Interstellar? NO.
Jan. 18th, 2014 08:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garoteI dream I am watching the opening scenes of an upcoming movie. Something about long-range space travel. My first thought is, "Is this that movie Interstellar that’s coming out late this year?"
"No, wait, this movie has a summer release date. And it's way behind schedule. In fact, only the first ten minutes or so is complete."
I see a really complicated robotic rocketship, being assembled on a launch pad in a bright tropical setting. The pieces of the robot are mostly rectangular chunks of painted metal, white with bright colored stripes. The more I look at it, the more it starts to resemble parts of a Transformer, crossed with parts of the Space Shuttle.
I am standing on a metal platform with a handrail, watching as a big piece moves slowly into a receptacle with a VOOOOM sound, and I notice two big circular holes through it, with chunky metal teeth on the inside.
"Waaait a second," I think. "That piece looks exactly like a friggin’ audiocassette!"
I stare at it a moment longer. Yes. It's definitely a 200-foot-long metal audiocassette.
"Is this some kind of Michael Bay thing? Shit."
So then, I’m standing with a big group of people, and animals, inside a glass atrium, about the size of an indoor basketball stadium. The floor is flat industrial carpet and there are booths set up haphazardly with hardware stacked in them, like a consumer electronics show.
Most of the people around me, including myself, are actually alien animals who can shape-shift and have chosen the shapes of humans to walk around in. We’re inside this big atrium in order to ride out an ecological disaster: The invasion of our planet by a bunch of slimy H.R. Giger alien critters.
While we’re waiting, we’re visited by a group of humans, who come walking in from some kind of interdimensional porthole on one of the walls. The group is about 15 people, and they’re all scientists and engineers and programmers, most of them with glasses and beards, and most of them are wearing jumpsuits and space travel gear. The leader walks up to me and says "I’m glad we finally got here. Those in-between dimensions always make me feel ... fuzzy. This place feels nice and solid."
I don’t know what to say to that, so I just stand there, clutching my drink.
"We’re here to tell you that the launch was a failure," he says. "We can’t get you guys out of here. You’re going to have to find some other way."
After that enigmatic message, he turns around and walks back into the portal, and his whole team goes with him.
I walk over to the glass wall of the atrium and look out into the jungle foliage beyond. It’s moving. Then I hear a thud, and look down. An enormous armored insect, vaguely alien, has rammed into the outside of the wall. As I watch, it shrieks, backs up, and charges again, making a tiny chip in the glass. Then I hear chittering noises rising up all around me, loud as hell. "We are totally fucked," I think, and back away from the glass.
Around me, all my animal friends are getting alarmed. They’re self-organizing into a defense. Some of them pick up weapons that were hidden in the booths. Some of them morph into much more aggressive animal shapes. They line up in ranks, facing outward.
Then I hear a voice booming out. It’s a language I understand, but with an alien accent, and seems to be coming from everywhere. It’s telepathic, and I’m hearing it in my mind.
"I am the ruler of this civilization!" it says. "None of you are safe; I know all your secrets! I am even inside your minds! You will not survive!"
The voice says a bunch of other apocalyptic stuff, but I ignore it, and instead wonder how it could have made a telepathic link. The only thing I can think of is that it took one of us hostage and performed some gruesome brain surgery on the victim.
Sure enough, the voice stops, and instead of speaking, it sends us all a series of mental images. There’s the hostage... Oh, it’s Ellen Ripley, from the Alien movies. Why not. They captured her, made her think they were doctors and she was ill, then performed the operation. Now she’s incapacitated, with all her external senses dulled, and hallucinating. But the use of telepathy has restored her to consciousness, and now we see what she sees, as she looks down at her torso and sees blood oozing out between rough bandages, running into a shallow pool in a dark cave, staining the water. Creepy shit. "Clearly this is meant to demoralize us," I think.
I push the vision and the voice out of my head. Sure enough, the glass wall of the atrium is now surrounded by shiny black aliens, some with weapons, all of them beating on the wall. Just ahead of me, one of them finally crashes inward and tackles a creature, and they start fighting. This is followed by more crashes, and now there’s fighting all around me. I reach for a bucket of long plastic sticks and pull one out, and it’s a kind of shotgun. I pull the handle at the middle, chambering a round, and aim it at an alien, through the glass. I pull the trigger and there’s a "ZAP!" sound and the alien falls over, thrashing.
I realize that this weapon is only good for outer defense: You aim it at the wall, and when you fire it, nothing happens inside the atrium, but the wall generates a projectile outside itself and sends it shooting in the direction you aimed the weapon. A strange design.
Now there are huge fish swimming outside the walls, paddling through the air as if it were water. I shoot some of them in the eyes, blinding them, since its the only part of their armored body the gun will pierce.
More fighting, in a haze.
Then, it’s a truce. Everyone has stopped fighting, and is watching a figure give a speech. It’s a humanoid body, an old dude with white hair, dressed like a victorian gentleman. He’s sitting in a kind of observation box, suspended outside the atrium, facing in, so he can watch us fight. It’s the ruler of the aliens - the one who was speaking telepathically to us before.
He’s speechifying again, something about how he will let us all live as long as we continue to entertain him, but I ignore it and sneak up to another weapons bucket. This one has big bottles of fuel in it, with thin cloth hoses coming off, ending in a nozzle on a stick. I pick up one of the weapons. It looks like a piece of medical equipment. When I push the button on the stick, a tiny flame appears, and I realize that it’s a kind of manually operated flame thrower!
Awww yeeeah.
I walk casually up to the wall, and stand on a table just beneath the observation box. I hold up the stick, and attempt to douse the creepy alien gentleman with burning fuel, but the spark has died, so I just end up wetting his clothing instead. I look at the stick and realize that the weapon has not been screwed together all the way. Dammit!
Meanwhile, the alien is still talking, as if nothing has happened. Clearly he doesn’t care about this body - he’s just projecting into it. But setting him on fire might be a cool symbolic act of defiance nevertheless. So I fix the nozzle, and aim it again, and he goes, FOOOOOOOOOOMM!!!!!
Chaos erupts, more fighting, a cloud of reeking smoke, another hazy interval.
Now there is music playing, and people are holding drinks again. I’m jostling around in a big crowd, of aliens and people. Some of them are wearing costumes. There’s fighting, but it’s scattered. Hand-to-hand skirmishes. Mostly, people just seem to be socializing.
A chair drifts into view, resting on a platform, carried by four grimacing aliens. Sitting on the chair is a regal looking middle-aged woman. It’s the frickin’ Queen of England. But she’s babbling incoherently and making bird noises. Behind the chair is a cylindrical platform, with a box on it. The box is covered in gold glitter, and has an ornamental lock on the front, and a few tubes coming out the side, going down into the platform. On top of the box is a cheap speaker, like the kind you’d see in a kid’s toy.
Ahead of this procession, which is having trouble pushing through the crowd, walks a somber young man in a suit and hat. He is explaining to everyone that the aliens have decided to amuse themselves by abducting the Queen of England, then extracting her brain and replacing it with that of an ostrich, then installing her now homeless brain in a cardboard box.
Now they’ve turned it into a mobile freakshow, and are parading it around amongst us, to further amuse themselves by watching our reaction to it.
"Clearly the war is not going in our favor," I think to myself, dryly. Where's Oscar Wilde when you need him?
As the golden box bumps past me, I hear a posh voice coming out of the cheap speaker. "Hello my friends, I am your humble queen. Keep your chins up in the dark times," et cetera.
Behind the platform, inching along with his hat covering his face, is another copy of the victorian fellow from the observation booth. He’s grinning with a smug expression. "Oh shit," I think, "It’s the ruler of the aliens again." I suddenly realize I’m still holding the flamethrower weapon I’d used to melt his face a while ago. "Act harmless!" I think.
As I wait for him to drift by, the tube from the flamethrower gets tangled in the equipment on the back of the platform and starts dragging me along. I have to step between him and the platform and rummage around to extract it. "Oh no!" I say, in an absent-minded voice, trying to disguise myself, "My cloth ropes! Oh dear me!"
I yank the rope out, glance at it to see if it’s intact, then as the man slips past me I turn around and douse him a second time with burning fuel. "FUCK YOU!!! Hahahah!!!" I say, and drop the bucket and run.
Chaos erupts again. The fire spreads through the crowd with bizarre quickness, leaping from head to head.
"Well," I think, dodging overturned furniture and flying bodies and shrapnel, "... At least it’s an end to things."
Then I wake up!
"No, wait, this movie has a summer release date. And it's way behind schedule. In fact, only the first ten minutes or so is complete."
I see a really complicated robotic rocketship, being assembled on a launch pad in a bright tropical setting. The pieces of the robot are mostly rectangular chunks of painted metal, white with bright colored stripes. The more I look at it, the more it starts to resemble parts of a Transformer, crossed with parts of the Space Shuttle.
I am standing on a metal platform with a handrail, watching as a big piece moves slowly into a receptacle with a VOOOOM sound, and I notice two big circular holes through it, with chunky metal teeth on the inside.
"Waaait a second," I think. "That piece looks exactly like a friggin’ audiocassette!"
I stare at it a moment longer. Yes. It's definitely a 200-foot-long metal audiocassette.
"Is this some kind of Michael Bay thing? Shit."
So then, I’m standing with a big group of people, and animals, inside a glass atrium, about the size of an indoor basketball stadium. The floor is flat industrial carpet and there are booths set up haphazardly with hardware stacked in them, like a consumer electronics show.
Most of the people around me, including myself, are actually alien animals who can shape-shift and have chosen the shapes of humans to walk around in. We’re inside this big atrium in order to ride out an ecological disaster: The invasion of our planet by a bunch of slimy H.R. Giger alien critters.
While we’re waiting, we’re visited by a group of humans, who come walking in from some kind of interdimensional porthole on one of the walls. The group is about 15 people, and they’re all scientists and engineers and programmers, most of them with glasses and beards, and most of them are wearing jumpsuits and space travel gear. The leader walks up to me and says "I’m glad we finally got here. Those in-between dimensions always make me feel ... fuzzy. This place feels nice and solid."
I don’t know what to say to that, so I just stand there, clutching my drink.
"We’re here to tell you that the launch was a failure," he says. "We can’t get you guys out of here. You’re going to have to find some other way."
After that enigmatic message, he turns around and walks back into the portal, and his whole team goes with him.
I walk over to the glass wall of the atrium and look out into the jungle foliage beyond. It’s moving. Then I hear a thud, and look down. An enormous armored insect, vaguely alien, has rammed into the outside of the wall. As I watch, it shrieks, backs up, and charges again, making a tiny chip in the glass. Then I hear chittering noises rising up all around me, loud as hell. "We are totally fucked," I think, and back away from the glass.
Around me, all my animal friends are getting alarmed. They’re self-organizing into a defense. Some of them pick up weapons that were hidden in the booths. Some of them morph into much more aggressive animal shapes. They line up in ranks, facing outward.
Then I hear a voice booming out. It’s a language I understand, but with an alien accent, and seems to be coming from everywhere. It’s telepathic, and I’m hearing it in my mind.
"I am the ruler of this civilization!" it says. "None of you are safe; I know all your secrets! I am even inside your minds! You will not survive!"
The voice says a bunch of other apocalyptic stuff, but I ignore it, and instead wonder how it could have made a telepathic link. The only thing I can think of is that it took one of us hostage and performed some gruesome brain surgery on the victim.
Sure enough, the voice stops, and instead of speaking, it sends us all a series of mental images. There’s the hostage... Oh, it’s Ellen Ripley, from the Alien movies. Why not. They captured her, made her think they were doctors and she was ill, then performed the operation. Now she’s incapacitated, with all her external senses dulled, and hallucinating. But the use of telepathy has restored her to consciousness, and now we see what she sees, as she looks down at her torso and sees blood oozing out between rough bandages, running into a shallow pool in a dark cave, staining the water. Creepy shit. "Clearly this is meant to demoralize us," I think.
I push the vision and the voice out of my head. Sure enough, the glass wall of the atrium is now surrounded by shiny black aliens, some with weapons, all of them beating on the wall. Just ahead of me, one of them finally crashes inward and tackles a creature, and they start fighting. This is followed by more crashes, and now there’s fighting all around me. I reach for a bucket of long plastic sticks and pull one out, and it’s a kind of shotgun. I pull the handle at the middle, chambering a round, and aim it at an alien, through the glass. I pull the trigger and there’s a "ZAP!" sound and the alien falls over, thrashing.
I realize that this weapon is only good for outer defense: You aim it at the wall, and when you fire it, nothing happens inside the atrium, but the wall generates a projectile outside itself and sends it shooting in the direction you aimed the weapon. A strange design.
Now there are huge fish swimming outside the walls, paddling through the air as if it were water. I shoot some of them in the eyes, blinding them, since its the only part of their armored body the gun will pierce.
More fighting, in a haze.
Then, it’s a truce. Everyone has stopped fighting, and is watching a figure give a speech. It’s a humanoid body, an old dude with white hair, dressed like a victorian gentleman. He’s sitting in a kind of observation box, suspended outside the atrium, facing in, so he can watch us fight. It’s the ruler of the aliens - the one who was speaking telepathically to us before.
He’s speechifying again, something about how he will let us all live as long as we continue to entertain him, but I ignore it and sneak up to another weapons bucket. This one has big bottles of fuel in it, with thin cloth hoses coming off, ending in a nozzle on a stick. I pick up one of the weapons. It looks like a piece of medical equipment. When I push the button on the stick, a tiny flame appears, and I realize that it’s a kind of manually operated flame thrower!
Awww yeeeah.
I walk casually up to the wall, and stand on a table just beneath the observation box. I hold up the stick, and attempt to douse the creepy alien gentleman with burning fuel, but the spark has died, so I just end up wetting his clothing instead. I look at the stick and realize that the weapon has not been screwed together all the way. Dammit!
Meanwhile, the alien is still talking, as if nothing has happened. Clearly he doesn’t care about this body - he’s just projecting into it. But setting him on fire might be a cool symbolic act of defiance nevertheless. So I fix the nozzle, and aim it again, and he goes, FOOOOOOOOOOMM!!!!!
Chaos erupts, more fighting, a cloud of reeking smoke, another hazy interval.
Now there is music playing, and people are holding drinks again. I’m jostling around in a big crowd, of aliens and people. Some of them are wearing costumes. There’s fighting, but it’s scattered. Hand-to-hand skirmishes. Mostly, people just seem to be socializing.
A chair drifts into view, resting on a platform, carried by four grimacing aliens. Sitting on the chair is a regal looking middle-aged woman. It’s the frickin’ Queen of England. But she’s babbling incoherently and making bird noises. Behind the chair is a cylindrical platform, with a box on it. The box is covered in gold glitter, and has an ornamental lock on the front, and a few tubes coming out the side, going down into the platform. On top of the box is a cheap speaker, like the kind you’d see in a kid’s toy.
Ahead of this procession, which is having trouble pushing through the crowd, walks a somber young man in a suit and hat. He is explaining to everyone that the aliens have decided to amuse themselves by abducting the Queen of England, then extracting her brain and replacing it with that of an ostrich, then installing her now homeless brain in a cardboard box.
Now they’ve turned it into a mobile freakshow, and are parading it around amongst us, to further amuse themselves by watching our reaction to it.
"Clearly the war is not going in our favor," I think to myself, dryly. Where's Oscar Wilde when you need him?
As the golden box bumps past me, I hear a posh voice coming out of the cheap speaker. "Hello my friends, I am your humble queen. Keep your chins up in the dark times," et cetera.
Behind the platform, inching along with his hat covering his face, is another copy of the victorian fellow from the observation booth. He’s grinning with a smug expression. "Oh shit," I think, "It’s the ruler of the aliens again." I suddenly realize I’m still holding the flamethrower weapon I’d used to melt his face a while ago. "Act harmless!" I think.
As I wait for him to drift by, the tube from the flamethrower gets tangled in the equipment on the back of the platform and starts dragging me along. I have to step between him and the platform and rummage around to extract it. "Oh no!" I say, in an absent-minded voice, trying to disguise myself, "My cloth ropes! Oh dear me!"
I yank the rope out, glance at it to see if it’s intact, then as the man slips past me I turn around and douse him a second time with burning fuel. "FUCK YOU!!! Hahahah!!!" I say, and drop the bucket and run.
Chaos erupts again. The fire spreads through the crowd with bizarre quickness, leaping from head to head.
"Well," I think, dodging overturned furniture and flying bodies and shrapnel, "... At least it’s an end to things."
Then I wake up!
no subject
Date: 2018-04-19 03:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-04-19 05:10 am (UTC)The connection in the beginning with a movie reminds me of that long Steven Wright routine where he goes into a video store describing the movie he's looking for and then eventually realizes he's describing a dream he had. The punchline, "okay well, let me know when you get it in."