Isn't it amazing the brain's capacity to invent a nearly complete, encyclopedic, alternate history for things that never existed when one is stuck in a particularly lucid dream?You certainly know the sort I am referring to, where one is completely aware that one is in a dream, and may even be sleeping so lightly as to wake up several times over the course of the dream only to return to it.
The Heathrow M is the creation of one such dream. The Heathrow M is a large wooden roller coaster with a long and storied history located on the grounds of London's Heathrow airport. Why an airport would have reason to to host a large roller coaster baffles me, it baffled me during the dream as well. For some reason or another I was brought along on the project of enhancing the Heathrow M.
This roller coaster team starting advancing ideas such as expanding the roller coaster to become a fast transit system to connect locations around the airport. I was stuck in the position of having to present the idea that maybe a tram, or if we must simply flush a budget down the drain, perhaps a monorail might be a better solution for providing a transit solution to connecting places around the airport. The original Heathrow M was named because it was laid out in such a way that it resembled the letter M in some sort of tacky, hollow font. It was set off to the side, wasn't particularly close to anything, and was for most of its history closed because most people who had in history been charged with operating the airport had the sense to realize the roller coaster in the airport's yard was a mistake of history.
For some reason I was hired to keep the clowns1 "engineering" the roller coaster's restoration in check. At some point the clown's ambitions go from replacing the collapsing wooden roller coaster, once it was realized the old one could not be saved, with an awesome metal roller coaster. As the dream continues their plans get grander, and I begin reminding them that the purpose of an airport being to accommodating aircraft a giant roller coaster loop at the end of a runway sized just right for planes to fly through is a horribly stupid idea, seeing as in the future the runway might need to accommodate ever so slightly larger airplanes. Or airplanes struggling against less than optimal weather.
At this point I took my ball went home, waking up because there are too many idiots in life to allow them quarter in one's dreams.
- Not literal clown in makeup, but idiots. The sort of idiots who actually exist in the form of college students who when planning for a service trip to introduce some shithole to toilets start broadening their plans to include fixing all of the poverty, in spite of never having travel to much less read about a shithole before and lacking time to do much more than construct one or two pit toilets that really only differ from the existing local solution in being newer. [↩]
Dwarves:
http://oglaf.com/obituator/