I have this one recurring dream where I'm in this weird race on a long winding pipe that is a couple hundred feet above the city streets below and it winds around the tips of the high rise buildings. There are faceless people looking out of the windows watching the race. Sometimes they try to make it more difficult by putting obstacles on the pipes, sometimes they help out by giving you a shortcut through their apartment to the pipe on the other side which may catapult you ahead of the rest of the racers or might be a trick and send you to the very back. The race is me against an endless supply of other people who are all basically clones of me. What you do is you crawl, walk, straddle, hang on to the bottom of the pipe etc and try to get to the front. If you pass somebody you push them off the pipe, and if they are lucky they keeping holding on to the pipe and dangle there. If they are unlucky, they fall to the streets below. So as you progress along the race, the pipe becomes narrower, rickety, broken in some spots, and generally more treacherous. The dreams all go through the same cycle. I start the race and I'm cruising along with no issues, it's actually kind of fun, I'm bumping people off, they dangle, nobody gets hurt and everybody laughs. They climb back on and we all keep going. Then it starts going to a dark place, people aren't just dangling anymore, a guy ahead of me gets bumped and falls to his death. The faceless people in the windows laugh and cheer. I get bumped and dangle and almost fall but climb back on and the faceless people boo and try to knock me off with broomsticks and throw things at me. After a while the race isn't just dangerous and dark, it's pure hell. The pipes are so narrow the only way to keep going is by dangling underneath and going forward one hand in front of the orher. The pipe is do broken and rusty that your hands are a bloody mess, but you can't let go. The faceless people in the windows shout obscenities and try to knife you as you go by or sometimes just shoot at you. There are very few people in the race now, and they are the only people you can trust, all the other racers and you have agreed to no longer bump others out of the way, winning is finishing now, not coming in first.
The dream ends with me seeing the finish line and all the pain and torture of the pipe race being over right as my fingers finally give way and I start falling to the streets, no more than 10' from the end. On one occasion as I fell, a fellow racer grabbed me and saved me from death, all other times, I woke up right as I started slipping off the pipe, so I don't know if I would have been saved or not, but I wasn't as of the moment I awoke.
So, how fucked up is that one? I think it's gotta be about the worst dream there is.
