Dream Journal 2021-08-18: Be Careful What You Wish For!
For three people in a dying town on a sweltering summer day, things are about to take a drastic turn. None of them have names that I can recall, though there were two men and a woman, and all appeared to be somewhere in their early twenties. The guy who kick starts the plot into gear is living in a house with a broken air conditioner and an overgrown driveway. His next door neighbor has an old limousine resting on cinderblocks in the yard, and the house across the street is little more than a pile of rotten rubble.
Anyway, this guy’s changing his car’s oil in his overgrown driveway when he wishes that he could leave this horrid town. This minor declaration of fantasy is enough to summon some sort of wish-granting entity into existence. Whatever the thing was, I’m not entirely certain: devil, genie, or fairy are all possibilities because I could never look directly at it because it was made of bright light.
One thing that I new for certain about this wish-giver was that it was risky to deal with. Sure, the wishes would come true, but there would always be a caveat. To offset this somewhat, the wish-giver offered four wishes instead of the usual three.
The first wish had a bunch of extra conditions on it so you could really only use it to determine that the wish-giver was actually capable of granting wishes. Our guy uses his preliminary wish to get his oil changed and BAM! Oil is magically changed and guy realizes he’s got an opportunity on his hands.
He does what I imagine nearly anyone else in his situation would do and call his two closest friends to come check out the situation and potentially share the wishable riches. The friends come over and they spend a wish or two on slightly more extravagant things. Exactly what they wished for isn’t important, but the three of them did learn about the need for careful wording lest you get unfavorable results.
Eventually the group decides on their final wish and it’s some long monstrosity of clauses that are very narrowly-defined to avoid obvious pitfalls. They want to live a lot longer and they define how exactly how strong they’ll be and how high they’ll jump and how much money they’ll have, among other things.
The wish gets granted and we get to see it play out… Including how it goes tragically, tragically wrong. Everything starts fine enough, though. The trio can now lift heavy things and jump several meters into the air. They become celebrity basketball players with fat contracts and leave the town on international tours.
Because such care was taken in specifying exactly how strong and wealthy the trio was, it seems like everything is good. But they neglected to include provisions that would keep them on top of the world’s stage. Soon the other athletes of the world began growing in strength and dexterity.
A few years after the last wish was finalized, everyone in the world is now stronger and can jump higher than these three. Plus there was a big round of hyperinflation, so those fat contracts weren’t worth much now. The dream ends with the trio being decades in the future but in the same metaphorical trap they found themselves in before the wishes were granted: stuck in a dying town, broke, and now everyone in the world is more athletic than they are.
Only this time, they don’t have any more wishes to fix their problem.
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“Deal With The Devil” artwork by Steven Rhodes







