sanity is relative

Dream logic was shaky at best in this one and I've already forgotten most of it, but the general idea was that I was part of a scientific team manning a base on Mars. We were mostly scientists, and there were only a few combat-trained security guards in the complex.

At some point one of the guards died, and I can't remember what evidence I had but I blamed aliens. Everyone else said those don't exist. Later on when a few more people had died, I remember standing in a hallway with another scientist and they were saying how badly the social dynamic was messed up at the complex, because they're like, "I don't know most of the people's names here!" and I'm like, "Yeah, same."

By the time it was really obvious the aliens were present and coming for us, the last eight or so people were pushed back into what looked like a hotel room with a wall-sized window opposite the entry door, and some kind of exit door in that window-wall. The idea was, we were going to escape that part of the complex through that exit door. I had a backpack that I got bogged down into trying to stock with useful things, like a blanket because Mars is cold at night and I was worried life-support systems might partially fail, and a box of tissues because... dream logic.

The last bit I remember was being in some kind of transportation device that looked like marbles on tracks, and one person could fit in each one of the marble-shaped vehicles. The survivors were using this system to get to a large building in the complex that I don't remember having been to in the entire dream, and someone said, "That's where Ripley is." And I was like, "Why haven't we been there the whole time!?"

I don't remember why, but I had some reason to take my marble off-course before reaching the building, and ended up crashing it into a small crater. I think at that point my brain completely lost track of the setting and plot, and I eventually woke up.

I dreamed I was male, someone who had been in some sort of accident but I couldn't remember what had happened. I got picked up from somewhere I couldn't remember clearly, by another guy I didn't know, who took me to some kind of multi-purpose building. He said something like "You seem to be in really bad shape, I should take you to-" and I interrupted his proposal to probably go to the medical department (or an actual hospital) with "-a cruise ship!" "...A cruise ship?" "Yeah!" And that's what we did. We went on a cruise.

At some point later on in the cruise, I finally realized that the whole situation was a bit weird. I asked the guy "Why did you wanna go on a cruise with me O.o" and he replied "Wellll, I kind of thought you were hot." I said something to the effect of "Oh really >.> welll y'knowww we cooould..." and he said "Cool, but you're the bottom" and I'm like "Dammit."

And then I woke up, right when it was getting interesting.

I think I started this dream as a character very similar to Evelyn from The Mummy (the original one). I was in the back "yard" of a dusty Egyptian house in an area with a lot of old stonework, and most of the yard was on an incline because there was a ton of sand going upwards further away from the stonework house. This wasn't specifically an archaeological dig site, as I think the general area was still lived-in.

I vaguely remember telling Jonathan (from the same Mummy movie) that this was a spot where an ancient temple had been buried under the sand. Then I went up the sand embankment further back into the "yard" where there was a more levelled-off area.

This new area was almost like a second back yard, and I noticed bits of what seemed like another temple half-buried under the sand. At first, they were more the scale that would make sense for an actual temple, but as I started looking around, it was more like a huge model of a very large temple. I was able to remove some chunks of hardened sand that were almost like big, loose stones around one particular section of the model, and got the uneasy feeling that I wasn't actually sure how stable any of the ground here was, especially near the parts where the temple-model poked through the sand-ground.

I mentioned to Jonathan that the lower area of the back yard we'd already passed through had a temple buried under it, and that Indiana Jones had gone through it in a previous movie. (This is the first of several references to the dream actually being a movie of some sort, and yet it was also real-life, and I never seem to bridge the mental gap there.) I added something like, "You know, the one where he runs through going 'RAAAR RAAAR RAAAR!'" and Jonathan said something to the effect of, "Yes, and the Egyptian Government buried that temple on purpose."

I waved my hand like that wouldn't be an issue, and then said something like, "Oh, well I will have to poke around my contacts and see if I can do something about that."

By that point I seemed to have forgotten that the ground might be unstable, as I ended up sitting on the ground looking through that bit of temple model I'd uncovered better. There were miniature trucks and other more modern accouterments that definitely didn't fit for something untouched. Someone had been here recently and it almost looked like they were planing something, but what?

Then I found a miniature crate by one of the trucks, and looked through it. I said, "Come look at this, Indy." I don't remember Jonathan being around any more at this point, I think the dream forgot him, but hey, we traded for Indiana Jones, I guess? Anyways, I had picked up one of the small figures that was being stored in the crate; the figure being about as wide as a Lego minifig but about twice as tall, not blocky, but about the same amount of articulation.

The figure was me. I was dressed a bit like Princess Leia in a white pants suit kind of outfit, and from this point I think I was supposed to be a weird Leia ripoff character in the dream-movie. There was also a figure of Indiana Jones and a few other characters who were supposed to be in this movie, good guys and bad guys alike. I'm not 100% sure, but I think there was a Darth Vader in there as well.

Indy agreed the discovery was pretty spooky and this must be something the bad guys were using. Maybe we could find some kind of clue to what they were up to if we kept looking. He wasn't the only person around, but I don't remember who the other people were, aside from friends or allies. The next thing I remember is saying, "I found a new one of me, and it has batteries."

I was holding a figure of me that had the top half covered in plastic packaging, with a tab coming out of it like the sort that you pull out of an electronic item that has batteries, and the tab is keeping the batteries from connecting and wasting power until the thing has been bought. I took off the packaging and pulled the tab, and there was a tiny button on the back of the figure.

I pressed it, and the sound was so quiet with other people making noise around me that I had to hold the toy to my ear. It said a line of mine from the movie (that we were currently in, but I still wasn't connecting the dots completely). I kept pressing the button and listening, and it had a lot of my lines. Then I heard something that made me say, "That's not even from this movie, that's from like... an improv I was in."

I checked Indy's figure again and realized it did actually have a button. His lines were a lot longer, and I listened to a few of those. Then one played that wasn't familiar, and I realized it must not have happened yet.

The line was spoken in a tone that gave me the impression he was reluctantly working for the bad guys, but I figured he must just be pretending to do so. Part of it was him saying, "Yeah yeah, fly from [city name I've forgotten] to [other city name I've forgotten] on the top of an airplane," and I was starting to visualize what he was saying. The dream pulled me into the visual of him standing on top of a stunt plane flying through the air, and suddenly another plane flew past. I watched myself in a flaming stunt suit jump from the other plane onto Indy's.

The flames went out as I held onto his plane with him, and the plane was attempting to fly towards its destination which wasn't terribly far away, but the winds were high and impossibly-tall phone lines and hanging-bridge supports were making the path difficult.

Then I woke up.

I started out as a male character of some sort running through dark streets with a female character. There were zombies around, and as they started chasing us, I noted they ran as fast and as well as we did. The girl was caught, but I kept running because there was nothing I could do (also I think my character might not have been the greatest person during this part of the dream).

I lost the zombies, mostly because they were distracted by lunch. There was a logic-fails bit where I met up with another guy who I knew and apparently hid out with him a lot. At this point the dream decided my character was female, and probably about 12. There was a hideout of some sort behind a wall, accessed by a small opening through the back of a partly-destroyed bookshelf that was sitting on the outside of the building. I handed some scavenged things through the opening to the guy who was already inside the hideout.

The opening became less and less useful as the dream had trouble holding onto the concept (that was already ridiculous to begin with, it's hard to explain how this opening looked) and I realized I was going to need to hide somewhere else. There was a dresser nearby, basically on the sidewalk, and I think my brain was trying to force it into a more useful shape of some sort, like a wooden box of roughly the same size so I could at least hide and maybe even get some sleep.

I'm not sure how the transition happened but the next thing I knew, I was entering a shopping mall where a survival gang of people with military expertise were doing something. I'm not entirely sure what they were doing because they were getting ready to leave. I found some office supplies and said I was going to scavenge useful stuff, and dumped a bunch of them in a reusable grocery bag that I basically produced from thin air. I noticed a more organized container of some sort with a lot of office supplies in it that I remembered I had put together at some point before, but the team said they were leaving and I decided to leave it there and take my bag of randomness with me.

I was trying to convince the team to take me with them as they left the building, and it was now daylight. We had to push our way out through an angry crowd of people who were trying to get in, and the place we were leaving had suddenly become a police station. There were police officers around keeping the people from getting into the door we'd just left. We were able to continue on through the parking lot, and I was now a woman in about my 20's.

We were all running at this point, and most of the team was faster. They were heading for vehicles on the far side of the parking lot. Running near me was a black lady with her two kids, one in each hand. One child was a girl who was maybe 4 or 5 years old, and the other was a boy who couldn't have been more than 3. The kids couldn't run very fest, so I offered to help and took the little girl in hand. I ended up picking her up because I could run faster that way than leading her by the hand.

A car was driving through the parking lot nearby, and I got the sense as it came closer to me that the lady in the car was the sort of person who would buy children for nefarious purposes. Unlike the character I had started the dream with, I wasn't going to even think about that, but that meant I was in potential danger if the person in the car decided to come after me. As it was, I made it to the vehicles the team was getting into, and they did let me come with them.

As we were driving away, I mentioned the shady lady in the car. Someone made a joke about if we thought she wasn't the sweetheart she was in some other show (as if two different fictional characters had the same actress, which made sense in fail-dream-logic that was a massive hint we were all not in "real life" but some TV show plot).

We were driving through a somewhat wooded area when I saw we were being followed by a man on horseback. He was wearing a uniform that was somewhat police-man-Canadian-mountie themed, and he was leaning over the saddle so badly I wondered if he was injured. The car we were in wasn't going very fast at this point, and he was able to keep up and follow the car right behind us. He sped up enough to follow the car on the passenger side, and the person riding shotgun opened their window and started talking to him.

Turns out he wasn't injured, he was just really worried about some kind of qualifying test he had to do that day, something that would advance his rank in post-apocalyptic law enforcement or whatever it was he was doing. The guy talking to him said something like, "You'll do fine," and as a good luck charm, handed him his own patch that was the reward for that test (he hadn't sewn it on anything apparently).

The guy went off some other direction and as our car pulled away from him, I remember thinking that guy was probably doomed and the dude who'd loaned him his patch was gonna get it back under unhappy circumstances.

Then I woke up.

I was part of an elite, armed investigative team going into an ocean-side science station to find out what had happened to it. Only the first part of the station was on land, the rest of which was located underwater, and it was connected by corridors, stairs, and elevators. The first section had bad lighting, papers and equipment scattered everywhere, and finally we started finding bodies as we went into the underwater sections.

The group was split up at some point, and one of the other smaller groups was attacked. A girl survived her initial injuries and we had her resting at the makeshift medical room we set up. My sub-group did some more exploring and had an encounter with another of the things that had attacked her, and they were freakish humanoid forms with weird delicate-seeming spikes and rings of almost barbed-wire shaped protrusions all over their faces.

I don't think I actually managed to kill it, but I was able to clear an area and noticed a map on the wall. It showed a side view of the complex with each area marked as a white rectangle with connections between each section. There were only about four or five sections and it didn't seem to go as far down as it could, more outwards into the ocean water. There was also a second floor section about half-way between the initial entry area and one of the sections out in the water, but I had a feeling the source of the problems was down and not up. I was trying to figure out how to get to the next section further into the water, but ended up going back to where the majority of our people were for the moment.

The girl in the medical room started showing signs of changing into one of the creatures. Stuff was beginning to grow out of her face and she started screaming as the changes became more severe. At some point she calmed down and dazedly suggested she go further into the complex alone, because maybe the creatures would leave her alone now that she was becoming like them. I had a bad feeling she was hurting so bad, she was in fact planning suicide by putting herself at the mercy of the enemy.

She became too disoriented to use for the plan, but one of our big marines was showing signs of changing too, yet he had not been bitten or injured. Did that mean the virulent creature DNA was somehow airborne? His changes weren't as severe, but he had a weird line of almost stitch-looking spines set flush into his skin, that traveled from roughly his chin up across his cheeks to his forehead on both sides of his face. He suggested he should try the plan for getting further into the complex without getting eaten.

My perspective shifted to the marine, and he had already made it much further and deeper into the complex. This area appeared to have been built into solid ground, the shallow end of the ocean floor. I could see a bunch of the creatures ahead, and as they started rushing towards me I thought the plan was going to fail after all. But they slowed down, and then started walking up the side of a ridge of nearby dirt. I had a headset on, and I said over the communications to the rest of the team, "I think they're trying to show me something."

The ridge of packed dirt was taller than me, so it took climbing it to see what lay beyond. I beheld a huge crater, so gigantic it nearly broke my brain and gave me vertigo. But I held my place and tried to figure out what had happened here. The shape of the crater almost made it feel like a ridiculously-huge sphere had once rested here, but really it must have been the end result of a huge excavation. I didn't remember seeing anything like this on the wall map, because a room this size would have dwarfed the scale used in that map. Thus, it was some kind of mega-secret project that had ended up killing a lot of people and turned the rest into aliens.

At the very bottom of the crater I could see what looked like a small exposed edge of dirty, beige-colored metal. Was that part of an alien craft? How come it had not been excavated fully? Had they found other pieces before reaching that one, or was the alien DNA so nasty that it had affected people almost immediately once they started uncovering that piece? Maybe it was some kind of space-microbe on the outside of a ship and nobody had even seen what else lay beneath the dirt.

Back at the command center the team had set up, there were lines of chat on a screen that had been sent from the marine (so much for the audio signal idea). The first two were something along the lines of "Here goes nothing." and "[soldier's name], signing off." Suddenly a new line appeared, in all caps, and it was maybe ten letters smooshed together that indicated the man was still conscious and still at least someone in charge of his own mind.

Then I was Mei in Overwatch, where I was using my ice-blast gun to freeze and kill the alien creatures and they gave experience points every time they died. I was keeping up with respawn so I only had to kill one or two at a time and not a whole room. And finally I woke up.


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Thoughts: I would have liked to have left the end off, but it just kind of shows how doofy the subconscious can be. I had a great, freaky, dark theme going on there, thanks dream! :P I really do wish I could remember what exactly the lines of text were, I almost think part of the last one was "IAMGOOD" but I'm not sure. I also vaguely remember something coming up about depressurization at one point but I am not sure where that fell into the dream and it was most likely one of the more messed up parts of dream logic.

I'd just watched the movie Inside Man before falling asleep, and this is clearly influenced by that. Logic was messed up the whole time, but I think I was part of a news crew who was trying to interview a preteen male kid who had caught home-video footage of the start of the bank robbery, except this time it was one guy on the side of the street who started telling people to get down and pushing them down on the ground. If he was supposed to be a distraction or what, I have no idea.

The bank robber didn't seem to mind the kid taking video and it's almost like he found the boy amusing. I vaguely remember more footage the kid shot for fun later of his footage going viral over news networks, but the only channel he'd been able to find on a random TV was something like Faux News so the content there was obviously biased and obnoxious.

Then the dream rewound and I was the kid. This must have been after the initial recording was completed and uploaded, because I was in an inside room in a location that dream logic couldn't decide on: sometimes it was on a higher floor of the bank building and sometimes it was in a building nearby. For the bank version, I almost got the feeling the initial robber guy just let me chill there while he moved off elsewhere to do bank-robber things, and it was later established as a safe zone that police and media could move through in the building.

But right now I was still alone. I was watching the random television I'd found and waiting to see what news show caught on first to the robbery footage. I decided to change channels until I found ABC's main network and saw a notice saying the news hour was coming up within moments. As it started, they had a bit of an intro sequence but the cameras stayed dark. Hmmm were they picking up late-breaking news and scrambling to get it running?

Yep, the next thing to play on the screen was my video surrounded by a graphic that was branded with the ABC logo and whatnot, and the voice of a news-lady could be heard talking about my video and the robbery. The weird thing is, dream logic failed badly and the video actually looked like some kind of oldschool Duke Nukem-ish game's gameplay (in fact I remember thinking that's exactly what it was, and somehow that made sense while in the dream). I held up the tablet I'd apparently filmed the original video on, and started filming the news show for posterity.

It was around this time the news crew from the first part of the dream appeared, and someone said, "Are we going to get a mic on this kid?" and someone else was like, "Yeah." At this point it was hard to focus, and my point of view kept changing around various characters. I remember some issue trying to figure out what the kid's name was, and from the kid's perspective, I was having trouble figuring out what name to use. I vaguely remember "Ned" being a possibility, though at one point I wanted to say "Nev" (pronounced NEEV) but I realized that would probably get mixed up with the guy who hosts the MTV show based on the movie Catfish.

Then I woke up.

I was some kind of male pirate, a Spaniard, and quite possibly dressed in oldschool pirate gear, yet I was being thrown in the brig on the USS Enterprise (original Star Trek TV version). I vaguely remember two other people being in the cell, and we were discussing how the cells were supposedly inescapable but I said something like I knew they weren't because I'd tested them for Starfleet and found a way out. (This sounds like something my brain ripped from the show or movies but I honestly can't remember.)

The way out was through the roof, and I got up into an area that was duct-work and then eventually weird spaces with large pipes running through them and big drop-offs on various sides of large metal surfaces that could be walked across fairly easily.

I found my way into someone's room, which was huge, and it turned out to be Uhura's. At this point I turned into Harry Mudd and tried to sleaze my way into convincing her that everything was fine and I was just gonna walk out the door now. She didn't buy it at first but after some more sleazing she was starting to believe me.

Then I woke up.


(Seriously, dream? You leave off with me as Harry Friggin' Mudd? The pirate was way better!)

I was apparently living with other people and had gotten a Kickstarter game in the mail which someone else had opened (rude much?). The game was called Plague, and it came with at least two books for rules and story background, one of which was a board book with game board elements that could be removed from it somehow. I didn't get that far because I was trying to find all the pieces of the game that had been spread out by whoever opened it.

The art style of the game was sort of art deco / noir in shades of dark orange, brown, and black. The illustrations were cartoony but in that high-class sort of Americanized anime way (think Batman the Animated Series but even more art deco). The premise of the game had something to do with a dinner party at a rich mansion, and player characters possibly ending up dying of different plague-based diseases, one of which could create zombies from the corpses. I finally found the game box itself, which included a bunch of vaguely Barbie (or specifically Ken)-sized clothing, because part of the game was to search for clues and find as many pieces of the party host's clothes as you could, since he would disappear at some point in the game.

There were more small pieces of clothing near the box but I was uncertain if they were doll clothes from actual dolls, and not a part of the game. I was picking up some of those as well just in case when the dream changed to something unrelated.

Ah right, and earlier on in this dream (which was one big illogical mess), I'd received notice in the same day's mail of being awarded something that had to do with Shakespeare. There was a certificate and everything in a large envelope. It took me a while to figure out it was because I had donated money to some kind of Shakespeare thing online, and that the company/charity/whatever sent these things out to anyone who had donated.

Meanwhile, I have no real idea how Plague was put together to form a cohesive game... but I want it! Argh. XD

(from a chat transcript which sums it up nicely because the details are ridiculously-full of dream logic errors)

tirsden: the weird dream I had, I was part of a space army, like Halo or the marines in Alien or whatever... and we attacked this bad guy base and our guns ran out of ammo almost immediately and we had no backups... so I made it further into the complex cuz the enemies had pulled back and [I] yelled that I wanted to surrender... and my commander shows up and goes "O.o?" and I said "I'm gonna pretend to switch sides because you guys are... incompetent?" and he was like "ah okay" XD ...turns out the place was actually a neutral hospital.

I was my original character Aster, who is a very beautiful, feminine-looking albino guy. I was wearing a long, sleek, shimmery dress of some sort, and I was at a club at Las Vegas that did a lot of lookalike-celebrity type shows.

I met someone who was a Frank Sinatra impersonator, and boy did he look and act the part. We decided to try and sneak backstage for some vaguely smexytimes... and it was rather dark back there and there was a lot of random props and equipment taking up most of the space. I was waiting for "Frank" to kiss me...

...then logic went to heck and lost the point of what we'd been wanting to do, and the rest isn't worth getting into... but for a few moments there, that was a pretty darn cool dream. :3