Space Junk: Return to Sender

I was outside and it was a bright day despite all of the cloud cover that was around.  I was in a big suburban area of a big city, which I could see in the near distance in front of me.

Radios and TVs were carrying news about an alien invasion, and everyone was freaking out.  I had the feeling that the aliens were not there to harm anyone, but like many movies, "we" decided to attack before understanding what was really going on.

The military started hurling huge pieces of what can only be described as "junk" into the sky.  Chunks of old abandoned buildings (entire floors, or corner sections that were around 20 feet wide), rusted and crashed cars, and all sorts of other trash that they could find.  I'm not sure exactly what they were using to fire the stuff up into the sky even though they were doing it out in plain sight a couple of hundred feet off to my left.  Sometimes it felt like they were using huge cannons, and other times it felt like huge catapults or trebuchets.

The thing that was really odd about the whole thing was that even though they were firing all this junk up into the sky, they couldn't see what they were firing out.  The aliens were on the other side of the clouds.  It was like the clouds were perfectly opaque, despite the fact that everything was so bright, almost as if it were sunny out.  There were no dark shapes on the other side of the clouds.  There wasn't anything even indicating that they were there.  We just knew they were.

As the military fired things, they would disappear through the clouds like pebbles through the surface of a calm lake.  Nothing was falling back through, yet there seemed to be sounds of the items making contact.  This didn't seem to bother anyone for a while as they kept firing crap through the clouds.

Then, without warning, things turned horrible.  The aliens had been gathering our junk we were hurling at them and, they finally started firing it back.  Whole cars, whole chunks of buildings and everything else came crashing back at us, destroying everything around.  People were running and screaming everywhere, but there were still those of us that could only stand and watch as things unfolded.

Then a hole opened up in a small section of the clouds, and this huge arm came down through and started throwing more junk back at us.  The ironic part is that this arm was made out of the junk we had just sent through the clouds.  As we thought we were bombarding them to blow them out of the sky, they were actually taking the junk and things from it before hurling the rest back.

I remember a big chunk of building landing pretty close by to me and getting another look at that "mechanical" arm right before I woke up.

Lucidly Moving Stars

There was a lot more to the dream, but I only remember a small chunk of it now.

I was outside, I think near Weyers Cave Elementary School, it was night time, and I was looking up in to the sky.  I got the feeling that I might see stars starting to move around like I often do in my dreams, which caused me to start becoming lucid and consider that I might be dreaming.  As I watched, over some trees kind of to my right (facing towards Massanutten) I started seeing a few moving stars come up over the tops of the trees.  They weren't moving in a straight line, but rather in somewhat random and squiggly motion.

There was a man standing next to me.  He looked like he was nearing 50, and he had thinning blond hair and big glasses.  He reminded me somewhat of a more 'with it" version of Milton from Office Space.  I got his attention and pointed the moving stars out to him, and he was watching them with a grin on his face.   As I did, I thought to myself that if I asked him something, and if he gave a particular answer, then I would know I was dreaming.  I don't remember the exact question that I asked him, but it was something that I knew that he wouldn't know the actual answer to (or I thought that he would think the answer was something completely different) if this wasn't a dream.  It was something along the lines of, "Do I feel like I know what I'm doing at work?"  If he answered "yes", then I would know this was a dream.  Sure enough, while grinning and keeping his eyes on the stars, he said yes and nodded his head slowly.

I was so excited about realizing that this really was all a dream that I woke myself up.

Taking a Sleepy Pee in the Woods

I started out waking up and feeling like I had to pee.  I looked around me, and I was in the front room of a small cabin.  It was sparsely decorated with a small cot, which I was in, and a chair or two and a fireplace somewhere in the room with a small fire going.

I knew that there was someone else there at the cabin with me, but I didn't know where they were at the moment.  I only knew that they weren't sleeping.

I got up and went out the front door.  There was a bright flood light on the front of the cabin that was shining out into the yard.  The area beyond the yard wasn't quite dense enough with trees to be considered a forest, but there were plenty of trees around.  It was dark out, a little chilly, and there was a light mist hanging around.

I didn't want to pee there in the front yard, so I looked around and decided to head out along the path and through the trees out from the front of the cabin.  I trotted off in that direction to find a place to go.  As I went, I never felt fully awake.  Despite the fact that I was jogging and it was chilly out, it was like I was barely awake.  I just knew three things:  I had to pee, I was following a path, and no matter how far away from the cabin I got, the flood light shone just as bright as if I was at the edge of the yard.

I wound up jogging for about twenty minutes, following the path and winding my way around trees and hills.  I finally got to an area that was a little more open and had a bit of an upward slope to it.  I went to the other side of this area and noticed that just on the other side was the crest of a hill, and down the slope were more trees on the other side.  As I went down the far side of the hill, the flood light from the cabin finally quit following me.

Still feeling like I was mostly asleep, I also finally felt like I was out of view of the cabin and could go to the bathroom in peace.  I did so and then turned to make the return journey.

After going back over the top of the hill and seeing the flood light in front of me, I vaguely remember seeing and hearing a small herd of buffalo there in the clearing.  Some were sleeping, others were standing and quietly eating, but I could hear their breath sometimes and hear the rustle of the grass if they moved a hoof a little bit.

I started jogging again and went all the way back to the cabin, which took about another twenty minutes.

When I got back to the cabin, I was still mostly asleep, but as I slowed down and went back inside, I finally started to wake up and realize just how asleep I had been.  I was amazed that all of that running for 40 minutes in the chilly air didn't do more to wake me up.

Once I was inside, I met the other person that I was there with.  It was Jethro Gibbs from NCIS.  He was asking me where I had gone to.  I told him that I had to go pee, and he started getting agitated and angry.  He knew I had gone far away to pee, and he was asking me about where I went.  I was telling him that I wasn't sure, and he said, "Well, you didn't go out past the buffalo, did you??"

As soon as he said that, I realized that there was something out there besides the buffalo.  I don't know what it was, but I knew it was dangerous.  It was something nebulous and not well defined.  It had the feeling of some mystery from Lost, like the smoke monster or a force or something.  I knew immediately I had been stupid to go out that far, but I had forgotten, and now I felt very lucky to be back safe.

Pandora's Clamshell

[It's been a while since I've written a dream down, but this is just too weird not to.]

I was outside of Weyers Cave Elementary School near the gymnasium entrance.  It was pretty early in the morning, and it was chilly out with a tiny little bit of fog or haze.  Even though it was mostly light and the sky was bluish gray, the sun was not yet out, street lights were still on, and the stars were visible in the sky.

I was standing around and talking to a few people.  I was mostly chatting with kids who were either going into the school or older kids who were waiting on the buses to take them up to the middle school or high school.  Em, my wife, eventually showed up, as well as a few other adults, and we were all just standing around outside and talking in small groups of two or three.

While Em and I were talking, I thought I noticed a shooting star out of the corner of my eye.  I turned and looked at the sky and saw another, with another quickly following.  Then there were two or three at a time, and they just kept coming, picking up in frequency very quickly, and all moving downward, almost as if they were rain.  After about ten seconds, every star looked like a shooting star, and the lavender colored sky was full of nothing but white streaks.

Suddenly, an area of the sky off to the left emptied of all stars and shooting stars, and a giant red and orange cartoon image of a clam shell with angry cartoon eyes showed up in that empty area of sky.  The thing was so big that it was as if I were holding a letter size piece of paper at arm's length, yet I knew it was "in space."  While it looked around, the falling stars continued. 

Then, out of nowhere, what looked like a giant square wooden frame, like a rough picture frame, faded into existence around the angry clam shell.  Then from above and behind the top of the frame, a giant door swung over and around, slamming down on the rest of the frame in front of the clam shell.  Instead of a thunderous boom that I had expected, I heard what sounded more like a hollow "thunk".  The door flapped up and down several more times, giving out a hollow thunk each time it slammed down over the clam shell. 

Somehow we all understood this wooden frame and lid to be part of the clam shell's display of anger rather than something that was happening to the clam shell.  It terrified everyone, and at that point we all started to run. 

I ran off towards the left first, which was across the narrow road/parking lot that looped around the school.  There was a house across the street, and I was trying to hide on this side of it since the clam shell was in the sky on the other side of it.

Almost as soon as I got there, I forgot about the giant angry cartoon clam shell in the sky with it's display of angry box power, and I looked off to my right.  The main road that went in front of the school was there, and as I watched, several cars were coming down the road and driving by the school.  At first there was nothing unusual about this, but then I realized that none of the cars had drivers in them.

At first I wasn't sure that anyone was controlling the cars, but I came to realize that there were people that were mentally controlling these cars from somewhere else.  It was as if everyone was sitting at home and sending their cars out to run errands for them.

I thought to myself, "Well, if that's the case, then I bet I can use my own mental power to push the cars off the road."  I picked the next car that was coming down the road, which sometimes appeared black or gray and sometimes appeared red, and I focused on it.  As it got closer, I started mentally pushing it's wheel to turn it to the left, away from me, and into a fence or ditch across the street.  Sure enough, it worked!  I did it with three or four more cars, too, and at one point I wondered if any of the people controlling these cars would wonder what was going on with them, or if they would just notice that they didn't come back and not worry about it too much.

With one or two cars after that, I think I made them take off down the road really fast, but then right after that the dream ended.

The Life Stealers

It was night time out, and it was somewhat rainy and I found two white zip ties out on the street. They may have been in or near a garbage can or dumpster. One was about eight inches long and the other was about three. I picked them up and put them in my pocket.

I went into a building close by and went through the hallways until I came to a lit room. The rest of the building seemed to be empty except for this room. I walked in and it looked like the classroom where I had my government class as a senior in high school, but it was setup more like a meeting room at a hotel. It had a buffet of snacks along the back and there were tables setup in the middle of the room with chairs around them. The room had a look of disarray showing that there had been a great deal of activity there earlier, but now there were only about five people in the room.

I recognized one of the people as Benjamin Franklin. He was talking to a taller fellow who was dressed in a black leather jacket, a black teeshirt and black jeans. Franklin was dressed in his typical colonial garb while everyone else was dressed the same way as the other man. Franklin and the other man seemed to be in an intense conversation, but I wasn't paying very close attention to what they were talking about. I did notice that Franklin had a bit of an odd appearance about him. He wasn't so bald on top and his entire presence had a bit of a green hue to him as if he had just stepped off a $100 bill.

I was just walking slowly around the room, looking around at the items on the tables and thinking about the zip ties I had in my pocket. I took them out of my pocket to look at them, and it seemed that there was a sudden burst of activity in the room. I looked around and saw everyone heading for me. They all starting asking me questions about where and how I got them. I could sense that they really wanted them, and I decided to find out why they wanted them so badly and what they would give me in return.

I don't recall actually asking anyone about the zip ties, but Franklin and one or two of the others started explaining it to me. Basically, when one person killed another person, they left behind their age, which took the form of these white zip ties. This age could be added to the killer's current age just by keeping them in their pocket, and it would guarantee the carrier of being able to add those years to their own natural life and live that much longer. For this reason, killing the oldest people they could find was the best for them as it would give them the longest amount of time to live. Evidently they also slowed the aging process a bit, as it turned out that Franklin was the leader of this group, and he was now 303 years old and didn't look a day older than his appearance on the $100 bill.

Somehow during the course of the conversation, I came to realize that the zip ties I had in my hand were worth about 135 years, and because I was the one holding them, then my life would extend by 135 years. I wasn't sure how I felt about that, but the others around me seemed convinced that they needed to get me to hand them over to them without trying to make a big deal about them. Rather than handing them over, I somehow managed to leave, although the dream ended as I was doing so.

Water Problems on a Ring World

For part of the dream, I was reading about the story, and part of the time I was experiencing it as if I was in it.

The world in the book I was reading/experiencing was a very strange one. For the most part, the world was a flat one. Imagine a flat disk, almost like a dinner plate, that's about a mile across. The entire disk is the surface of a body of water. New water came from below at exactly the center of the disk, and it flowed outwards to the edge and ran over. The water came from and returned to "nothing" because whatever was below the disk was not known.

Around this disk of water were something like canyon walls. These walls were about four or five stories tall and muddy red in color. There was a space of a few feet between the edge of the water disk and the canyon walls that allowed the water to overflow and fall down into the bottomless abyss below. In the surface of the canyon walls there were doors and windows carved in them, and this is where the people lived. The doors and windows resembled many of the cliff dwellings of some of the southwest Native Americans.

That was pretty much all there was to this "world." There was nothing above it, and there didn't seem to be anything below it. Well, it didn't seem to be resting upon anything. It just floated out there in this atmosphere bubble. It was almost like a ring shaped island in the middle of an ocean, except that there was no ocean for it to sit in, and the water that was there didn't even extend quite all the way to the island itself.

As for the story that was going on, I don't remember most of it. I know that part of the time I was reading about the story, and other times I was in the story, or at least watching it from a first person perspective. During the times that I was reading the story, I was sitting or standing in a place that closely resembled the dining room of Grandmama's house in Weyers Cave.

Part of the story was just about the people and how they lived. The people were basically like a port town or village from the 17th or 18th century. There was an older man (a father type of figure) and young girl that was about 10, and they were going about their "normal daily routine." The father was basically teaching the girl his trade so that she could learn it and do it at a later time. Many people in this place made their living by going out into the water for things, such as fishing, I suppose, or doing something to help maintain the, for lack of a better word, stability of the water.

Evidently there was something about the water to be maintained because there seemed to be a constant sense of how important it was to do certain tasks to keep the water from... doing something. I don't know exactly what that something was, but it would basically lead to catastrophic world failure and destruction if it wasn't taken care of.

At one point something DID happen, and the girl wound up getting swept up into this event where she wound up going under the city/world into these deep caverns because the water feeding upwards had become too strong and was threatening to somehow destroy the water disc or the world around it. The girl was wandering around, and there was a river of lava to the right side and she was carefully walking down a path cut in the side of the giant open cavern. The path went around the outer wall of the cavern in a downward spiral, and in some places it went through parts of the cavern wall that suck out into the middle.

Sometime around this time I came back out of reading the book and I was talking to someone about it. I think that I had somehow gotten a different visual in my head of how the world in the book was laid out, and we were discussing it.

Telepathy Testing at the Sleep Clinic

I went to a sleep clinic about my snoring. The clinic was in Weyers Cave, and in fact was in something that was very much like the front living room area at grandmamma's house, only on a larger scale. The main door was on the left side of the house (when facing the back of the house from the front) instead of in the front, and the main room was both the reception area and the testing area.

I spoke with the receptionist/nurse when I first entered, and she told me a little about what they were going to be doing. I was already in my pajamas, and I was lead to a table where they put an IV in my left arm. They only had the IV in for a short amount of time, and I'm not sure exactly what it was for. Part of the time it seemed to be for drawing blood, and another part of the time it was like they were using it for injections. I don't know what the injections did, but I didn't have any problem with them.

Then after a short time I was lead to a couch that looked a lot like the red velvet couch that used to be in the living room. I took a seat, and the nurse sat on the floor about six to eight feet away. She had me to close my eyes and tell her what I saw.

So I closed my eyes and I waited for a few moments. I didn't really see anything, and just at the last moment when I was opening my eyes and saying that I hadn't seen anything, I caught a brief image of a big silver "coin" that was spinning in the same way that a tire rolls and it had some sort of engraved looking picture on it.

She told me that this was a telepathy test and that I was supposed to see "bread." I realized that the image I had seen on the coin was wheat, and I told her that. She didn't seem very impressed, but we continued on. I felt like I now understood what I was supposed to be looking for, so I was excited to continue. It was almost more of a teaching than a testing.

We went through a series of five or six more words that I was supposed to see, and I wound up getting them all correctly. One was an eagle, but I don't remember what the others were. I just remember that each one came up the same way. In the darkness behind my eyes, I'd see a large coin fade into existence, spinning around and slowing down to a stop and becoming clearer. I would tell the nurse what image I saw on the coin, and she would tell me that I was correct.

I was extremely excited about this, and she was saying something about how helpful it can be. I wound up asking her if Em (my wife) could do this too because I knew that she'd think it was awesome. She said that she'd have to come in for testing/teaching, but it was a good possibility that she'd be able to do it, too.

Then conversation turned to my car. I think she was telling me something about how lice can breed in the seats if they are exposed to something I can't remember. I told her that my car was brand new, and she said that it could be transferred from an older car, and I thought about how dirty my old car had been before I got rid of it.

Then I went to where the kitchen would be and I saw my cat, Nelliebelle, there by the table and chairs. She was kind of wandering around and flopping over on her side trying to find a good place to relax. She seemed to be acting a little loopy, but I couldn't pinpiont what I thought was up with her.