Re: Dreams!
Posted: Wed May 13, 2020 7:33 pm
So, here is the dream I had today... One first interesting aspect is that it occurred between 15:10 and 15:20, in the slot between two "Snoozes" of my cell phone alarm - I had slept badly the night before and was sure the meeting I would be attending that day was to be at 15:30 (turns out it was at 18:00 - d'oh!). I had obviously gone back to sleep pretty much immediately after hitting snooze at 15:10, and clearly went into dream sleep immediately too. Still, the dream was quite long and it's astonishing it all happened in just some minutes.
The first part of the dream that I remember is quite typical... Based on reality, but with differences, and kind of weird and pointless. But we'll get there.
I am at home in my parent's house in Germany. I first need to point out that the room I lived in during my school years was taken over by my dad when I went to university. I had taken my bed with me to university town and since I would now be sleeping in another room upon visiting home, he decided to fill the room with a desk and a cabinet and all kinds of his stuff... And today, it is just a storage room for all my CDs and DVDs I put there before moving to Spain. This was the actual background in the dream as well.
But in the dream, the room is now almost completely empty, even to the point that shelves on the walls with my model airplanes are gone, walls are painted white. There's a bed, a small one as I used to have (as in, the mattress is not very wide). Beforehand, the bed had been against the south wall, but now my mom had moved it by 90°, against the west wall, on the opposite side of the room from the door. It's kind of amusing to me that I had done such a shift in the real world myself a very long time ago...
Now, it's also true there's a sink in my room, it's all the way in the northwest corner. Back when my bed was against that wall, it was just beyond the foot of the bed. But in my dream, the sink is right in the middle of the wall (the mirror is gone), and that means it's above the bed itself! While higher on the wall than in reality, it still hovers just over where I would be sleeping.
So I complain to my mom about this, that I'd bang against it when trying to get up, stuff like that. She counters that since I typically sleep until noon or so, the Sun will be shining into my room and... somehow this will cause me to sleep looking out to the room, and my drawn-up legs will not be directly under the sink... Or something like that. You know, the typical weird dream stuff. What's especially wrong is that my room faces north. I think that in summer, I could see the sunrise, but that's about it, so the sun never shines straight into my room at midday.
Now the dream becomes a bit muddled. I think I was looking outside and saw something weird, motivating me to go downstairs and outside and have a closer look. But there's also the issue that more people were showing up in the dream, and I'm not sure anymore... Seems I heard them downstairs, talking and so. How did they get in? What are they doing here? From what happens later, I reconstruct that these people are military folk, they're wearing camo, carrying machine guns and stuff!! But for now, at least in terms of what I remember, I pretty much ignore them. I go outside.
It's night out. My old room's window is on the front side of the house; now, going out into the driveway, I'm still looking north. Our house is on the top of a small hill, our driveway is still nearly flat but the street beyond goes downhill at that point. At the bottom is a larger street and just beyond that, another, much larger hill rises steeply, with houses only at the very bottom. This hill dominated my outside view for many years. Further to the west, it bends over into a side valley, and beyond that is a deeper valley going into the Eifel "mountains." Anyway, I now see a quite full moon off to the... northeast?? To the right, beyond the hill and out into the Moselle valley, toward town. Let me assure you such a moon would never be seen at that sky position in the real world - and my dream self realizes this, and is very puzzled. Right in front of me, partially even in front of the hillside, is a hazy cloud. It is slightly glowing, because behind it, basically straight to the north, is the same moon again, muted behind the haze!! The sky to the west but also east is clear and star-spangled.
Now, as mentioned, my memory of this part of the dream is somewhat muddled. I think this view I actually already witnessed from my room's window (with the light on inside!), and I only went down after seeing that.
For now, suddenly, the sky is much lighter, it's dawning. The sky is now clear except for some cirrus. There were a few things visible off to the east and west, but I do not remember what they were. Hm, I think the moon was still there off to the east, palely visible. What dominates high in the sky toward the north makes my jaw drop. It's... an asteroid field?? A spray of brown-reddish irregular rocky bodies hanging there in the sky, following an arc, the largest centered. I can see contours, craters, a general three-dimensionality. The way they look is very peculiar. Crisp, colorful, as if they were in sunshine, and very close, maybe just a kilometer high. But they are not falling, not moving, just hovering there like the moon hovers. As you know (maybe ), the moon is actually a very dark body which reflects very little light, but the sun is so bright that when we see the moon, we see an almost white sphere with only the black maria being a light gray. To not fall, or at least rapidly orbit like a nearby satellite, these asteroids have to be tens of thousands of kilometers away, but they do not look like the moon.
The scene changes. Now it is daylight, but rather muted. Overcast. No asteroids. A rumble ensues, and from the south, behind us, a plane flies over. It's nothing less than a massive Boeing 747. It's flying quite low, maybe a km high, larger in the sky than an extended hand. It's a cargo plane, no windows. The engines are pushing out a stream of thick exhaust, and it's listing to the side, while actually not turning... It looks... hurt... Like it is going to smear off and crash soon. But it disappears behind the hill without further things happening.
The scene changes. Full daylight, clear sky. More and more planes fill the sky. They are generally higher than the earlier 747, but still low enough to be readily identifiable. There's fighter jets, I recognize Dassault Rafales and Eurofighters. There's passenger jets. They are flying in somewhat haphazard directions, but mostly from south to north. They're fleeing, I think. Like animals crashing through a forest, escaping from a fire. What is it that is coming???
And then it comes.
The ship.
The alien ship.
It is ALIEN. If a single word should be used to describe it, it's "geometry". The ship is made up of interlinked hexagonal tiles. They are in part a pale pink, pale blue, pale grey. The tiles seem to be not entirely flat, but peaked in the center, with faces rising from each of the sides. After several rows of these tiles, there's a different element, in white. Imagine half an oval, maybe twice as long as wide, on the east side, and a long, pointy triangle, three or four times as long, on the west side. This element clearly hangs below the tiles, and is pointing west-east, parallel to the front of the ship. Which, by the way, is not a straight line, just the triangle parts of the hexagon tiles. Except for that single anomaly, there are no features. No windows, no docking bays, no sensor extrusions, no batteries of turbo lasers... And especially no visible drive system, no engines, no exhaust. And I get the impression that it is thin. The tiles are likely similar to actual tiles humans use to tile things, so maybe 20 times wider than they are thick. While I can't see the top, I have the very strong impression the top is the same as the bottom. Just a huge sheet of linked tiles flying across the sky.
It is HUGE. The strips of tiles extend from horizon to horizon. Similar to everything else, it is flying from the south to the north, and I can't see any end in the west and east. But you can see curvature! It seems to be curved, hugging the surface of the Earth. And it must be way high up. There's a clear Rayleigh-scattering effect at work, the ship is seen through a blue haze, like distant mountain peaks looming over the horizon. I guesstimate it is probably 30 km above the Earth's surface, which makes each tile kilometers in size, and maybe 100 m thick. And the whole ship spans... hundreds of km!!!!
It is FAST. I can get all these impressions and have these thoughts because it takes some seconds to pass because of its incredible size. But if my estimates are correct, then it is traveling at an incredible velocity in the atmosphere, maybe 100 km/s (at a size of 500 - 1000 km on the side, and a square geometry in total). The front of the ship takes just a second to go across half the sky, far faster (by impression, not actual speed) than anything except a very low-flying fighter jet. And it is entirely silent. Even after many seconds, no sonic boom reaches us. It seems to be running on a reactionless gravitic drive anyway, but now it even seems to cut through the atmosphere without any resistance. The technological level is completely mindblowing. Oh, and it seems to be transparent, too! The sun is behind the house so we can't look at it directly, but the ship does not seem to cast any shadow, no eclipse. The bottom of it seems to be illuminated by the bright source of the Earth.
It comes, and it goes, leaving an empty sky behind.
But it has brought something else with it. The ground starts to vibrate, a rumble grows... To the west, the low mountain valley has completely disappeared, now we are just looking out over a wide "townscape" (no high buildings) toward a flat horizon.
And then the tsunami hits. No idea how a tsunami can get here, we are supposed to be 500 km from the sea and close to 200 m above sea level...
I saw a lot of videos of the great earthquake in Japan, and my dream tsunami is reasonably realistic. It is not some huge surfer wave, but instead a giant flood stream that rises and rises. Though here, it rises very fast, and has a choppy, foamy surface. Cars, broken remains of houses tumble in the cataclysm.
But it does not reach us. For some reason, despite not being elevated vs. the tsunami, it does not spill close to us, and especially does not hit us from behind. Something high must have split the wave behind us. I have an idea...
I run around the back of the house, and at least one of the military people, a woman, comes with me. What's behind our house is VERY different from reality, now we are standing on the other side of the small hill, looking a bit down on an expanded cityscape, and nearby, that's what split the tsunami, is a huge parking garage. The building looks to be like 200 m long, extending away from us, and probably 50 m wide. It's clad in pale pink marble, and reasonably low to the ground, being mostly underground. In the center, the roof is open, and we can look down into a parking lot filled with hundreds of cars. There's no water inside, it has survived the strike.
I go closer, accompanied by that one soldier, at least. The tsunami seems to have passed, for now we are climbing through a devastating landscape of wreckage. After some looking around, we make our way back. I point out that we should look into all of the cars later, and if needed break them open to get at groceries and so. Their owners are not coming back. And driving around will also not be possible unless you have a main battle tank. The woman agrees.
And then another person shows up (it is implied they had come with us before), a real person. I'll not name them, let's just say they very often complain about how the world is treating them, very loudly and vociferously. Now they are crying and screaming, the world has ended, their life is a mess, fuck the aliens!!!
I try to keep a more pragmatic approach and tell her: "Come on, at least it's not as bad as the last time, the entire world was destroyed that time." And a huge memory dump happens in my head. Suddenly I know that I know these soldiers. We have been on... missions... before. I'm not just a guy in my old teen's room complaining about the placement of my bed. I'm some civilian science adviser in some kind of SF superhero story... And there was at least one time when we used either time travel or some kind of alternate universe stuff to undo the destruction of the entire Earth!!!!
PLOT TWIST!
Not sure if I drifted off into dreamless sleep, or if my alarm rang, but that's the end of my memory of this dream.
The first part of the dream that I remember is quite typical... Based on reality, but with differences, and kind of weird and pointless. But we'll get there.
I am at home in my parent's house in Germany. I first need to point out that the room I lived in during my school years was taken over by my dad when I went to university. I had taken my bed with me to university town and since I would now be sleeping in another room upon visiting home, he decided to fill the room with a desk and a cabinet and all kinds of his stuff... And today, it is just a storage room for all my CDs and DVDs I put there before moving to Spain. This was the actual background in the dream as well.
But in the dream, the room is now almost completely empty, even to the point that shelves on the walls with my model airplanes are gone, walls are painted white. There's a bed, a small one as I used to have (as in, the mattress is not very wide). Beforehand, the bed had been against the south wall, but now my mom had moved it by 90°, against the west wall, on the opposite side of the room from the door. It's kind of amusing to me that I had done such a shift in the real world myself a very long time ago...
Now, it's also true there's a sink in my room, it's all the way in the northwest corner. Back when my bed was against that wall, it was just beyond the foot of the bed. But in my dream, the sink is right in the middle of the wall (the mirror is gone), and that means it's above the bed itself! While higher on the wall than in reality, it still hovers just over where I would be sleeping.
So I complain to my mom about this, that I'd bang against it when trying to get up, stuff like that. She counters that since I typically sleep until noon or so, the Sun will be shining into my room and... somehow this will cause me to sleep looking out to the room, and my drawn-up legs will not be directly under the sink... Or something like that. You know, the typical weird dream stuff. What's especially wrong is that my room faces north. I think that in summer, I could see the sunrise, but that's about it, so the sun never shines straight into my room at midday.
Now the dream becomes a bit muddled. I think I was looking outside and saw something weird, motivating me to go downstairs and outside and have a closer look. But there's also the issue that more people were showing up in the dream, and I'm not sure anymore... Seems I heard them downstairs, talking and so. How did they get in? What are they doing here? From what happens later, I reconstruct that these people are military folk, they're wearing camo, carrying machine guns and stuff!! But for now, at least in terms of what I remember, I pretty much ignore them. I go outside.
It's night out. My old room's window is on the front side of the house; now, going out into the driveway, I'm still looking north. Our house is on the top of a small hill, our driveway is still nearly flat but the street beyond goes downhill at that point. At the bottom is a larger street and just beyond that, another, much larger hill rises steeply, with houses only at the very bottom. This hill dominated my outside view for many years. Further to the west, it bends over into a side valley, and beyond that is a deeper valley going into the Eifel "mountains." Anyway, I now see a quite full moon off to the... northeast?? To the right, beyond the hill and out into the Moselle valley, toward town. Let me assure you such a moon would never be seen at that sky position in the real world - and my dream self realizes this, and is very puzzled. Right in front of me, partially even in front of the hillside, is a hazy cloud. It is slightly glowing, because behind it, basically straight to the north, is the same moon again, muted behind the haze!! The sky to the west but also east is clear and star-spangled.
Now, as mentioned, my memory of this part of the dream is somewhat muddled. I think this view I actually already witnessed from my room's window (with the light on inside!), and I only went down after seeing that.
For now, suddenly, the sky is much lighter, it's dawning. The sky is now clear except for some cirrus. There were a few things visible off to the east and west, but I do not remember what they were. Hm, I think the moon was still there off to the east, palely visible. What dominates high in the sky toward the north makes my jaw drop. It's... an asteroid field?? A spray of brown-reddish irregular rocky bodies hanging there in the sky, following an arc, the largest centered. I can see contours, craters, a general three-dimensionality. The way they look is very peculiar. Crisp, colorful, as if they were in sunshine, and very close, maybe just a kilometer high. But they are not falling, not moving, just hovering there like the moon hovers. As you know (maybe ), the moon is actually a very dark body which reflects very little light, but the sun is so bright that when we see the moon, we see an almost white sphere with only the black maria being a light gray. To not fall, or at least rapidly orbit like a nearby satellite, these asteroids have to be tens of thousands of kilometers away, but they do not look like the moon.
The scene changes. Now it is daylight, but rather muted. Overcast. No asteroids. A rumble ensues, and from the south, behind us, a plane flies over. It's nothing less than a massive Boeing 747. It's flying quite low, maybe a km high, larger in the sky than an extended hand. It's a cargo plane, no windows. The engines are pushing out a stream of thick exhaust, and it's listing to the side, while actually not turning... It looks... hurt... Like it is going to smear off and crash soon. But it disappears behind the hill without further things happening.
The scene changes. Full daylight, clear sky. More and more planes fill the sky. They are generally higher than the earlier 747, but still low enough to be readily identifiable. There's fighter jets, I recognize Dassault Rafales and Eurofighters. There's passenger jets. They are flying in somewhat haphazard directions, but mostly from south to north. They're fleeing, I think. Like animals crashing through a forest, escaping from a fire. What is it that is coming???
And then it comes.
The ship.
The alien ship.
It is ALIEN. If a single word should be used to describe it, it's "geometry". The ship is made up of interlinked hexagonal tiles. They are in part a pale pink, pale blue, pale grey. The tiles seem to be not entirely flat, but peaked in the center, with faces rising from each of the sides. After several rows of these tiles, there's a different element, in white. Imagine half an oval, maybe twice as long as wide, on the east side, and a long, pointy triangle, three or four times as long, on the west side. This element clearly hangs below the tiles, and is pointing west-east, parallel to the front of the ship. Which, by the way, is not a straight line, just the triangle parts of the hexagon tiles. Except for that single anomaly, there are no features. No windows, no docking bays, no sensor extrusions, no batteries of turbo lasers... And especially no visible drive system, no engines, no exhaust. And I get the impression that it is thin. The tiles are likely similar to actual tiles humans use to tile things, so maybe 20 times wider than they are thick. While I can't see the top, I have the very strong impression the top is the same as the bottom. Just a huge sheet of linked tiles flying across the sky.
It is HUGE. The strips of tiles extend from horizon to horizon. Similar to everything else, it is flying from the south to the north, and I can't see any end in the west and east. But you can see curvature! It seems to be curved, hugging the surface of the Earth. And it must be way high up. There's a clear Rayleigh-scattering effect at work, the ship is seen through a blue haze, like distant mountain peaks looming over the horizon. I guesstimate it is probably 30 km above the Earth's surface, which makes each tile kilometers in size, and maybe 100 m thick. And the whole ship spans... hundreds of km!!!!
It is FAST. I can get all these impressions and have these thoughts because it takes some seconds to pass because of its incredible size. But if my estimates are correct, then it is traveling at an incredible velocity in the atmosphere, maybe 100 km/s (at a size of 500 - 1000 km on the side, and a square geometry in total). The front of the ship takes just a second to go across half the sky, far faster (by impression, not actual speed) than anything except a very low-flying fighter jet. And it is entirely silent. Even after many seconds, no sonic boom reaches us. It seems to be running on a reactionless gravitic drive anyway, but now it even seems to cut through the atmosphere without any resistance. The technological level is completely mindblowing. Oh, and it seems to be transparent, too! The sun is behind the house so we can't look at it directly, but the ship does not seem to cast any shadow, no eclipse. The bottom of it seems to be illuminated by the bright source of the Earth.
It comes, and it goes, leaving an empty sky behind.
But it has brought something else with it. The ground starts to vibrate, a rumble grows... To the west, the low mountain valley has completely disappeared, now we are just looking out over a wide "townscape" (no high buildings) toward a flat horizon.
And then the tsunami hits. No idea how a tsunami can get here, we are supposed to be 500 km from the sea and close to 200 m above sea level...
I saw a lot of videos of the great earthquake in Japan, and my dream tsunami is reasonably realistic. It is not some huge surfer wave, but instead a giant flood stream that rises and rises. Though here, it rises very fast, and has a choppy, foamy surface. Cars, broken remains of houses tumble in the cataclysm.
But it does not reach us. For some reason, despite not being elevated vs. the tsunami, it does not spill close to us, and especially does not hit us from behind. Something high must have split the wave behind us. I have an idea...
I run around the back of the house, and at least one of the military people, a woman, comes with me. What's behind our house is VERY different from reality, now we are standing on the other side of the small hill, looking a bit down on an expanded cityscape, and nearby, that's what split the tsunami, is a huge parking garage. The building looks to be like 200 m long, extending away from us, and probably 50 m wide. It's clad in pale pink marble, and reasonably low to the ground, being mostly underground. In the center, the roof is open, and we can look down into a parking lot filled with hundreds of cars. There's no water inside, it has survived the strike.
I go closer, accompanied by that one soldier, at least. The tsunami seems to have passed, for now we are climbing through a devastating landscape of wreckage. After some looking around, we make our way back. I point out that we should look into all of the cars later, and if needed break them open to get at groceries and so. Their owners are not coming back. And driving around will also not be possible unless you have a main battle tank. The woman agrees.
And then another person shows up (it is implied they had come with us before), a real person. I'll not name them, let's just say they very often complain about how the world is treating them, very loudly and vociferously. Now they are crying and screaming, the world has ended, their life is a mess, fuck the aliens!!!
I try to keep a more pragmatic approach and tell her: "Come on, at least it's not as bad as the last time, the entire world was destroyed that time." And a huge memory dump happens in my head. Suddenly I know that I know these soldiers. We have been on... missions... before. I'm not just a guy in my old teen's room complaining about the placement of my bed. I'm some civilian science adviser in some kind of SF superhero story... And there was at least one time when we used either time travel or some kind of alternate universe stuff to undo the destruction of the entire Earth!!!!
PLOT TWIST!
Not sure if I drifted off into dreamless sleep, or if my alarm rang, but that's the end of my memory of this dream.