Superpowers & Cameo Appearances

Date: 12/8/2020

This dream is about superpowers. Mostly. It starts out with a pair of fictional characters from an anime I watch in the waking world, just dropped into an entirely new setting. Specifically, they're Nasa & Tsukasa from Tonikawa. They now live in a world where some people have superpowers & it's seen as being a fairly normal thing -- like being born with blue eyes. Not so common that it applies to everyone, but present enough to be accepted. In this world, Nasa & Tsukasa run a small shipping company together. Several of their employees have powers, but it's not really important. What matters is that they enjoy working for the couple & everyone acts kind of like a family. One Winter, when it gets very cold, they're all worrying about what to do to keep from freezing at work. Nasa pulls Tsukasa aside, into a back room where they can't be overheard. Thinking that their employers are trying to complain about the cold without ruining their positive image or maybe even discuss who to fire to afford better office heating, the employees get very sad. They discuss options for awhile, and ultimately decide to do something nice for their employers so they'll be cheered up. The nice thing is... plugging in a whole bunch of humidifiers? Supposedly to help heat the office without introducing fire hazards? This logic would never work in the waking world, but the employees were proud of themselves in the dream. Meanwhile, Nasa was actually discussing the same thing with his wife. They were warming their hands, taking turns wearing the same pair of gloves while the gloveless person got their hands held, & asking each other what they could do to raise the spirits of their employees. In the end, they also decided to plug in a humidifier following the same logic. Tsukasa also decided to go to their office to start doing paperwork to give everyone a half day for the day so they could go home & think up more long-term solutions. When Nasa left the back room & plugged his humidifier into a wall in the main work room, he noticed all the others. He did a slow 360 turn in place to look at all the spots where humid air was rising. In his head, he asked, "Mother... if your son was being surrounded by too much kindness... would you want him to run?" The dream then switches to a different set of protagonists entirely. The details of their adventures are less clear, but the main conflict sticks with me after I'm awake. Someone is collecting powers. A guy in a beige suit is trying to find people whose powers he considers "interesting" and gather them for his own personal entertainment. If they're not interesting enough, he has them hunted down by those with interesting powers and eliminated. The main group of protagonists is on his radar, & they're trying to save members of their group from being either owned or hunted by this guy. There are fight scenes on trains, in high rise buildings, in city alleyways, etc. One minion uses guns & has the same voice as several villains from cartoons I've watched in the waking world. He seems like a caricature of German villains, & the heroes easily escape his poor shooting & poorer strategy. Several paintings are broken at one point & it feels significant in some way. Some of the heroes make it into hiding & fret about staying safe or making it back to save their friends. Two members of the group get caught & one of them has to demonstrate her powers for the beige suit. One is taken with beige suit himself, into a banquet hall in a high rise. It has a crystal chandelier every dozen feet or so, & fancy dining tables spaced about the same way. It has a cream colored carpet and simplistically ornate wallpaper. It's practically a room for royalty. The other is taken into the empty room just above the hall & tied to a chair. She's told to apply her powers to the room holding her friend & beige suit (tho how she sees it, I don't know -- if I write this into a non-dream story, I'll probably give her security camera footage to watch or something). As the demonstration proceeds, beige suit gets progressively more insistent that her powers have the potential to be interesting and it's such a waste because they're ultimately so boring he could cry. He's grinning the whole time he says it, but the intensity of his voice makes it hard to believe that he could be lying. He told them that if one of the pair can hurt him using her powers or the other can convince him her powers are interesting using their words (which, in retrospect, must tie in to their actual power as well), then he'll add both of them to his collection & they won't have to be eliminated. The girl can create mirrors. She can turn any flat surface into a mirror, & it can be as strong or as brittle as she wants. This is the power that beige suit insists has potential. However, her friend is also explaining how it works & they make the mistake of begging beige suit not to make mirror girl use her powers too much. The more mirrors she creates, the more things she forgets. If she turned the whole banquet hall into mirrors, she'd probably lose her memory entirely. They don't say it out loud, but they're specifically terrified that she'll forget all her friends -- them included. So they beg to have her limit her display of power. Beige suit scoffs at this, saying it's exactly why her power is so frustrating to him. It could be used in so many ways, but instead it's restricted in such a dumb way. He steps on a section of mirror that she's made intentionally brittle. It shatters beneath him, and another mirror connected through her power shatters at the same time: one of the full-wall-length windows looking out from the high rise. Glass shatters everywhere. Beige suit stands in a storm of colors and reflections, nearly being cut or stabbed by chunks of broken mirror but not even needing to dodge to stay unscathed. He grimaces in the maelstrom, truly frustrated. He stomps his foot down on the last un-shattered piece of this section of mirror, this time with force. The shards fly up even more dramatically around him as he makes his final assessment "Interesting? This isn't even a power! This is just amnesia with extra steps! What's interesting about that?" The banquet hall captive flinches. There's a feeling that the rest of the group is nearly there to save them, but won't make it in time. It seems like these two are doomed. That's when I wake up. Until next I wander.