Vampires at the Mall.

        I dreamed I was in some sort of mall, collecting up items for work when the mall was suddenly feeling  very deserted. I ended up finding a lot of vampires and for some reason they seemed to assume I was one of them and didn’t attack me.

        After a short while I was able to get outside into the sun, where, they couldn’t run after me. They could still throw things, and they were able to throw stuff really hard. I was quite battered and bruised by the time I got to the first row of cars and could take cover.

        When I woke up I knew that the plot of this dream was pretty much just two lines. The dream lasted a very long time, and I interacted with a half dozen different vampires, including a couple of very pretty women. The surreal nature of hanging with predators meant I had to practice a lot of self control to not give away how frightened I was. Every time we walked somewhere I worried that I was going to see someone I knew, and have to blow my “cover” in trying to save them, too.

        I was quite glad when the group revealed that their attack was somewhat botched and most everyone in the mall escaped out into the sunshine. There really were no fatalities, and they’d managed to pick up a couple of “groupies,” amongst the bitten ones. I managed to avoid my first instinct, which was to suggest that perhaps they should have attacked after nightfall. Although it wouldn’t really have helped them, as the mall closing at 9 PM still meant there was plenty of daylight left.

        The dream reality glitched after I had escaped, and I was back in the mall, helping the vampires make the transition from the mall into the back of a long panel truck. I was using a large tarp to keep the sun off of them as they ran from the mall to the truck. Once they were all inside I was volunteered to drive them to safety. I wasn’t sure why they didn’t use one of their groupies for that. One of the women explained that they didn’t trust their judgment, as they couldn’t believe that anyone would choose to be a vampire. Completely not what I was expecting for an answer.

        None of the groupies had actually bitten a vampire back, so I couldn’t see how they would become a vampire. (Apparently I knew that returning the biting was the only way to become one in this particular version of reality.)

        I had to wonder if I was under some sort of hypnosis. To which the female vampire answered that I wasn’t, but they knew I was a reasonable person and wouldn’t just randomly doom them all.

 

Egyptian Ruins

        The ruins were in a remarkable state of preservation. I shone my flashlight around, a huge 12 LED bright white beam, and could still see the color of the pigments on the walls behind a thin layer of dust. My colleague and I let the underground area breathe a bit and used a remote controlled robot to enter and check the air quality.

        She read the words off of a strange seal, and there was an audible pop. Several Egyptian looking gods (human bodies and animal heads) rushed in glowy apparition towards our little opening.

        “Finish the incantation!” I urged.

        She did so, and the gods receded, as if plastered to the surface of a deflating bubble. However, amongst the red and ochre, grey and brown, there was the glitter of gold and the stirring of flesh. Apparently the gods had revived two of the mummies.

        Even though I was pretty sure there was some magic involved, I was immediately infatuated with the gold covered woman. We helped the pair of them out of the buried ruins, and they seemed grateful.

        Some time passed and our guests were pronounced healthy and allowed to return to the dig site. By that time, we’d managed to clear out a large amount of the dust and debris, the murals were amazingly well preserved and there was such a large quantity of painted hieroglyphics that this site alone had more than doubled the effective library of ancient texts.

Both our mummies had served as consorts in their previous life, and neither had been particularly happy about being chosen for the honor of accompanying their mates into the afterlife. They had actually lived decades apart, and their lives had not actually overlapped, so they were strangers to one another. You would have thought that they would have become friends, since they spoke each other’s native tongue, but that wasn’t the case. The woman and I had become close, and the University had “allowed” it, as we had been able to argue that, regardless of the mechanism, both of our guests were fully human and therefore had their own human rights.

We returned as a much larger team to the ruins to get their help in deciphering some symbols and interpreting some phrases that we had never seen before.

Once there, the male guest intoned an inscription that reformed the strange soap bubble, and the woman grabbed on to me. The three of us were transported back into time, not too far, as I could hear the machinery against the far wall of the outer chamber that would soon break through. Glowing apparitions pressed against the bubble near where our digging would soon break through. The male guest threw himself to the ground, prostrate before the apparitions. The female guest grabbed my arm and pulled me back further into the ruins where the gods couldn’t see us.

“They will escape into the world if we don’t read the incantation,” she whispered to me.

“I can’t actually read the incantation,” I admitted, I’m more the technology guy.

“I can read it, but I can’t see it from here.”

“Oh, I can help with that.” I pulled out my computer slate and brought up the image library, it only took a few moments to find the pictures of the seal.

“If we stop them, will I be reborn?”

I didn’t know the answer, but sure enough, their mummies were there in the front chamber, just as they were when we broke through. I wondered if I would be duplicated from now on also.

“Perhaps we should talk to the gods, first, find out their intentions.”

“Okay.”

I stepped out to where the deities could see me. The male guest was still worshipping the glowing apparitions from the floor.

I hailed them and got their attention, they didn’t seem too happy to see me. I called a few of them by name, the one’s I thought I recognized, and they moved to get a little bit closer to me.

I don’t know what possessed the male guest to jump up at that point, jealousy, anger that I wasn’t bowing and scraping the floor or some other emotion, but he crossed the dusty floor to interpose himself between the gods and myself. As his reward the foremost deity grabbed him and pulled him into himself, impaling the man on three foot long spikes that had suddenly appeared from his glowing body.

I heard chanting start behind me and fully expected to be killed next.

Instead I found myself in the clean and well lit present. I heard my tablet clatter to the ground and spun around, fearing the worst.

Instead the female guest knocked be back, holding on, crying. Even though I was certain the fascination was still mostly magic in nature, I was hugely relieved.

Ad astra per technica,
FF

Hypnopompic Hallucination

This morning’s odd little voice offering: “There were many thoughts left un-thought.” The voice was a clear genderless tenor, with just a hint of urgent trepidation in it.

For whatever reason, this completely wiped out the rather long and detailed dream from earlier (except for an image of a leggy blonde in a deep blue dress with yellow polka dots.) Sometimes when this happens, I will remember when I climb into bed the following night, usually too tired to get back up and jot anything down.
 

Trans Dimensional Rift War

          Stale Chocolate bars in a drawer beneath a drafting table. I figured the chocolate would still be safe, but apparently there was too much milk in it and it had turned rancid. The section leader called over the radio to warn us. I found one bar still wrapped and it didn't smell or taste bad to me, but I didn't finish it, just to be safe.
          We reported to the front of the design building where we (a group of about a dozen) were assigned to a virtual machine interface. The mission started in full video with cgi overlays for the multidimensional threats that were brewing in our skies. There was a sort of cartoon aspect to the overlays as more threats began to form. (Apparently the drones were fired out of a cannon of some sort and the wings were deployed once we reached the target area.)
          We had a sort of chemical laser to fire into the micro rifts when we spotted them. There were only about a dozen shots per drone however, so the control center had to monitor who was available and route us accordingly. I was almost on top of a rift shortly after launch and my laser activated and was fired in a matter of a few seconds after my wings deployed. All faster than I could have reacted. I boosted my power draw to catch up to my flight and took the far right tail position of our "V" formation. In many ways us pilots were simply along for the ride, the AI in the drones was much faster than a human pilot ever could be. Only thing the drones didn't have was the visual processing ability and decision making process that went along with it. The control center was wired directly into our heads, so it sometimes reacted to our perceptions of threat before our conscious mind was aware of it. It was a very odd feeling. We flew our patrol, splitting up to surround a newly formed rift. One of the flight was in position to take two rifts when a second formed near by, and she got a double kill.
          We congratulated her, but knew that any of our drones would have reacted the same if we'd had the shot.
          Soon, however, there were too many threats, and the system began to simplify, eventually we found ourselves flying our drones through a sky full of wire-frame models, that, when there finally was a breakthrough (which we were supposed to prevent if at all possible) there was an explosion of black and purple rotary winged creatures that split off in all directions, they sprayed a caustic chemical of some sort that would then violently explode if we got too close. It made following them very dangerous (for the drones at least.) We lost a couple of drones before we figured out this new tactic.
          Our front mounted guns didn't have much ammunition, so we had to conserve by using single shots or three shot bursts or risk not being able to survive the whole engagement. This was the sort of flying and shooting that the drones excelled at. Unfortunately the targets that dropped out of the rifts weren't always the same, so humans had to make the fine targeting calls, as well as prioritizing the targets, and coming up with tactics to deal with the unexpected; like exploding chem trails. In this particular mission, there were just over sixty rifts, and we managed to stop all but two of them.
          When we formed up after the engagement to return the drones to our base, there were only eight of us left. We'd shot down a similar number of aliens (or alien craft, the researchers couldn't agree on that, some believing that the living craft were a drone, like our own.)
          According to historical data, the engagements always lasted anywhere from 21 to 84 minutes in increments of 21 minutes with rifts forming three to five per minute. We didn't have any good theories as to why that would be, just that it always happenend that way. If no micro-rifts formed at the 22 minute mark, then we knew it was safe to stand down for another few days.
          Later I was at my parents old house, still in the world of the rift war, and came upon a drawer full of small scorpion-like creatures. I knew immediately that they were part of the alien invaders' little left overs. I immediately went numb on the right hand pinky and ring finger when one of them stabbed me. Quickly I ran water in the sink and dropped the whole drawer into the hot water. The little silver and blue critters could actually swim, and started darting around picking up their eggs (which were a fuzzy flourescent green color.) It took several seconds to rinse the critters off my arm and hand. The hot water seemed to be slowly killing them, though I had to keep sweeping escapees back into the sink. I used the back of a carving knife for that. After I cut the first couple in half, tricky since they were all of two centimeters long, they learned to avoid the knife by rolling up into a little ball. I'd tried crushing them, but the little ball was impossible to break, so I just rolled them back into the sink. I finally had the situation under control enough to activate my headphone and call it in. I knew I was in for a long decontamination and that my parents' house would be incinerated and passed through a triple zero mesh. (Whatever that is.)

Virtual Flying, Sobbing Apparition

          In what was a very detailed dream, I was playing Axlepyre, running through an instance in World of Warcraft with nine other folks from the guild. We were ducking through a glowing green maze, trying not to touch the sides, the whole thing was rotating, making it fairly difficult. In the fashion of this sort of dream it wasn't long before I was not playing the game, but living the game. Apparently the others in the group had the same feeling. We finished up the current group of creeps we were fighting and decided to mount up and fly out of the area. Soon we were darting over the jungle of Stranglethorne, racing between the tops of the trees and diving down to skim the surface of the rivers. We stopped at the diving platforms and made a camp fire.
          It didn't take long for us to change into far more colorful attire. (Or in the case of the elves in the group, less attire.) I put on my chef's hat and prepared a couple of feasts for the group. In one of my bags I had a chest that was essentially a refrigerator and some sort of magical grill. I set up on the other side of the path and was chopping vegetables and carving fillets, grilling same, and then brewing up some sauces and finally mixing them all together in a large wok. I remember having to stand on a fallen log to get to the top of the grill to turn the meat.
Since half the group were Gnomes there weren't a lot of short jokes, though I did notice that I was the shortest of the entire group, so when there were jokes, I was typically the subject.
          Soon we were all taking turns diving off the platforms, though some of us who could levitate or slow fall cheated so we could do a couple of dozen flips or turns before splashing down in the brackish water of the cove far below.

          I woke up thinking, "that there was worthy zip-line inspired dream."

          In the morning, while laying in bed unable to move, feeling fully awake, I could hear the cats moving around, knocking stuff over in the kitchen. Then, from N's old office I could hear a woman's high pitched wail and long broken sobs. The despair was palpable and I wanted nothing more than to go and comfort the poor woman, all the while concerned that the house was somewhat insecure if she could have just walked in. I could not, however, make myself get up and go to her. The sobbing stopped, and a few moments later the woman passed through the hallway, past the front entry where the light caught her from behind, revealing reddish brown hair just past her shoulders, a cap sleeved blouse almost the same shade brown with cream colored lace collar and trim. It seemed she was wearing a skirt of the same material (brown corduroy, I think.) But I could not tell whether the skirt was long or short as the skirt turned into a dark roiling mist just about mid thigh and going to within about a foot of the ground.
          I heard the cats scrabbling around, knocking into the toaster and flowers on the kitchen counter, then tearing through the living room, frantic claws on paraquat tiles. When they bounded in across the bed they bounced over my hips and across my chest, and that finally woke me up.

          I didn't really look for the woman, but I did find the kitchen to be quite the mess; toaster crumbs, coupons, plastic flowers and a couple of zebra-striped place mats were strewn across the counters and onto the floor.
          I love how fast and how detailed your brain can fill in a scene with very little real information. In this case the cats were probably racing through the house and the wailing was likely Little John's "I'm a mighty hunter!" call (or perhaps his "where the heck is breakfast?" call.)

Happy 50th?

        I would have thought that the occasion of my 50th birthday would create some sort of dream presence. I wasn't exactly expecting any great revelation or wild dreamlands party event, but, well, something a little out of the ordinary, perhaps.
        But no, just the usual jumble; a plotless mishmash of friends and strangers trying not to look like zombie chow and a one-line musical refrain. This morning's musical selection, courtesy of Counting Crows: "And the feeling that it's all a lot of oysters, but no pearls..."

Hawaiian Shirt Noisy

    Last night's dreams were all over the map, but seemed to have one theme, they were Hawaiian Shirt noisy. By that I mean both the colors and sounds of the dreams. Sometimes I woke with the "What the heck was that?" memory, nothing but sounds and lights, bright patterns and little of anything making any semblance of sense.
    Colors were sounds, and sounds were oddly visible, the refrigerator running was a galloping blue and charcoal gray, the cat meows were bright gold and metal flake red swooshing loops, people voices were odd little checkered patterns that undulated in a variety of colors.
    I was, in one scene, drifting up near the ceiling in my front room, and there were four inch high people running around on my dining table, trying to set up some sort of stick and string tower. I remember thinking that it would be so easy for me to tie the sticks together, if I had hands. That scene, too, eventually broke into a riot of dueling colors and sharp staccato bursts of meaningless sound.