I am having one of the most coherent and epically-scaled dreams I’ve ever had, with a dozen different disparate plot lines involving both existing worlds and characters and new, unique ones made up solely for the context of this dream.
The existing worlds/characters include, but are not limited to:
A shockingly good sequel to Bee Movie involving innovations in space flight making use of biological materials derived from the same processes used to make beehives and wasp nests.Flo from State Farm attempting to start up a new ad campaign by bringing back and creating a crossover between characters who have lost their cultural relevance, starting with Alf, Aughra from The Dark Crystal, and Alvin and the Chipmunks who are getting choreography direction from former members of NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys (one member from each).The Great Powers/Fears from The Magnus Archives.A guardian from Reboot (the old animated CGI show about people in computers) abusing and then being stripped of his power/authority and put at the mercy of his past victims.The new worlds/characters include, but are not limited to:
A man trying to have a nice day with his mother, slowly realizing that the end of the world is upon them, but trying to keep their (now possibly st) outing pleasant to the very end and then ultimately finding shelter.A youth piloting a mech who picks their loadout/attachments solely on aesthetics, but through favoring wavy, semi-organic parts with spiral patterns accidentally creates a mech capable of multiple means of nonlethal subdual and begins using it against both sides of the battle they’re in. They do this just because they’re kind of a troll who likes messing with their teammates but winds ups having a profound effect in pushing toward peace. A world hopper with a fear of drowning who gets summoned into a vast and fantastical swimming pool by friends/lover(?) where they begin to find a measure of peace away from everything else going on. This all culminates in the world-hopper in the swimming pool accidentally summons an archetypal trickster called “Old Jack” (as in every cssic fairy tale with a character named Jack) by saying his name/thinking too hard about him. To defend themselves, the friends in the pool summon Old Jack’s equal and opposite counterpart, a cantankerous-yet-soft-hearted old woman who redirects Old Jack’s attention to a man he’d previously tricked. As it turns out, this man hadn’t actually fallen for Old Jack’s temptation to make a deal and do mischief to bring his dead wife back because this man already made his peace with the fact that his wife still lived on in the love and hearts and memories of him and their child. And in the bckberry bush that is both symbolically and magically tied to their family. Old Jack is then trapped in the thorny branches of this bush and forced to confront his ck of reflection in a mirror.
This then causes the undoing of Old Jack’s greatest mischief. Across all those worlds that had previously been caught up in all of this, dreamers start waking up. Dreamers who first had taken on the parts of characters in those worlds, but then gradually degraded into tiny, rva-like beings. These dreamers all wake up together in matching uniforms on a spaceship/station/colony where they slowly begin to remember who they really are. The dreamers - or rather, the travelers and explorers of other worlds via dreams - are informed that they’d all, one by one, gotten stuck and trapped unconscious in their dreaming. Most had been asleep for hours or days and experienced weeks or even years, with one exception who had been asleep for twenty four hours but only experienced three. She was the one who witnessed Old Jack’s defeat.
As the story ends, I immediately recognize its rare combination of crity, quality, and scale and begin trying to record as much of it as I can before it fades away in the manner in which dreams do. I quickly begin to despair however as it all fades even more quickly than expected while at the same time, new details and plot lines that weren’t part of the original begin worming their way into the recounting. It is all just too much and too magnificent for any waking mind to handle.
And then I woke up for real. I id in bed with my eyes closed for an unknown amount of time, trying to wrap my mind around it all, to capture and remember as much of both yers of the dream as I could. I debated whether or not to even bother this hard with trying to remember the dream. It included far too many pop culture and fandom aspects to qualify for dreams that I would normally record for posting online. Ultimately though, it was the meta commentary nature of the fact that I’d had A Dream About Writing Down Dreams that drove me to make the decision to roll over in bed, grab my phone from the bedside table, turn on the screen, feel the light through my closed eyelids, give my eyes a moment to adjust, open them, tap my Google Docs app, open my “A Dream About…” document, and start typing out this entry.
Normally I would wait until my arm went off to get up in the morning and either write the dream down after breakfast at the earliest, or - more commonly - off and on throughout the day. Something about this one hit differently though, (most likely the feeling of scale combined with the meta nature) and so instead I started typing away on my phone in the dark a little after 5:00 a.m. It’s a little after 6:00 a.m. now and work starts at 8:30. My arm will go off at 7:40. Such a rush to get this all down when it will be weeks before my post queue gets to it. I like to think it was worth it though. But maybe that’s just the sleep deprivation talking. I should try to get a little more of that before my arm goes off.
