(Male, 40’s) Now that I write down this nightmare I realize that nothing really horrific happens in it but there was a terrible sense of foreboding, like something extremely bad was just about to happen. I was at an indoor amusement park with someone else’s family – a mom, a dad, a couple really small kids. It was night time and the sense I got was that this place was open all around the clock. We were in the middle of this huge indoor plaza and we were going to take in one of the shows. The older kid, the one about 4, wandered away from us as we stood getting out bearings. He got on this escalator headed down. I scooped up the other kid, who must have been about 2 and ran down the steps to catch up with the first kid before he totally disappeared.
The escalator ride was almost entirely dark. There were sheets of black canvas hung so that they’d nearly hit your face as you descended. At the bottom was the lobby for the show. It appeared to be some kind of rather terrifying vaudeville show, a sideshow nearly a “freakshow,” not something that would be obviously appropriate for children. I decided to stall for time until the children’s parent’s arrived. They couldn’t be far behind us on the escalator.
Some kind of rather terrifying vaudeville show…
In this lobby area were booths devoted to each of the stars or attractions in the show. There was a busty blond woman in a flimsy white chemise who turned into a werewolf, supposedly at some point during the show. There was a thin man in a black suit that was a bit too big for him, as if he’s been wasting away from life on the road, who wore an immensely tall stovepipe hat. He seemed lost and badly preoccupied. The strange thing about these booths at least from a marketing perspective was that the actual stars of the show stood behind the booths. We were free to talk and interact with them. The children seemed to be rather scared of some of these performers so I started talking to the performers, joking with them, trying to make them appear OK. I don’t know if it worked. Some of the acts sounded pretty intriguing like this person who worked turning snakes into swords. We waited longer and longer. The children’s parents never appeared. Furthermore, there was no escalator that would take us up out of there. The exit must be on the other side of the show. We had to go through it all.