Will You Let Me Into Your Dream?
/As Ed Marlo would say, the following trick is dope as fuck.
A friend asked me to come up with a routine for a new gimmick he had purchased. I thought about it for a while and came up with the effect below. It's something of a meta-trick that happens over the course of four meetings with your friend and includes a couple other tricks within it (Including one with a shitty presentation but it serves a purpose). I think it would work best on someone you don't live with but still see relatively frequently. My friend ended up performing it for a girl he works with on the weekends at a cafe and he had a lot of fun with it. I wish I could have seen it. The performance description below is based on his recollection of events and how I imagine it would likely go. The only real performing condition is that days 3 and 4 should be in the same place. You'll see why (and you'll also see that you could probably get around this requirement if you really wanted to.)
Will You Let Me Into Your Dream
Effect
Your dreams about someone keep coming true in increasingly bizarre ways.
Imagine
Day One: You meet up with your friend. We'll call her Nicole. At one point you say, "I think I had a dream about you last night."
"Oh yeah?" she says. "What happened in it?"
"I don't know," you say. "I think just pretty much this. We were here at work. It wasn't much of a dream I guess."
Day Two: "Good morning," Nicole says as she comes into the coffee shop.
"Whaaaat theeeee shhhhhhiiiittt....," you say.
"What? What's wrong?" she asks.
"Nothing. Nothing," you say. "I just had another dream about you last night and you were wearing that exact outfit: red bandana, purple t-shirt, blue jeans, grey Converse. This is crazy. I mean... you know me, right? I'm pretty rational. So this is fucking with my mind."
Day Three: "Guess what?" you say.
"You had another dream."
"That's right. But this time I knew it was a dream and I paid closer attention and I took notes."
"What happened in the dream?" she asks.
"We were playing a card game. Actually we were playing Uno. So you know what we're going to do now? We're going to play a little Uno. Indulge me. I need to know what's going on here." You pull out a deck of Uno cards and have her shuffle. As she does you remove a piece of notebook paper that has been folded over a few times. Then you say, "I know this is stupid, but I just have to see what happens. I mean look, I had a dream we were playing Uno and now we're about to play Uno, so clearly there's something to it."
"Yeah, but we're only playing Uno because you had the dream," she says.
You look her dead in the eyes for a moment. "That... is...exactly what you said in my dream."
When she's done shuffling you hand her the folded up piece of paper to hold onto. Then you tell her to deal you both a hand of uno (7 cards).
When she's done you say, "Okay, freeze." You push away your cards and the rest of the deck. "In the dream I looked over your shoulder at your hand. Pick up your cards and take a look at them. Now set them on them on the table. This is exactly what I saw in my dream. And when I woke up this morning I wrote something down. Open up that paper."
She does and sees that it's a perfect match.
Day Four: You don't say anything about any dream. Eventually Nicole says, "So, any dreams last night?"
You: "Ahh... haha... I think the dream thing has come to an end. I actually did have a dream about you last night but it was just fucking insane. Like one of those dreams that is just a random jumble of neurons firing off in your subconscious creating a bunch of nonsense."
She asks if you remember any of it.
"Uhm... let's see. I'm not sure where we were. I remember you were shouting something in German, I think. Then I was really excited and waving a sign or a sheet of paper or something that said "Boners" on it, and I was saying, "Boners! Boners! Boners!" And then the Golden Girls theme song was playing and you were holding a clear box of my pee in your hands, your eyes were bright purple, and I was wearing a clown nose. What do you think it means? Yelling in german? A sign that says "Boners"? The Golden Girls theme? A box of pee? Purple eyes? A clown nose? Strangely my dream interpretation book didn't have anything to say on the subject."
Later that day.
"Can I show you a card trick?" you ask. "I'm working on one where cards will come to the sound of your voice when you call them by name. But it's depends on how loud you speak and the distance they have to travel. I'll show you."
She picks a card, a four, and you put it between two other cards. "Now this card doesn't have far to go. It's just between two cards. So you can just whisper its name to it." You hold up the packet near here face. "Just whisper the word 'four' a few times." She whispers, "four, four, four." You turn over the top card of the packet and it's the four.
"Now let's try it again with a few more cards." You have her pick another card. This time it's the jack of clubs. You take about half the deck and bury the jack in the middle and hand the cards to her. "Okay, first just whisper the word 'jack.'" She does, and you turn over the top card to show it's not there. "Because it has so many more cards to come through, you need to speak louder. So now say Jack a few times in a normal speaking voice."
"Jack," she says, "Jack." Now she turns over the top card herself and it has risen to the top of the deck.
"Pretty crazy, right?" You start to put your cards away. "Actually, let's try it with the full deck." You turn over the top card, the nine of diamonds. You bury it in the middle of the pack and hand it to her and ask her to hold everything between her two hands. You first have her whisper "Nine." You reach into her hands and pull off the top card to show her it didn't work. Then she says it a few times in a normal voice, again you reach in and it's not her card. "Now, really yell it a few times."
She starts saying loudly, "Nine. Nine. Nine."
You freeze up. "Wait!... No, keep going." She keeps saying "Nine. Nine. Nine."
"That's it!" you say. And then in a German accent you repeat, "Nein! Nein! Nein!"
You start looking around frantically and pick up a piece of paper. "Boners!" you say. "Boners! Boners!" You wave the paper then show it to Nicole. It's the prediction paper from yesterday. You show it to her and then turn it upside down.
Your phone starts vibrating. And then from the speakers blares, "THANK YOU FOR BEING A FRIEND! TRAVELED DOWN THE ROAD AND BACK AGAIN..." Your head whips from the paper to the phone then to Nicole. Your eyes are big. You gesture for her to open her hands, when she does she finds she's holding a small plastic box filled with urine. She looks up at you and sees a red clown nose on your face. You jump back, "Ah! Your eyes! Those damned purple eyes!"
And... scene.
Day Five: "Any dreams?" she asks.
"Yup. We were at work, then left work and went back to my place and fucked until the boxspring broke. I'm not going to question it. Clearly I have precognitive dreams and that's that."
Method
So my friend was purchasing the trick Aquarium, which is a "Solid Deception" style ending to an ambitious card routine where the deck turns into a little aquarium in the spectator's hands. Cute. I like it. My friend started feeling bad for the fish and wondered what else he could do with this 60 dollar box he had just bought. I told him I don't think fish had the cognitive abilities to think, "Hey, this is too small for me." But he wasn't feeling that argument.
Then I said, "Why don't you just bet someone 20 bucks that before the night is over they'll be holding a box of your pee in their hands?" That would have been a good enough presentation for me, but then I began to think about it more and realized it really could be part of some surreal presentation. Of course the box doesn't have to be filled with something that looks like urine. It could be filled with milk, or chocolate pudding, or fake blood, whatever. Urine just happened to be the first thing that came to my mind.
So lets break this all down.
Day One and Day Two are just you setting the stage.
Day Three
When I first came up with the presentation, Day Three was just any prediction effect in the guise of having come to you in a dream. So you could do a Shuffle-bored type trick, a spectator cuts to the aces (but using random cards instead of aces) trick, a nail-writer effect -- anything where you could bring out something you supposedly wrote down after your dream. Originally day three was simply meant to up the intensity of what your predictive dreams are. And to provide actual evidence this time rather than you just saying, "Yup, I dreamed this."
But then I thought, wouldn't it be cool if the unrelated Day Three trick could be part of the surreal happenings on Day Four. And that's when I thought of the Uno-Boners trick. I use Uno cards a lot. I'll write up the reasons why in a future post. All you have to do is force that hand on someone: 5-1-2-3-4-0-8. There are a couple of ways I'd consider doing this, but I feel like the most straightforward way to do it is to have those seven cards in that order, then put an X card above each one. You now have a 14-card stack. Hide it under your prediction. It's a lot of cards but it's still very easy to hide. As she finishes shuffling, take the deck and put your prediction on top of the deck to free up your hand for something else. Extend the deck and prediction to your friend to take the prediction from you. That leaves your set-up on top. Give the deck a false cut (as if cutting the cards is standard procedure in an Uno game) and give her back the deck. She will deal back and forth leaving herself with the seven cards on your prediction.
When you're done, take the prediction back and put it in your pocket. You don't want her to take it or for it to get thrown out (if you're doing this in a workspace, for example).
Day Four
You need a deck of cards; the Aquarium gimmick filled with something pee-like and two cards on top: a nine, and an indifferent card; the Uno prediction; a foam clown nose; and an alarm set on your phone to play the Golden Girls theme at a specific time. For the purposes of timing, a visible clock with a second hand that is synced with your phone's clock is extra helpful, but not necessary.
When you get to where you're going to be that day, put the Uno prediction out somewhere near where the climax of the effect will be. You want it to seem like it was left there from the other day(that's why Day Three and Day Four should be in the same place).
About three minutes before your alarm is set to go off, introduce the card trick to your friend.
Now it's time for the dull trick within the good trick, and the method within a method.
Come When I Call
Effect
The cards come when called.
Method
Phase 1. Your spectator selects any card from the deck. You place it between two cards. When she whispers to it you push off the top two cards as one to show it on top and a do a KM move to clean up.
Phase 2. You have your spectator select another card. This time you take half of the deck and pretend to bury the card in the middle. In actuality you do Marlo's tilt, placing the card second from the top. Hand her the 1/2 deck to hold.
Have her whisper the second card's name. Turn over the top card to show the whisper didn't work because the card is buried deeper this time. Toss that card to the side. Have her say the name louder now and after she does, allow her to turn over the card that is now on top, which will be the card she selected.
Openly removing the cover card used for tilt as part of the presentation is fun to do. You also openly remove the cover cards used for phase 3 of this effect which is really the beginning of the climax of the real effect, so let's pop out of this method and back into the other.
You start to put the deck away after Phase 2 of Come When I Call. In that action you switch it for the Aquarium deck with it's two loose cards on top. You should have under a minute until your alarm sounds at this point. (Your phone, by the way, should be out of your pocket on some nearby surface with the volume cranked.)
Turn over the top card, it's a nine. Use tilt to place the card in the middle of the deck and then put the deck between the spectator's hands. Have her whisper "nine." Reach between her hands and pull the top card off the deck to show it didn't work. Then have her say "nine" in a normal voice. Reach in again, this time you're actually removing the nine, but you're just going to look at it yourself, not show it, and say it didn't work again. There is no heat on this whatsoever. Your friend is in no way expecting there to now be no cards between her hands and instead a plastic box filled with urine. Now have her say "nine" very loud. Tell her to do it over and over.
Freeze up like you've just been brought back to that dream. Say, "That's it!" and start saying "Nein! Nein!" with a german accent. Then start looking around. You're looking for other parts of your dream to have come true. You notice your prediction from yesterday. Start yelling, "Boners! Boners!" Pick it up and then turn it over so she sees it says "Boners" upside down. At this point your alarm should be going off. Put your right hand in your pocket to retrieve the clown nose and with your left hand, point to or tap her closed hands and give her a gesture to suggest she open her hands. As she does you have a good moment of misdirection to put on the clown nose. She will react to the box of pee, look up and react to your clown nose, in turn you jump back and shout something about her purple eyes.
I was curious how this would actually go over with someone, so I asked my friend to describe her reaction to the whole thing. His response is below:
When I started saying "nein, nein" and showing her the "boners" paper, she was laughing, and when the song was playing too. I think up to that point it seems like the punchline of a joke. But when she opens her hands and finds the deck has transformed into the little pee box THAT was actually the big powerful magic moment. I had just lumped all these bits together in my head before I performed everything and wasn't really thinking about how strong that part would be. As far as she's concerned she's holding a deck that she's been using for a trick one minute, and the next it's something else entirely and all the cards are completely gone. I think the strength of that moment makes all those little bits like the clown nose and all of that even stronger. I'm not sure. But she loved the whole thing. I could tell she was thinking about it long after it ended and putting the pieces together. Even later that night she texted me and said "You put a lot of thought into that. That was the highlight of my week. Thank you."
