Scifi Dream

You can probably skip this one.

I know dreams are really only interesting to the dreamer, and I want to keep what I can of this one around because it was so involved. It happened in several segments as I awoke, fell asleep, awoke, went to the bathroom, awoken by the cat to let the it out, but the cat wouldn’t go, and so on. I’m not exactly sure of the order and it’s been hours since I got up, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

It was an end-times space-based dream. I was an astronaut and we were following a scout ship that was trailing an artifact, or silent alien ship as it passed through our solar system. Our ship was better supplied and equipped, but the scout ship was a small manned space station, maybe, and had started out first. One of the astronauts on the space station had drifted away from it somehow and everyone was mourning his loss. I knew he had to be on a similar path and nearby, so I went out on the surface of the ship in a pretty nifty space suit and called for a small course correction that wouldn’t cost us too much fuel. As we approached I could see the drifting space suit and anchored my feet on the ship and reached out and was barely able to grab him. My first instinct was to swing him towards the Earth’s Moon as we were nearby and have someone on the moonbase save him, but decided to just send him inside the ship.

I hung out on the outside of the ship for a long time and as we got near Jupiter we caught up and docked with the scout ship. There were clouds all around like maybe we were inside the upper part of Jupiter’s atmosphere. I could see a cluster of several glowing lights of different colors just inside a cloud and identified it as the alien ship. Then turning and looking around I could see several other ‘ships’ at different points in the clouds. There was a lot of discussion over the radio how we could reach them and what we should do.

Then we were back in geosynchronous orbit over Salt Lake City I was still outside the ship and marveling at how the city had changed in the decades that we were gone. The Great Salt Lake had been mostly drained for some sort of economic reason and a Bingham Copper Mine-like pit had been dug around the capitol area, lowering  it and the surrounding buildings and homes, intact thousands of feet. All that was left of the lake had drained into a little ring almost circling the capitol which was at the lowest point. The city and county building, however, was still at the original elevation and accessible by a small peninsula jutting out into the pit.

Then I was down in the arcology dug into the walls of the pit. A series of tunnels and rooms that the survivors were using as living and science quarters. We were covertly gathering esoteric equipment and planning on leaving the Earth behind to it’s doom. We could only save a small number of people and were preparing some sort of exodus. I was winding tubes and cords around the equipment preparing it to ship out. We decided to get to a base on the moon first and decide where to go from there.

We were in an underground moon base. I guess that thinking of it as an exodus had sunk in, because everyone that was leaving was Jewish except me. I’m not talking Hasidic stereotypes or anything, I just knew everyone was Jewish except me. A scientist came running in and started excitedly telling everyone that because of quantum entanglement we could jump in a split second from our cave to an entangled one on Mars and be safe from the apocalypse. There was a big argument about we didn’t know anything about the Martian environment inside the cave, whether there was air or water and whether it was occupied by anyone, human or otherwise. The Rabbi leader made the decision that we would set up here and send a scouting party ahead to evaluate the Martian caves. This wasn’t a popular idea among most of the people who were afraid we would be too late to escape.

Then we were in the Martian caves. Someone had taken upon themselves to trigger the jump and fighting broke out among most of the people. The few that weren’t fighting started heading out and exploring the caves, which seemed to be perfectly capable of supporting life. There was vegetation in places along the walls and somehow the caves were lit with a ruddy light that emanated from nowhere in particular. I moved into one side tunnel and came out in a small room where a few children had found tomato plants growing tomatoes the size of basketballs. One kid was holding one of the giant tomatoes and looking like he was going to dive in and give it a bite. I reminded him that he was allergic to tomatoes and shouldn’t even be holding one. He started to argue that 1) it was a Martian tomato and probably ok, and 2) he’d probably lost his allergy when making the quantum jump. I took the tomato away from him anyway and made him go wash his hands.

Somehow the whole thing was set to the Red Hot Chili Peppers “Show (Hey Oh)”