You would think it was a carnival funhouse, but it's something much darker

This dream had to be an allegory about the U.S. I found myself living in a place that seemed kind of like being at a combination boarding school/carnival fun house. There were many, many people who lived here, like a small city, and it looked a little like Disneyland. Everywhere you turned, there were all these mechanical mannequins – clowns, animals, giant lollipops, that would move around and pop up. A kid would have found this delightful. The buildings looked like fake buildings in Disneyland: façades that made them look like castles, or old Victorian houses from a Dickens set, cobblestone streets, but really, there were ordinary buildings with classrooms and dormitories behind the façades. Seems like a good metaphor for America.

We all had to report to a guy who I'll just call The Boss. He ran this place, and when he said he wanted something done, it got done. When he said he wanted to see you, you went to see him. That sort of character. No one questioned what he wanted, it just got done. I never saw him in the dream, he was just a presence. Kind of like Karl Rove – I guess he was just a symbol for totalitarian authority.

The Boss made an announcement over TV that we were being invaded. I looked out the window and saw troops of Asian men in khaki uniforms marching up the street. I was panicked and thought, “This is an emergency, we'd all better get to a safe place.” Then all the mechanical gears and tracks that operated in the funhouse city began to move, and buildings were shifting around, clowns popping up, giant teddy bears offering candy, and I couldn't see the invaders anymore. As I went around the city, I couldn't see any sign of them. I went to class, as I was supposed to on my schedule, and began talking to a guy who looked like a Goth about the invasion. We were both asking what had happened to the invasion. The teacher told us not to talk about that. We talked after class about trying to figure out what was really going on in this place, where nothing was as it seemed. He and I made plans to meet secretly later to talk about it, in his dormitory.

After class, I was walking round the city, looking for any sign of the invasion. I got to the edge of the city, where I could see tracks – like trolley tracks – on which all the buildings moved, and the back side of the buildings with all the gears and machinery that moved them. I could see the reality of the city, instead of the funhouse illusion. There was not a trace anywhere of any of the soldiers, or of any fighting or blood. I began to have the chilling feeling that the mechanisms of the city had simply crushed the invaders, destroyed the bodies, and cleaned up all the blood, hiding reality behind the façade of fun. I could imagine street-sweeping machinery washing away the blood as if no invasion had taken place. The TV had gone back to life as normal, no more news of the invasion, as if it had never happened. I don't need to explain that as a symbol, do I? Pretty obvious.

As I went back to Goth guy's dorm to meet him, a messenger came and told me that The Boss wanted to see me. When that happened, you were supposed to go right away. I didn't, because I wanted to tell my friend/ally the Goth what I suspected had happened to the invasion. As I was trying to meet him, another messenger from The Boss found me to let me know that The Boss didn't like to be kept waiting. All I managed to say to the Goth before being led off was that this place was not the carnival funhouse it seemed to be, but something much more sinister.

Need I say more to interpret this one? Isn't this an obvious dream about America?