Hypersleep

Realistic detailed dream of the sort that made me think it was real, and caused some confusion about how I woke up in a bed with actual fabric coverings, and small furry animals.

I was a crew member on an intersteller ship. We had been awakened to perform maintenance on several ship's systems. Part of the repairs actually involved deploying a shield made of ice, and then a space walk to replace some exterior sensors and plates. Apparently we'd bumped into a fairly large (less than a gram!) chunk of carbon and lithium, and it had punched a hole into one of the storage decks (fortunately unpressurized.) I patched the hole while another crew member assessed the damage to the cargo. Then I replaced a couple of sensors while I was outside. When I looked at the ice shield, I could see little flashes of light as it took hits from the intersteller debris. It turned out that space was not as empty as we'd thought, or hoped.

I looked back at the scoop array, still amazed by the size of our endeavor. At a half mile away, it was impossible to tell if they were working or off, or even if there were any physical damage.

When we got back inside, we listened to some of the news and telemetry notes that had been continuously beamed to us from Earth. Lots of unrest and turmoil around the world. Several other "Earths" had been located in the nearby stars, and there were even broadcasts from the second colony, about twenty five years worth! Their target world had been discovered long after our mission had left.

We also had bad news. We'd lost a lot of our cruising atmosphere supplies, and so needed to cut our maintenance operation short. We put the bulk of the team back into hypersleep. Finally, there were only two of us there working on the final few repairs, the deflector anti debris system had depleted a significant amount of our power resources. It was obvious that we were going to have to use the emergency hypersleep stand-ups instead of the full featured ones, as that appeared to be the only way to guarantee that the debris mitigation would continue all the way to our destination. The stand-ups were a supportive framework instead of a high tech bed, the hookups were very simple and the mechanism encased the sleeper in a special ice like material. I monitored the freezing of my companion, and then with everything else powered down, connected myself by the bluish glow of the debris shield. I closed the ceramic screen, and triggered the process, allowing the cold to take me away.

When I woke up I was very confused, as the dream was so strong it was like a memory of a real life.