispering to herself, "Where. Where, duh. It is WHERE, you idiots!" (Keep in mind that Quando is actually 'when', not 'where'.)
Finally the Phantom was getting tired of this, and he shoved the microphone into the struts of the windmill, attempting to prompt the girl with the black backpack and the calculator. She tried to look up the answer using the Internet, but her calculator wouldn't go online. Jade finally shouted "WHERE!", and the Phantom grinned and winked at her, and he continued with the rest of the song. The riff played several more times, and then we woke up.
*Today on the way back from Latin class, which was just before the nap in which this dream occurred, we saw a young woman in stereotypically 'hipster' garb, carrying just such a backpack. One of the pins was the mask of the Phantom of the Opera, from the cover of the playbill of the original stage version.
