It would suck to be in stasis for thirty years

Please note that all blog posts before 8 April 2007 were automatically imported from LiveJournal.  To see the comments and any LiveJournal-specific extras such as polls and user icons, please find the source posting at http://brianenigma.livejournal.com/2004/06/

I just woke up from a rather strange dream. It sort of started out like a movie trailer, but the situation and people were incredibly familiar. It felt sort of as if this were the sequel to a movie I had seen or this was a place I had been to before in previous dreams.

Fundamentally, it involved some technological facility run by an evil guy. Additionally, it was a “secret lair” sort of thing with a vast gate around, but you still had to get to it using trains from the gate's entrance. These were not happy little Harry Potter style trains, they were generic shiny silver Amtrack-style trains, only everything was automated and computer controlled and they had some James Bond style tricks up their sleeves. For instance, part of the “movie trailer” portion of the dream showed someone who had fallen (or rather, was purposely ejected) out a secret-panel-thing in the bottom of the train. He was flat on his back, on the ground, between the rails. After the train had passed, he sat up, wondering what had happened. By this time, the train that had passed him, silently built up momentum coming from the other way (how could the guy not HEAR the train coming up behind him???) and, like typical movie trailers, it cut to another scene before any sort of graphic impact occurred.

The “secret lair” also employed some sort of funky weather thing that I could not figure out. From outside, there was a lot of snow, wind, and cold. From inside, the weather seemed normal. At some point, in either direction, was a threshold you passed, at which point the storm would instantly arrive or recede–but the line you crossed for that coming in sort of overlapped the one going out, if that makes sense. As an example, I was there on the innermost (no scary weather) part of the property with a bunch of people and we were somewhere near that threshold line. We could see someone coming in, on foot, toward us. We saw no weather, but he was obviously experiencing some pretty heavy wind and snow. This continued to occur, even until he was standing next to us–at one point, he was actually standing between two of us and we could see him perfectly fine, but he could not see us and very obviously could still perceive the storm. As we started walking toward the exit (which was still miles and miles away), there was a point at which the storm sort of arrived. It quickly blew in and past us, in a very quick time-lapse sort of fashion. At this point, we could turn around and see the guy we had passed and yes, he was in several inches of snow.

At some point in the dream we were talking to the Big Bad Guy. It seemed he wanted something-or-other from each of us there. It was not exactly clear what he wanted, but I remember having my hands in my pockets, feeling my keys there, and realizing that while we were all there, someone with the resources to build such a place would have a trivial time hiring someone to pick locks and enter the homes of everyone that was there. (Although I was not sure if what he wanted was at home.)

Later, we all hopped on a train to travel the miles toward the exit of the facility, and that is where something weird happened. It all occurred in the span of about two seconds (“one thou-sand one, one thou-sand two.”) Everything instantly got dark–not pitch black, but dim. There was a tingly or prickly sensation all over my skin. Things blurred by my field of view, too fast to clearly discern. And suddenly, the train ride was over and everyone was a bit confused and disoriented…as well as covered in dust and spiderwebs. (The fast moving things during those two seconds, I then realized were spiders; the tingly sensation, dust and spiderwebs collecting.) The train reached its destination, everyone got out and flowed out the front gate. I found a “Police Call” button that had a little two-way speaker, but had a hard time conveying much more than “we need help.” A police car showed up almost instantly and we attempted to describe the situation to him, but it was fairly clear that while we all intuitively knew roughly what happened, nobody was sure of the details and the cop was not believing any of it. For instance, I had “known” (I have no idea how) that those two seconds were actually three or four years of time passing. Someone else “knew” it to be 30! Regardless of the lapsed time, it all seemed very “Twilight Zone” and Bermuda Triangle and very difficult for your average cop to understand. At that point, SUVs from the facility pulled up to the inside of the gates (presumably to placate and send off the cop and grab all of us), but that is when I woke up.

The whole thing was a little disturbing, but not in a nightmare sort of way, more of a “that's odd” way. I think part of the Bermuda Triangle aspect of it stems from the fact that I watched a couple of Twilight Zone episodes last night: the one where the guy throws a coin to the guy in the newspaper stand, where it lands on its edge, giving him the power to read minds until the end of the day when he disturbs it and it falls flat and the episode where the little girl falls through the wall of her bedroom and is stuck in another dimension until the dad and family dog come in to rescue her (which was later spoofed on one of the Halloween Simpsons episodes).

Posted in: Dreams

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *