Thread: The Steampunk Clock

This dream was somewhat disjointed, but I believe all the elements are connected in some way. In this dream, I am my younger self (probably about 15-16 years old (I'm 29 at the time of writing)). The beginning of the dream is somewhat blurry. I'm hanging out with this girl that appears to be my girlfriend. She was never my girlfriend in real life. I don't recognize her completely, but she looks similar to someone I know. We are generally just having fun at this amusement park. She keeps kissing me a lot; to the point where I get a little uncomfortable cause I don't like PDA. But I was very happy anyway.

Fast forward to the next scene. Me and my friend back in high school are climbing this really huge tall staircase. It's either a mall, an airport, or some industrial building. It's a wide metal staircase that seems to never end. We both see the top coming eventually. He's slightly ahead of me, but we both make it to the top. My legs feel weighted like I have sandbags attached to them. At the top there's a few large metal doors with windows in them. We can see outdoors, but there's not much of anything out there. It just looks like grass and a tree. We open the door and both walk out. He wants to head in one direction and I, the other. So we amicably part ways. I just keep walking and then I softly fall and fade into the grass. I'm not dead, just semi conscious. I see that girl again and she leans over me. I don't know how she got there. She leans down close and says something that I don't remember and then kisses my cheek. It's all very blurry even for a dream (indicating I was not fully conscious - maybe asleep). Then the scene fades out.

The next scene takes place in the house I grew up in. I moved out of this house around 15 years old and we now live on the other side of the country. My house had a staircase that went up through a large hole in the floor. Around the perimeter of the hole, was a walkway with railings (I don't know what you call it), so you could see down to the lower floor. The hole was pretty large, but it was much bigger in the dream than in real life. It looked like I was inside an auditorium with a second floor.

Anyway, in the middle of the open space, was a huge clock hanging from the ceiling by ropes. Like the type of clock you might see on a clock tower. It was probably around 20 feet (6 meters) in diameter. It was very interesting because it worked like a sailboat. It had a ton of ropes and mechanical things in the back making it work. It would kind of swing and move around a little as it worked because of the large mechanical nature of it. It was clearly VERY old. It was mostly black, but there was some gold on it. I then watched it and realized there was a problem. The minute hand and hour hand were reaching the point where they overlap. The problem is that one of the hands was bent a little and it slowly collided with the other. The clock stopped briefly and then I saw the tension rising. After a few minutes, "bang", and the clock shot forward some minutes. It was incredibly loud and it was nighttime. I was given the impression that people were trying to sleep, but for some reason they just ignored it. It swung back and forth a lot when it happened and you could see dust pop off of it. I watched it for a few more minutes (which were actually seconds in the dream) and it kept working fine. I found a large control panel in a different room somewhere near the clock. It looked like steampunk gauges. Each gauge had two things: A picture of the mechanism that it was for, and an indicator that said "good" or "ok" with a light behind it. Most of the pictures looked like gears of different sizes. Some were pictures of ropes, and one was a large metal capacitor. Everything said OK except one gear. The light was off and the gear was a broken in half picture. The clock seemed to keep working completely normal, so I just ignored it. I knew it needed to be fixed at some point, but I had no idea how it worked and didn't know anybody that would help. Somehow, I knew it was broken for a long time and it kept working anyway. Clearly something else would break in the future cause of the hands that kept colliding every hour. Then it faded out and I woke up.