they made a movie based on a dream i had as a kid

Date: 10/2/2023

I can hardly remember this one! What I can remember is how my family, some of my friends, and I were on a vacation far away from our home. There was an old CRT television sitting on top of a shelf of medium height, and on the first shelf was a DVD player. My dad had put in one of his old DVDS taken from this book I saw in the attic in the real world. I was rummaging around an area full of junk and dug out a bright pink DVD case. I recognized it as something I had obtained during my early childhood. I flipped to the back to read the information, and was excited to see that it was a movie based on a dream I had had as a little kid! I remember being obsessed with this woman’s franchise and had sent her a letter asking her to make a movie based on a crazy dream I had. It turns out she actually DID, and she mailed the letter to our house! She also combined my dream with a dream another little girl had into one full story. I was so chipped to see MY actual name on the DVD’s synopsis. In the bonus features, they even had a scene dedicated to me! I was so excited to watch it with my family. I quickly took out the DVD my dad had on since no one seemed to be interested in it or watching it for that matter, and replaced it with my bright pink one. The DVD was very pleasing to look at. It was unlike any movie DVD I had seen the time I got it: hot pink, girly cartoon characters, cursive logo script, and sparkles galore. It was riveting to be able to use a DVD during the ages of streaming. I was so impatient, I managed to grab the attention of someone nearby to watch it with me. Then, I turned on the TV to be greeted with the loading screen. How gorgeous it was! Even though I was no longer five but rather twelve years my senior, I was pumped with absolute nostalgia. When the title screen finally showed up, I picked up the remote and pressed the ‘play’ button, initiating the immediate beginning of the movie. I cannot remember too much about that movie, but it really did feel like I was watching it. I knew I was dreaming, and even I was surprised I was getting such a quality movie! The movie wasn’t actually good at all, however. It’s like those movies you had watched as a kid and think upon fondly, and then when you finally watch it, you realize you just had your nostalgia cap on the entire time. The movie was actually terrible. I recalled the creator’s movies always being animated in a 2D cartoon artstyle, just like how the characters looked on the DVD, but this movie was animated in complete CGI. It looked awful. The writing was bad, too, and the characters were just downright misogynistic and stereotypical! But then… Disgusting things happen in the movie, disgusting things that I wouldn’t dare admit I’m into. As the story progresses, I can’t help but ponder WHAT exactly did five-year-old me put into that letter… Perhaps luckily, the movie shifted from gross to downright disturbing. It focused on a family who was away on a camp, similar to how my family and I was in the dream. The dream consisted of around three kids, parents, and the dad’s mother. Unfortunately, I’ll have to skim over these parts because I’ve forgotten about most of it by now. They were a family of fugitives, even the younger kids, and were all on the run. There were these scenes that actually happened to me in real life (in the dream); it was almost as if the family had came out of the TV. The middle child, the son, seemed to be around ten years old. Now that I’m typing this out, the family reminds me of the family in F is for Family despite their differences in appearances. The son was riding bikes with his group of friends from one side of the empty field to the other and back, and was bickering back and forth with most of them. I suppose their small bickers grew into something physical, because they were all soon involved in a brawl. I assume this kid killed at least one other kid, because why else would he be a fugitive? Another scene has my brother and I in this small white cabin with the same CRT playing the rest of the movie. We notice a big bug crawling around the ceiling. I freak out and try to whack it with a broom, and as I do so, loud alarms begin to set off. I need to mention that the ‘bug’s’ legs were long, thin, and reminded me of those red lights you’d see in schools’ fluorescent lights when turned off. My elementary school not only had them in the main lights, but also a few in a single light bulb covered by a small cage on the ceiling. Does that make sense? That means that in preschool while every other child was blessed with the ability to be able to sleep, I had no choice but to ogle up at the ceiling to face my biggest fear - those faint red lights. Anyways, it was terrifying trying to kill that bug. Even my BROTHER was shrieking, when just the other day, he was getting onto me for freaking out about a massive bee hitting my face out in the open! What a hypocrite! The bug came down from the ceiling when I whacked it about a third time, but that came with the unfortunate news that it had WINGS! Those buzzing sounds were the last thing I wanted to hear in that situation. I whacked him as many times as I could before eventually dropping the broom and fleeing. That is when my brother just stomped it flat with his boot. A rather anticlimatic end, but thankfully that was the end of that. The shift to the family was the beginning of the end to my dream. It revealed what had been their home for the past twenty years: jail. Their jail cell was rather peculiar, however, since it was this massive tent in the middle of the camp. The tent was always tended to by guards on the prison grounds. It was the ONLY jail cell there. Inside the tent was complete darkness at all times. Their only chances of seeing the light was during their bathroom breaks, which happened multiple times daily. Today was a special day, though. Since people were visiting by camping (though it was completely unintentional), they got to take a little break and converse with the others, while handcuffed at all times, of course. The wife and husband wanted to stay near each other but wanted to sit down, so they were taken down to the wooden bench and had their legs handcuffed to the chair’s legs. The younger son and daughter were in their 20s, but having spent most of their childhood in custody, they needed to make up for a lot of lost time. So, they played with my younger cousins - WHILE HEAVILY SUPERVISED, OF COURSE. All the grandma and the older son, who looked just like Alan from the Barbie movie but much more hairier and disheveled, wanted to do was sleep. That’s all they had to rely on for entertainment in these grim circumstances. The dreams they had were the only things keeping them company. The dark tent was abruptedly opened up to make room for incoming reporters. I was suddenly in the body of a reporter. I came in the tent and literally straddled Alan. I eagerly looked down at him. Alan was now about thirty-five since he was fifteen during the arrest. He slowly awoke from his rest, groaning and rubbing his eyes while doing so. He surprisingly was pretty detached for someone who was staring directly into a crazed woman sitting on him. “Good morning, Alan! Did you sleep well?” I chirped, before asking him a myriad of questions. “What do you do for fun?” was one of them. “Well…” He groaned, rubbing his eye with the back of his hand again. He had a red beard covering the lower half of his face. “Sleep. That’s pretty much the only thing we got since it’s always dark…” “Do you not hang out with your family?” “No.” His grandma was a few feet behind us, which was where she was sleeping before the tent open. She was a bug