Deep down in the dirt

I dreamed we were watching some type of television program or perhaps stage play. It concerned an Indian (from India) family, a sort of sitcom setup: father, mom, two kids. It seemed to take place in the '50s or early '60s, awash in color, with the dad wearing a "bowling shirt," as it were.

The father at one point entered a closet, and climbed into what looked like a suit bag. The suit bag became a sort of cocoon, with the father tightly bound within in. Dangling from the edge of a rope attached to a winch, the father was lowered down through the bottom of the closet, through myriad layers of the earth, down, down, down into darkness.

At the end of the rope, the suit bag/cocoon burst and dropped the man sprawling onto a bed of earth. The colors were now turned all brown and grey, the figure covered in dust, almost unrecognizable. All around him wriggled forth from the muck hundreds of mole-like creatures, wriggling and dragging him down. He cried out, gasping, and pushed onward, falling further and deeper into a dark where no light was.

My son turned to me and said: "Dad, I'm going to go down into that pit."

I was kind of surprised and anxious, as it didn't look like much of a good time. But my son reassured me: he had seen the end of this episode/play. There are vacuum tubes that shoot down from various locations to the deepest parts of the void, and once the guy gets down there, the tubes basically pull you right back up to the surface. The only thing is that it costs $17 to let you out once you reach the top of the "elevator."

I told him I thought could we manage the $17, but it didn't make me feel much better about it all.