I was in a room where a scary tan horseshoe-crab like creature materialized and mounted itself on the wall.
The crab jumped on a boy's head and seemingly sucked the boy inside of him, and then spat him out. This process repeated several times, sometimes holding onto his head as he struggled. But the boy was finally released with a piece of paper, that was a kind of sentence: he would have to eat crab legs 6 days a week or he would die.
After the strange creature left, people sort of nervously joked about it. Some warned not to talk about what had just happened--because it "knew everything", and the mere mention of its name would bring it back.
me: (rebelliously) "Well let's bring it back. If it "knows everything" let's see if it will tell us how to defeat it."
My view seemed to fast forward to a ceremony, where some kind of flame was being upheld in an incantation to intentionally summon the creature. Some scary backgroudn music began to play--as if we were in a movie. The crab materialized again--but this time instead of mounting on the wall, it showed up on the floor.
I began to taunt it. As I did so, it floated up in the air and tried to come toward me. Not wanting to get sucked into it as the boy had been, I punched it squarely in the face. A struggle ensued of it coming at me.
Someone else managed to find out that we had been visually tricked--it was not levitating, there was a curtain of some kind, behind which was a humanoid-shaped being holding the crab as a puppet.
But when we attacked the humanoid-shaped object, it turned out to be some kind of robot. We managed to dismantle it, but a small piece of it jumped out and began running to try and plug itself into an electric outlet. I grabbed it and tried bashing it on various surfaces, but my impact was weak and it seemed fairly tough.
I stopped bashing it when I noticed a sink full of water and dishes.
me: "A-ha, water! If it's electrical, this won't be good for it."
I tossed it in with the dishes, but someone else fished it out and threw it into the other side where there was a garbage disposal. They began running water and turned the disposal on, grinding it up.
Rather quickly after this happened, the people who had been frenetically fighting the monster before seemed calm and satisfied. They dispersed off into different adjacent rooms, as if we'd been in some kind of dormitory all along.
Though I was puzzled at their nonchalance, I went to the room I believed was supposed to be mine. However, the scary background music suggesting the creature's arrival started playing again.
Panicking, I went back down to the room that had the garbage disposal and tried to knock on the door. My knocks were somehow very quiet, but eventually a man inside opened the door.
me: "I don't think this is over, music is playing and it's coming back."
man: "That's just playing during the credits, look."
He pointed to a TV screen, which was running through a list of names and playing the music. I gathered all that had been going on was part of some strange virtual video game...and we had won the final fight.
me: (becoming lucid) "Okay, um, that whole fighting-the-crab thing was some kind of game? I don't get it, and I don't know how I'm here in the first place. Also I really have to pee."
man: "Then come with me."
He took me to a small room with a strange looking bucket that had tubes connected to it, with a wall that looked like an aquarium behind it.
me: (shaking my head) "Look. There are really just two ways this can go. Either it won't do anything and the tension will remain--so I'll just be sitting here peeing perpetually in a dreamstate. OR if I do get the sensation to be relieved, that's going to mean I'm wetting the bed wherever I'm sleeping. That would not be good."
man: "This will be different, trust me. Just try it."
me: (sighing) "Fine."
As I urinated into the bucket, it looked as it was going to overflow...and it had with what looked like pieces of small floating feces in it. I grumped about that, but he told me not to worry and keep going.
I did as he said, and it didn't overflow somehow. My pee turned completely clear, and it seemed that the level of the container started going down instead of up. My urge to pee did not subside, so the stream continued...but the container and the aquarium behind it seemed to start vibrating and going through some kind of pumping machinations.
As my rate of peeing escalated to seeming like a fire hose, faces of some kind of weird animal/fish/sea-monster things came up and stared at me through the aquarium glass. They started cackling maniacally like they were going to attack me...but the man pulled out some kind of weapon and pointed it at them. They froze in fear and backed off from view.
Somehow in that moment, I ceased to have any feeling of needing to pee.
man: (laughing) "They aren't used to seeing that mumbagun pointed at them, because...they made it! Heh heh heh."
Note
I'm making up 'mumbagun', but he used some gibbersh term like that apparently referring to the thing he had pointed. If you are wondering: no, I did not wet the bed. :-)
The man led me to an enclosed chute which seemed to have a stool with handlebars on it. He encouraged me to sit on it.
man: "Now that we've gotten your immediate need taken care of, I think it would be very illuminating for you to go and see space."
me: (leerily) "Is it painful?"
man: (dramatically) "Oh...yes, very. No, no it is not. You'll be fine."
The stool began to raise and I passed through what felt like a rickety Disney ride experience, made out of construction paper and cardboard. After going up several levels, I arrived at a place where I could get off the stool or stay on it. A woman sat at a ticket-taking desk.
woman: "Ticket, please."
me: "I don't...know anything about tickets. I was told to 'see space'."
woman: (surprised) "Oh, that's you. Um...can you tell me, the address of the person who bought your ticket?"
me: "No. I have no idea where I was then, and I honestly have no idea where I am now."
Note
While nothing explicitly said this, I gathered that the person who I had encountered was famous in this realm...and she was trying to trick me into getting contact information for a celebrity.
I had seen at some point a button that said "Go Directly To Space" but I couldn't push it before being cleared on the ticket. After the discussion about the ticket happened, I could no longer see such a button.
So I stepped off the stool and began wandering in a large cylindrical tower. It was filled with museums, restaurants, and exhibits.
Without access to the stool any longer, I just kind of made my way up whatever elevators or stairs I could find to try and get higher. I spotted the man from earlier at a long table that was seemingly overhanging high in the sky out of one of the restaurants...as if they were all eating on a construction ledge outside of a skyscraper.
They invited me to join them, and a conversation ensued--of which I remember only a little.
man: "It's important to remember that all the so-called 'material' world is actually just a web of wired-together metaphors. If you look a level deeper than that to see what powers the metaphors, the energy to sustain them comes from nostalgia."
Inspired by that sentiment, I asked if there was a way I could travel back to where I had the option of being in the chair to go direct to space just by thinking about it. An Asian man sitting next to me seemed to light up at the question.
asian man: (covering my eyes) "Of course you can!"
Covering my eyes did seem to help me visualize what I'd seen before. But that began to mix with awakening--where I could hear the mechanical fan running in my room, and the rain noise generator I run on the computer. Ultimately the awakening won.