The Betterments

Last night I had a terrifyingly realistic dream. And it went on forever, a full-length feature film and then some. It was equal parts Village of the Damned and Pleasantville with a little Cronenbergian body horror mixed in as well. In it I was a teenager in an idyllic small town where a new medical practice moves in. The sign is simple and almost fairy-tale direct: Betterments. The doctor boasts that he can correct what is wrong with everyone and since everyone is unhappy with something about themselves, his business doesn't take long to grow. The doc really exploits people's insecurities and there is a slick small town advertising campaign and everything.

In the dream my father (who isn't my father in real-life, like i said, this dream was like a live-action movie where even I am an actor playing me, if that makes any sense) is one of the first to go in, his big toe is banged up and he has surgery to fix it. The thing is, the guy running Betterments not only fixes the problem but also manages to secure some sort of control function over each patient. At any moment the doc can take over one of his patient's free will. And this is just the beginning.

The dream meanders along with me the happy go lucky center, I'm often hanging out with my sister (again, not my real sister) and we begin to get suspicious, especially of Dad. But since in the beginning there is no real reason for the Doc to use his control, its impossible to prove, but we keep catching glimpses of this puppeteering at work all over, most times in the most benign fashion. Finally our mother goes in to see the Doc about 'night blindness' or something stupid like that and there is this skin-crawling sequence where my sister and I walk into her bedroom in our house which is more a horrible funhouse at this point, with impractical angles and doors everywhere, Dad is a carpenter and this odd housework is part of the whole mind control deal, or perhaps an unintended side-effect, and we walk in and mom is facing away from us. She turns around horribly slowly and stares at us with this creepy sedated smile and both her eyes are strikingly different colors, one a bright light purple the other a greenish brown.

We run screaming out of the house and the latter third of moviedream has us playing the Running Man because now most of the town is under control or eliminated or too stupid to care otherwise, and now all sorts of secondary abilities in the patients start cropping up. Everyone who has been operated on can communicate with each other telepathically and have super strength and other heightened senses depending on what surgery they had. Along the way my sister is horribly murdered by this big bald thug who has obviously had brain surgery or something and is really slow moving but implacable.

Somehow i end up building a case, getting audio and other files against these people and there is one extended moment where I'm running from Dad and half the town and end up hiding under this filthy porch and a bunch of them are sitting above me talking about how they will find me and kill me, that i know too much and that it was my fault that my poor innocent sister was killed and that my mother is worried sick about me and how this doctor's procedure will spread across the country and the world.

In the end I'm captured (of course this would go the 1984 route) and just before they are about to kill me I let them know its no use, that I have already informed the proper people but everything is now ambiguous, i don't quite know if the people i sent things to got them or if they can be trusted. And the moviedream ends with my neck being broken (same thug as my sister) and the camera just slowly zooms in on my wide open eyes, starting from many feet away and my whole body in view, head at an impossible angle and the feet of everyone walking away from me in all directions, the camera zooming in until its just my unblinking eyes.

creeeeeeeepy.