To Sleep, Perchance...

Originally posted on Tales of the Parodyverse by Manga Shoggoth.

Parodyverse characters copyright (c) 2006 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works.

I have a dream...

No. Not in the Martin Luther King sense. I have a recurring dream. More accurately, I have a recurring nightmare. It started not long after I stated my "career" as a superhero.

The earliest form I can remember this nightmare taking was this:

I am in my costume, bound to some moulded surface by cables thicker than three of my fingers. I know that I am more than capable of breaking the cables, but I have somehow been paralyzed.

By the look of the walls around me and the translucent shimmer of a force-field in front of me I appear to have been imprisoned in come form of high-tech cell. There are shapes moving outside the force-field.

I try to remember how I was captured, and which of my enemies has access to such technology, but my memories are strangely inaccessible. I start to panic, want to scream, but the paralysis that grips my body also strangles my voice.

In other words, not a fat lot of good.

After the first few months of being a superhero, the dream changed.

I am in my costume, standing somewhere high up. I am bound to some sort of structure that supports me under the shoulders. I cannot see the structure, but out of the corner of my eyes I can see colleagues, enemies and strangers, likewise bound. Again, I am gripped by the same strange fear and paralysis.

When I had been a superhero for about two years, the dreams took a more sinister turn. They became more varied, but all followed a similar course, and all started from the same root.

The dream starts in the familiar "high place" of my earlier dreams. Now, however, I am torn from my position by some vast, humanoid creature. The bulk of the creature is too far away for me to see it clearly. All I can tell is that its fist, almost humanlike, is vast enough to cover most of my body in its grip.

I am carried through the air at great speed, the wind whipping past my face. At length, I am dropped roughly in a room do vast that I cannot see the walls or ceiling. The floor (which I can see if I land sideways or face down) appears to be made of a single piece of highly polished brown stone.

The creature then twists my body in the most outlandish manner, with no apparent care to the pain it causes me. It then forces me into an absurd tableau, sometimes with my allies and enemies, sometimes with people I have only heard of, and sometimes with completely alien creatures.

At length, there is a flash, and I wake up.

Then, five years after the dreams started, I happened to be fighting one of the more ... mystic ... members of my rogues gallery. During the battle he happened to drop a remark that resonated rather strongly with one of my recent dreams, that he had appeared in. I defeated him, of course, but I was left thinking. Perhaps he might have been responsible for the dreams.

I visited him in prison and confronted him with my suspicions. To my surprise, he not only denied them, but remarked that he suffered from similar dreams, and that the dream we had apparently shared had prompted his attack on me.

We agreed to do a little joint research. He examined the dreams of his fellow villains - at least, those serving at Her Majesty's Pleasure - and I would do the same with my comrades in arms.

We found the same dreams. Exactly the same dreams.

Our investigations went on further. Several of the mystics, villain and hero alike, started working together to identify the source of the dreams. The rest of us put our plots and rivalries on hold.

There comes a time when all must band together to fight a greater evil.