Speaking of dreams, that’ll teach me to take a nap with indigestion…

Had a REALLY strange dream. It started out on some kind of spaceship, trying to puzzle out the meaning of this set of stone tablets inset into a wall (with jazzy blue neon accents!) Some of the words were in English, but didn’t form coherent sentences–“sweet” and “queen” and “cream” and a few others. Another tablet just had equations. Eventually I realized there was a tiny little metal plaque that explained the measurement being used, and concluded somehow that it was the owner’s manual for a refrigerator. Spock and Bones, who were with me, agreed that this was great deductive reasoning.*

That concluded the amusing portion of our scheduled dream.

After that, I was down in a city, on a little wooded hill in a park, with a boy, running from a group of Stepford-style social workers and their army of neo-samurai (again, in snazzy black and red uniforms.) Lots of tearing along paths, around trees, and looking down little foot paths, only to see black and red at the end. Fortunately, right as we were hitting the end of the trees and getting into open parkland, I remembered that I could fly. (Always a handy skill.) Taking the usual few dream swoops to gain altitude and confidence (and vaguely aware that I had to be dreaming, and wondering if I was flapping my arms on the couch) I dragged one of the social workers into traffic, and hauled the boy off…somewhere or other. Then I was on the run from the neo-samurai cops, and it turned out that the world was actually some kind of habitat, organized into a number of giant bays, and I would fly as long as I could, stop, get in an elevator, go to another bay, go up as high as I could, avoiding floor 14, which always had checkpoints, come out several miles up, and continue flying. There were skyscrapers up that high, but the air looked sort of like photos of Jupiter, all swirly oranges. (Fortunately no corrosive gases or 900 mph winds.) I was, for a good chunk of this, some kind of lemon-yellow pterosaur, but nobody seems to notice.

Finally landed, was me again, and found myself in some kind of furry convention-meets-college-dorm, wandered around, met an artist who doesn’t exist, said something encouraging about her portfolio. Then I met up with two people who vaguely resembled younger versions of the guys from Sofawolf, crossed with a few other people from my past. They wanted to go to some abandoned building or other, and watch this movie projected on the walls, because it was a weird movie and this would be the perfect ambiance. I agreed, and we trekked along overpasses, were set upon by MORE dream birds (dusty black geese with long, narrow white feathers, like the heads of that one penguine, only sprouting at random all over, in little bunches like pine needles.) “What kind of bird is that?” I asked one of my companions. “It’s…um…a duck. You don’t identify ducks, they’re all domesticated or feral**.” We continued on, through some variety of park, and into this ruined building. You’d expect a ruined building to be dark and dingy, but there was this wonderfully sculptural lighting everywhere. It was an enormous, spectacular, quasi-industrial building, with piles and huge silver vents and shafts, but the inside had dusty wood floors and floor-to-ceiling windows. It was pretty cool. It was also falling apart, and creepy as hell, full of weird noises. We had to go to one room, the blue room, which was floor to ceiling (and floor AND ceiling) painted a deep, though not too dark, blue. While waiting outside this room for the movie to be set up, I sat on an ancient bench, which proceeded to slowly crumble under me, spilling me to the floor. Then the floor began to creak, and list. “I think we should get out of here,” I told my companions. “Yeah,” they said, and we fled the building as it began to collapse, with loud crashes and sledgehammer WHOMP noises. We got out of the building, and discovered lots of other people running out of the building as well. All of whom were dead. Not in a good way. Sticky green light, somewhere between molasses and a laser, was pouring out of the building and engulfing these zombie guys, and then got my two comrades, who turned to bones more or less before my eyes as I tried to hault them out of this light. Curiously, this did not stop any of us running, while the building shook itself apart behind us–big vents calving off, bricks sliding apart, quite dramatic. My subconscious may owe royalties to the creators of Poltergeist.

Eventually the light sort of puddled in this desert that hadn’t been there earlier. The corpses began struggling out of the pool of green, and I tried one more time to get my zombified buddies loose. They came along, although they were picked clean skeletons by now. One of them had on a pith helmet for no apaprent reason. It occurred to me as we ran through the desert that I might be a skeleton, too, and didn’t know it yet. We scrabbled up this near vertical sandy cliff with little patches of grass (a very tactile chunk of dream) and lo! everybody was themselves again, and there was an angry small child, who happened to be some bizarre demon, waiting for us. Her father sold ice cream, and was a very genial sort. We had ice cream.

Then we were set upon by helicopters shaped like bell peppers, and it got too incoherent to pursue farther.

On the bright side, my stomach feels much better now.

*The only way I could be more geeky is if this involved Dr. Who or the old Battlestar Galactica.

**This is blatantly untrue.

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