Aircraft Fantasy, and, Sun Block

In the first dream, I was, once again, flying around the broken world in an aircraft with four wings put together like a "+" sign with the cockpit and the main thruster on the centerline. The cockpit was a funky rotating thing, as the whole aircraft had to rotate 90 degrees to land on its tail like a '50s rocketship. when landed the thing looked a lot like a Christmas tree, especially since it was painted in green camoflage.

I landed in the cleared parking lot of a large strip mall. The cars that had been left behind had been all pushed up against the perimeter of the parking lot as a makeshift wall of sorts. It wasn't immediately clear if they were supposed to be keeping things in or out. The others of the group soon landed in the empty parking lot, most of them in ultralights that would have little trouble getting out in a hurry. A couple of them landed on the roof of the longest building, as they wanted to have a little bit of air beneath them when they rolled off, and the wall of cars made them nervous.

We unholstered our ray guns and set off to open the gates of the mall, to see what we were up against.

Unfortunately, that's where that dream ended.


Sun Block

The next dream started in a much less apocalyptic mode. I was in the park with several of my friends, we'd brought out my telescope to track one of the largest sunspots ever in recorded history. It was big enough that you could just make it out using the pinhole projection method.

I got the scope all set up and even had the tracking motor working properly, we set up a drawing board with paper on it for a screen and had my camera ready as well. It was about five in the afternoon, so we figured we would have about an hour before the sun went behind the houses next to the park. Several of us had brought jackets to sit on, and to wear if we decided to stay and use the telescope after it got dark enough.

I managed to get the image focused on the paper, and there was the giant sunspot, surrounded by a fractal dusting of smaller spots. That surprised several of my friends, as they hadn't been following the photographs. I had printed the photo from a couple of days ago, when the sun's rotation was in nearly the same position. Some of the group started outlining the sunspots with a marker.

"You missed one," CD said.

"No, that's new, it wasn't there a minute ago," SCV, her husband, said, then drew a dot where it had appeared.

"Look, there's a bunch of new ones."

"I've never seen sunspots form so quickly," I noted, starting to feel nervous.

"I wonder how many there would have to be for us to start feeling cooler?" One of the people asked, not sure at this point which friend it was.

"Sunspots are actually hotter than the rest of the sun," SCV pointed out, "so we'd actually start feeling warmer."

"But wouldn't it get darker?"

I thought that it might, as the spectrum shifted into a range that we couldn't see. I looked away from the drawing at the sky, thinking it was a little bit darker than I remembered. The image of the sun was now mottled, much like the skin of a rotting orange. The sunspots were beginning to merge, and SCV suggested that I should start the camera up in movie mode. The sky was getting darker.

I put in a new memory stick and switched over. Just in time. Like soap bubbles merging, the sunspots began to stretch towards one another and to join up, soon the sky was noticably dimmer, a false dusk. About ten minutes after the sun was more "spot" than sun, I noticed there was a huge aurora shimmering above the north and west.

"I think we might want to get inside, or put on some more sunblock. This doesn't look good."