Have you ever had any theme park related dreams?

[Matt N]

Hi guys. I was curious to know; have any of you ever had any theme park related dreams?

I only ask because I had a very weird theme park dream last night that I couldn’t not share…

 

Basically, it revolved around my first day at Europa Park, which is coming up in real life in 6 days’ time. And it was one of those dreams where every little thing was stopping me from getting into the park and riding any rides… but far from a regular one. Buckle up, because this dream is weird…

 

Things got off to a good start after a wonderful sleep in Hotel Castillo Alcazar (actually, I’m not sure what hotel it even was… it certainly didn’t look like Castillo Alcazar), but then we went down into the hotel lobby… where I was greeted by my study skills tutor from university, who was armed with a cricket bat and a huge black bin bag. She then proceeded to whack me around the head repeatedly with the cricket bat and throw me into the bin bag…

 

When I finally woke up from being knocked out by repeated cricket bat wounds, my study skills tutor had taken me out of the bin bag, and I found myself in a room that looked bizarrely like the House of Commons if it didn’t have any MPs in it. She then threw me onto one of the green seats and threw an exam paper in my face before informing me that I had to resit A Level Maths for some reason, and I wasn’t allowed into the park until I’d passed. I then started doing the exam, but for some reason that I can’t quite remember, she then came and kicked me out of the room for “acting up” before throwing me into my own private room and restarting my timer from the beginning, even though I’d completed a fair chunk of the exam.

 

The exam was fairly plain sailing after that, but when I got out of the exam, I wasn’t allowed to leave the House of Commons-style room, as it got stranger… two team members from TowersStreet Talk then appeared out of nowhere and informed me that it was time for my “Forum Member’s Review”. They sat me down at this table where I was facing them directly, and then they began to spend a long time grilling me on my past forum posts. I don’t remember exactly what they said, other than that it started with them going “We’ve been looking through your post history… and my god, you’re a moaner!” before then shaking their heads and tutting at me in perfect unison. I don’t remember what they said after that, other than that it was definitely about my previous post history, but for some reason, my mum then appeared and reprimanded me for being rude to the two TS team members. And I again can’t remember what I did… it just came seemingly out of nowhere.

 

After that, I finally found myself in Europa Park… except as is typical for dream theme parks, it looked nothing like I’d imagined it would. I started in this tiny indoor area with Victorian style windows and a tiny little house to navigate your way around to get into the park. It had corridors that were barely wide enough to fit me in them, and it was an absolute maze to navigate my way through. I did eventually get through it, but for some reason, my grandparents (who aren’t even coming to Germany with us in real life) then appeared out of nowhere, and we spent a few minutes exchanging pleasantries. By this point, my enthusiast anxiety was most certainly rising, and it was close to closing time. I then exited the maze with my grandparents… which led us to a massive muddy field that had Silver Star randomly plonked in the middle of it. I yelled “OH MY GOD, IT’S SILVER STAR!” and then started sprinting like I’ve never sprinted before. My grandparents initially tried sprinting with me, but then they told me to leave them behind, as they were too tired. My foot fell into a giant rabbit hole while I was sprinting, and I twisted my ankle very badly (much more badly than you’d expect for merely getting your foot stuck in a rabbit hole, for some reason), but I kept running (albeit in a rather haphazard way, and certainly not straight… I felt like I was going to keel over any second due to my ankle pain). I was very close to reaching Silver Star’s queue entrance… but then in typical theme park dream fashion, I woke up.

 

I know it sounds weird, but that’s exactly what happened, word for word… have you ever had any theme park related dreams?

[Mark9]

Back when I operated Runaway Train at Chessington I used to have a regular recurring dream that I was operating and couldn't get the train to park in the correct part of the station to open the restraints. So the train just went round and round relentlessly for hours. Even to this day, I have this dream once or twice a month. 

 

A pretty good dream I had once was that Southends Adventure Island got a B&M Floorless but it fell apart and into the sea.

 

Most of my dreams these days tend to revolve around getting on Disney Cruise ships. 

[Inferno]

😂 Love this! That dream sounds like a rollercoaster of emotions on its own!

 

Mark9's train parking issues are more of a nightmare than a dream as well tbh.

 

I did have an odd one a few months back - there was a long wooden coaster that opened in Central London, think along the lines of The Ultimate...

I joined the queue, and it was extremely busy.

The queue was sort of a lot of wooden stairs going up, a bit like Depth Charge.. But a bit more grungy, like Shockwave used to be.

I nearly reached the top of the queue, and unfortunately hit my head on a wooden beam, which caused me to wake up 🙄

I never did get to ride the London Woody!

 

Hope you have a great time at Europa Park!

[Matt N]

6 hours ago, Inferno said:

😂 Love this! That dream sounds like a rollercoaster of emotions on its own!

 

Mark9's train parking issues are more of a nightmare than a dream as well tbh.

 

I did have an odd one a few months back - there was a long wooden coaster that opened in Central London, think along the lines of The Ultimate...

I joined the queue, and it was extremely busy.

The queue was sort of a lot of wooden stairs going up, a bit like Depth Charge.. But a bit more grungy, like Shockwave used to be.

I nearly reached the top of the queue, and unfortunately hit my head on a wooden beam, which caused me to wake up 🙄

I never did get to ride the London Woody!

 

Hope you have a great time at Europa Park!

Ouch; the end of that one sounds painful!

 

Thank you; the actual first day at Europa Park is tomorrow, so let’s hope that my dream wasn’t a premonition!

[Han30]

@Matt N blimey that was a pretty vivid and detailed dream!

 

The only theme park related one I can remember was going to Thorpe on a really windy day and Stealth had blown over so it was essentially flat - it still had a big queue which confused me!

[Matt N]

I had another dream last night. Thankfully, this one wasn’t quite as much of an acid trip as some of my previous ones, but it was still a bit weird…

 

My family and I were driving along a motorway in Italy (we've never been on a family holiday to Italy…), and for some reason, my mum was driving (it’s usually my dad who drives when it’s all 4 of us, particularly if we’re abroad). We drove past a road sign that said “Gardaland: 10 miles”. I go “Ooh, there’s a road sign going towards Gardaland, the biggest theme park in Italy!”. My family initially reacted in the usual way they react whenever we see a theme park road sign in the UK on the way to somewhere else; they went “Oh, fun!”, shrugged and continued on with our journey. However, this is where it began to get weird… we travelled up the motorway for a few more miles, but things then took an unexpected turn, and this experience turned from a leisurely drive into something befitting of a James Bond film…

 

My mum, completely unprovoked, suddenly did the most spectacular u-turn you’ve ever seen in the middle of this busy motorway, put her foot down like mad, and started driving in the direction of the Gardaland road signs. My dad and older sister, for completely inexplicable reasons, suddenly flew out of the car through some sort of ejector seat mechanism. I looked at my mum, concerned that my dad and older sibling had randomly disappeared from the car, but she didn’t look fazed at all; she said “F*** ‘em; we’ll come back for them later”. At this point, she suddenly started driving like a rally driver; the speedometer was at well over 100mph, she was weaving in and out of traffic, weaving between lanes, she was jumping over cars… this was some insane driving, particularly given that my mum is a very safe driver in real life! I asked her why she had suddenly changed tack and started driving crazily, and she said “Son, you and I need to go to Gardaland together!”. We then continued to speed down the road together in what was by far the most insane piece of driving I’ve ever experienced… it was spectacular, but insane!

 

We eventually arrived at Gardaland and got out of the car… but not before she sped into the car park and did a load of donuts around it, still travelling solidly over 100mph. She then stopped rapidly with a perfectly executed handbrake turn, and we got out of the car right outside the entrance. None of the Gardaland staff even batted an eyelid at the fact my mum had just sped into the car park, drove at an insane speed round it or had parked somewhere that definitely wasn’t a parking space, so we had a speedy and efficient entry process.

 

Once we were inside Gardaland, it was strange… because even though I was talking about correct Gardaland ride names, like Raptor and Oblivion The Black Hole, the park did not look like any photos or videos I’ve ever seen of Gardaland. It was instead a blend of Drayton Manor and Warwick Castle; for the most part, the park was a spitting image of Drayton Manor (but with all the signs and ride names in Italian), but had Warwick Castle itself randomly plonked in the middle of it, along with the Horrible Histories maze from Warwick Castle and the show where the performer shows off and demonstrates old weapons (he was shouting “This… is a BIG AXE!” as we walked by… that’s an actual line from this Warwick Castle show that I remember. I can’t remember what the show was called, but it definitely used to run at Warwick when I was a child, and that line was definitely part of the spiel). This all seemed perfectly normal to me in my dream, however…

 

Now when we entered the park, we didn’t actually go on any rides… my mum needed the toilet as soon as we entered. But she wasn’t content with any old toilet, oh no… there was this “special toilet” that she was intent on using. The ones right by the park entrance weren’t good enough… she went to great lengths to find this “special toilet”, and we spent about an hour staring at the park map and walking around trying to find it. Eventually, we found the special toilet… it was in this Tudor house, and we had to walk up a tiny ladder and crawl through these tiny spaces to use it. She used it and walked out saying “10/10; totally lived up to the hype! I’m happy we came to this park just for that!”. Then I went in… and it was like one of those Medieval toilets you see in old castles, where it basically consists of a hole that drops directly into a river.

 

Sadly, I then woke up before we could go on any rides… that was a strange one, and a lot longer than I’d expected it to be when I started writing!

[Matt N]

I had a really weird and surprisingly in-depth theme park dream last night that I just had to tell you all about!

 

To set the scene, I was visiting “Fantasy Island in Skegness” for the first time with my family (well, it started as my nuclear family, anyway…). I put the name in quotation marks because as is usual with dream theme parks, this version of Fantasy Island had a fair few… discrepancies with the real life version.

 

The day started with stuff that is actually in the real Fantasy Island, with Odyssey and Millennium being on my mind.

 

Me and my dad initially took our seats on Odyssey. We were on the front row, and I was excited for the ride ahead. When we started ascending the lift hill, I was naturally smitten with being on the front row, and I bizarrely said “we’ve got good weather for it; I’m so glad that we weren’t plagued by weather bad enough to cause the ride to close”… even know there was fog so thick you could hardly see ahead of you, waves crashing over the pier, and wind so strong you could feel the structure shaking! My luck was not to last, however… as when we were near the top, a very loud siren suddenly started going off, with the words “WARNING: Bad weather alert! Activate abort sequence!”. We kept ascending the lift hill for a bit, so me and my dad looked at each other, completely bemused… but then, the ride suddenly dropped backwards back down the lift hill, without any prior warning, and whacked us back into the station at full speed. Thankfully, the ride had the hardest station brakes ever and was able to stop a full speed train in the station in a matter of seconds, and the staff just nonchalantly opened our restraints as though nothing had just happened and said “sorry, the ride’s closed due to weather”.

 

After I got off Odyssey with my dad, quite a lot else happened. I struggle to piece together the exact sequence of events, as it was a bit of a blur, but I remember quite a few of the different attractions we did and a few of the different things that happened. These include:

• I had some sort of absolute temper tantrum in a random car park somewhere over Odyssey and Millennium being closed due to the weather. My sister was trying to console me, but to no avail; she was saying to me “Don’t worry, Matthew, we can always come back”, but I was angrily sobbing and yelling “No, [sister’s name]; this was my only chance and I BLEW IT!” before sobbing uncontrollably… in the background, Donald Trump was bizarrely there, yelling “This is fake news!” and “We need to build a wall around Fantasy Island!”
• We went in an attraction entitled “Gangsta Granny: The Experience”, ostensibly themed to the David Walliams book Gangsta Granny… which simply consisted of being repeatedly yelled at by a slightly drunk elderly lady eating chips and tomato ketchup and drinking a bottle of whisky. The lady also had a Southern US accent; think along the lines of Meemaw out of Young Sheldon.
• We went in a very long educational dark ride about the D-Day landings… I fell asleep halfway through it and got yelled at by my parents at the end as a result. They called me an “unpatriotic traitor” and “Hitler sympathiser”…
• We went on a ride that somehow had the ability to be a shape-shifting ride system; it started as a junior coaster, shape-shifted into a flying theatre halfway through and then shape-shifted back into a junior coaster at the end. Think along the lines of if The Dragon and Flight of the Sky Lion at Legoland Windsor had a baby and had the ability to shape-shift into one another. On this ride, my nan and grandad, as well as an 88 year old relative who I don’t think I’ve ever seen ride a roller coaster, popped up out of nowhere.
• We went onto a racing mat water slide whose theming was a bizarre hybrid of Minifigure Speedway at Legoland Windsor and VelociCoaster at Islands of Adventure… the ride had the racing lights, Roxy announcements and Team Legends and Team Allstars like Minifigure Speedway, but had a Jurassic World-themed queue, complete with raptors and a Bryce Dallas Howard/Chris Pratt pre-show video, like VelociCoaster. This Minifigure Speedway/VelociCoaster theming hybrid continued into the ride itself, with the ride containing upbeat racing music and announcements punctuated with odd sirens and raptor growls every now and then… the ride was also very short, at probably no more than 10 seconds long.
• We went into an attraction named “Hall of Tories”, which was kind of like a less celebratory version of the Disney classic Hall of Presidents. An animatronic version of each Tory Prime Minister post-2010 stood up and made a short speech, similar to the presidents in the Disney attraction, but towards the end, an animatronic Keir Starmer piped up from the back, started ranting about the Tories’ 14 year record in government and then encouraged the audience to throw foam balls at the animatronic Tories, from a bucket that suddenly appeared beneath the audience’s seats. The animatronic Tories tried to fight back with lines such as “£2,000 more tax under Labour!”, but eventually, the attraction ended with animatronic Starmer and the audience winning against the animatronic Tories.
• We went into a dark ride named “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, ostensibly themed to the Roald Dahl children’s novel of the same name. It claimed to be a “world-class immersive experience”, but was more akin to that AI Willy Wonka event in Glasgow in reality…
• We went to have burgers, and I kept laughing at the numerous typos around and saying I had to post them in TowersStreet’s “Merlin Typos and Grammatical Errors” thread… at this point, my uncle and cousins also appeared out of nowhere.
• To top things off, my entire family randomly became Asian at some point in the dream… when I was getting off a ride and looking for my family, an Asian woman wearing my mum’s clothes started beckoning me over in Mandarin (which I somehow understood…), and I followed along and thought nothing of it!

It’s a while since I’ve had a theme park dream that’s been that much of an acid trip… I forgot just how utterly random and incomprehensible they can be!

[Han30]

Just remembered another one I had a good few years ago where Thorpe switched rides around - I distinctly remember people going down Depth Charge in a singular swarm seat (with restraint).  Pretty sure Rumba boats were going down Storm Surge and boats from Storm Surge were on Rapids.