This... will take a while.
As some of you may recall, I hardly ever get nightmares, so whenever one does happen, it's a quite memorable experience. This one was not your usual run of the mill nightscream horror dream. It was different and surprising. Read on...
The dream takes place in some generic town or city, not too small, not too large, in the central strip of Germany, the "Mittelgebirge" (middle mountains), a worn down mountain chain half a billion years old. As so many other places, a river cuts through this town, though the valley is quite narrow. Except for a small, winding strip of land around the river, most of the town is built on to the hillsides.
I am visiting a friend of mine (a really existing person). This friend, in the dream, is not working on his physics PhD as in real life, but has studied chemistry and is now the safety supervisor of a chemical plant down in the town. We are at the town's university and it seems there is some kind of open house day. A slew of science people have been giving talks anyone can attend, and it seems the focus of the talks is a kind of "show and tell". The talks do not take place in a seminar room, but right in the entrance hall of the university building, a large, wide-open space. Folding chairs have been place here, offering seats for several dozen people who may come and go as they please. The ceiling is high above us and the further floors of the building can be seen - there's an open gallery on each floor, a kind of cross between a hallway and a balcony.
While I do not really recall this part, I too have given a presentation. My object to show and tell about is rather mediocre in nature. It seems to be a kind of stress relief ball. But instead of being a plastic sphere with some kind of thick fluid or sand inside, it's a kind of sheet of carbon-gray onion paper which has been tied up. It contains little yellow (as it will turn out) plastic balls, about 1 millimeter in size each. Does anyone remember these ink cartridges which, while sealed, had these little milkily transparent plastic balls to cap them off? You pushed them into the fountain pen and could later cut open the cartridge and remove them. Made for nice bullets in school!
I really don't remember why I was presenting this object. Was I not an astrophysicist? Did I design it?
My friend, then, had something far more interesting to present. Clarke's third law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." And these things were rather magical... He had to get them out of a safe in the university building, and he is one of the few people who know the code. The devices are flat rectangles. About the dimensions of a typical playing card, but maybe 8 mm thick (very close to a Magic booster pack). The top and bottom edges consist of black plastic "sticks" of 8 mm x 8 mm x whatever the width is, 6 cm or so. The large central part is set back on all sides by about a mm (so only 6 mm thick). It's a transparent material forming a container, and inside is some fluid. The one I clearly remember looked like motor oil. So far, it sounds very easy to reproduce these objects. But! They were split along the middle line. When you put your fingers on the top and bottom, you could push down the black ends (each side independently to each other) and the central, transparent part slid into the black ends and... just disappeared! Theoretically, you could push the black ends all the way together, and there would be no sign anymore of most of the object. As I said: Magic!
But beyond warping physics as we know it, these objects were devices with a function. They controlled the settings of the chemical plan my friend worked on. So they also must contain some kind of electronics, and a sending device, and likely an encryption module... And somehow, the degree in which the ends are pushed together influence the stability of whatever chemical reactions are brewing in the plant. It seems the plant runs just fine with all three of the devices at full extension, so one may ask why anyone would construct something to destabilize the runnings of the plant? This is the first incidence of dream dislogic, but let's face it, such stupidities show up in movies all the time...
My friend now is an absolute expert on handling these devices, knowing how much one can depress them, for how long, at which speeds etc. to.. Yeah, to do what. Definitely to not blow everything up, but beats me what the positive effect would be. He shows the things off, moves them around a bit, and then goes to a computer terminal and accesses a webcam placed somewhere in the town's hills which looks down (seemingly a narrow-angle zoom) at the chemical plant. What I see actually looks like the telescope dome of a moderate-sized amateur telescope, but this is one of the smokestacks of the plant. (Again: Hollywood movie logic...). Everything seems a-ok, the demonstration has worked fine.
While my friend continues to tell us about what is made in the plant (stuff that should not start to burn and be released into the atmosphere, of course), he has left the devices lying around, and some people look at them. And then they come to me and some other guy, dream stranger. We look at each other... and depresses the ends of two of the devices!!! WHY WOULD YOU EVER DO THAT???? Sorry, we are slaves of the script, blame the writers. We try to emulate the way my friend did it. We return the black end caps to their maximum extent. Hm, no huge explosion or anything. We pass them on. No one saw what we did, right?
A while later my friend wraps up his presentation, and it's time to leave. It seems my visit if over, I need to get to the train station, and my friend's going to take me down. We go up the stairs to the first upper floor, the parking lot is to the back of the building, cut into the hill and on a higher level than the front entrance. My friend is walking in front of me, and only I myself look back down from the balcony hallway to the impromptu seminar room we just left. And I see several policemen (pretty beefy guys too) coming in and checking out the people sitting there!! What the... No, that's not... We go around the corner further into the building. No shouts. We were not noticed. Not that it would have mattered, right, haha?
It seems we skip a scene, now we are in the car, driving through the hills. Nice houses, trees, other cars on the road, pedestrians, here and there little shops or a bank on the corner. My dreamworld is rendered extremely realistically. First, my friend tells me that there'll come a point where we get some kind of hole between the buildings and will be able to look down into the valley directly toward the chemical plant. This look-through seems pretty small, he actually makes the
o gesture with thumb and forefinger. In a single consistency failure, this viewpoint then does not show up after all.
My friend tells me that it happens every once in a while that someone asks him why someone would build a bunch of telescopes in the middle of the town, with all the light pollution. "And is it not also dangerous with all the children?" (Because, like, what, did they put a fucking kindergarden right next to the chemical plant???) My friend tells me he then answers: "Well, there's no children around at 4 am, right?" I laugh out loud. Because it's not telescopes, it's smokestacks - like the one we saw earlier on the webcam. (Dream consistency level: High!)
We are just going up a hillside when suddenly a huge, massive, blaring, bone-jarring alarm starts whooping!!! I violently compress my stress ball which I had been kneading the whole time (Dream consistency level: Very high!), it ruptures and barfs little yellow balls all across the floor of my friend's car. The pedestrians around us start running, looking shit-scared!!! What the fuck is going on????
We top the hill and suddenly the perspective of the dream - which has been seen through my eyes the whole time - seems to violently jerk around 180°, as if looking back at my face for an instant, and then everything turns outside in again and... the world is filled in a white blaze. A few of the dark house front around us remain as melting grey silhouettes, then they too dissolve into white. I am utterly blinded. But it is not some nuclear detonation, it is a psychological blindness. a complete and utter refusal to acknowledge what a glimpse has told me. But then reality comes back and I must face why the policement came into the university hall - looking for me... (Dream consistency level: Immense!)
From this hill, we can see down into the entire valley. In its center, surrounded by a "muscle" of train tracks, is the chemical plant. Not that you can see anything, as the whole plant is enveloped in billowing white smoke and steam, which is as impenetratable as thick clouds. There seems to be a certain wind going, the smoke column (no flames are actually visible, maybe something is... boiling off?) is being pushed down the valley, held quite flat. The plant is surrounded by fire trucks with flashing lights. If we were closer, we'd probably see people in full hazmat gear.
I totally lose it and start trashing and screaming my head off in a high-pitched, girly voice: "OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! I WANT TO TURN BACK TIME! I WANT TO UNDO WHAT I'VE DONE!!!" But there is no turning back time, no undoing. I've blown up the whole damn thing, and likely people are dying in droves down there!!! My friend gets over his shock quite quickly, and is grim: "You will have to flee." I see my whole life dissolving, going from the great inventor of the squeezy ball to a fugitive on the lam. Total panic fills me to the brim, driving me to hysteria and madness.
I somehow actually CLAW my way out of the dream, it really feels like swimming upward from some great depth, an invocation of denial so strong it is indeed channeled into a world where I am not a mass murderer out of sheer, utter stupidity...
I lie there for a while, actually neither sweating nor with a racing heart, more in awe at how consistent and detailed the whole thing was.
And THEN my alarm goes off. The fuck?? Could you not have done so earlier?