I was more of an onlooker in this dream than an active participant. It involved the characters from Friends and The Simpsons being caught up in a huge marketing scheme cooked up by a multinational corporation. The corporation came to the TV characters and told them they were wanted to help build a utopian society. All they had to do was give up their normal lives and move into a special compound. The corporation was actually doing this for both marketing research and a way to get cheap labor, but none of the participants knew that yet.
So Joey, Phoebe, Rachel, Ross, Monica, and Chandler started working alongside the animated citizens of Springfield in the compound. Joey, strangely enough, was the first one to catch on to the fact that the "society" they were building wasn't utopian at all. He realized that he missed all his old girlfriends and regretted that he couldn't have casual sex in the compound. All he did was pound together plastic toys for the corporation.
He told Marge Simpson that he'd had enough, that he was leaving. So he dove into a tunnel in the workroom. He went sliding through a network of dirty canals, somewhat like the "portal" in Being John Malkovich. When he popped out of the tunnel, though, he found himself back in the workroom with Marge. There was no way out of the compound.
Joey started to spread the word that everyone in the compound was a prisoner. No one really believed him, though, since he had a reputation for being fairly stupid. Finally, the owners of the corporation called him into their office and divulged to him the details of their plan.
"If you continue to provide us with market research, we'll let you go back to your old homes," one of the owners said. The only catch was that they wouldn't be allowed to meet any new people; they could only talk to people they had known before they went into the compound.
Joey agreed to this. He went back to New York and visited a playground. The only one of his old girlfriends he could find was Lauren, the ditzy understudy from a play he once acted in. He had dumped her, but she eagerly took him back.
At this point, I became a participant in the dream in that I was reading Joey's story in a book. The cover of the book said that it was a sequel to The Blair Witch Project and that it had been written by Kurt Vonnegut. I had been hearing about a twist ending to the book, and finally I came to the last page. It turned out that Joey had only dreamed his return to the real world. The owners of the corporation hadn't made a deal with him at all. He and the others were stuck performing cheap labor in the compound for the rest of their lives.
