Tag: aliens

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Dream Journal

Missed the Bus; Mother Zerg

On an overnight group bus trip. We crowd into a wood-panelled roadside tchochke store filled with various odd objects. Happening to know the purpose behind many of them, I regale my companions (classmates? friends?) about one item after another. I know at some point that I’m oversharing and being annoying, yet I’m so enjoying being an expert on something — I get carried away with it. I recall this as “acting enlightened” (whatever that means). As a result I miss the group bus when it departs, leaving me stranded after the store closes. I loiter and pace outside in the parking lot, wondering what to do, trying to reason out where I might get a ride. Across a long distance of strip mall emptiness, I make out what might be the bus, my bus, with all my people that left me here. But that could be simply wishful thinking. By the time I could walk all the way over there, they might very well be gone.

I’m part of an alien hive-mind-ish force, zerg-like, bred in great numbers like insects. As one of the exceptional males who survived, today I’m tasked with re-fertilizing the zerg mother. This is regarded as somewhat of an honor for a zerg drone — it’s rare for us to have sex. The actual experience is unpleasant though. The zerg mother stares at me with gazeless eyes, her exaggeratedly big hips meant for storing vast quantities of genetic material to make whatever brood is needed. But I am a brood — could this be my mother? Not that it matters really; we’re all so genetically alike anyway. But since that’s the case, why does it even matter if I contribute my material to future broods? I find myself wondering if I’m allowed to simply stop having sex with the empty-eyed queen. Eventually I do — and nothing bad happens. But what now is my purpose as a drone?

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Dream Journal

Camping on an Island, Rescued

Camping on a private beach on the south shore of an island when an alien invasion is announced.

I don’t know the private landowner who I’m staying with, but he has a floating camper with hidden food stores, on a big swampy plot to the southwest. The land is basically only being held until it’s valuable enough to sell for home development, which I find regrettable.

I watch a childlike version of myself be rescued from under a table. After I recover, and can walk along the offramps of the freeway out of town, the same area is searched again. I then help the person who helped me, to now get a small kid who has a leg injury out from under the table. I feel warmly about this.

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Dream Journal

No Rules Govern the Instant

Generational epic on an ocean liner evading a single alien xenomorph. Stories piled on, variations on a theme, successive generations remixed between earlier characters.

On the last day of the long ship journey, about to pull into port, I share a very specific old sailor’s tale I learned. There’s a brief moment when the ship has come to rest at the dock, yet before the rope is tied fast to a mooring. You can do anything in that moment, the situation is a technical gap in maritime law. No rules officially govern that instant. One of my companions asks if that means someone could murder you and get away with it… I presented this as a fun curiosity so this isn’t the reaction I was hoping for.

Giving a presentation over a projector to an audience with a front row that includes my wife, her boyfriend, and his wife. Part of it involves signing up for new internet (or mobile) service. One reason for that is the signup sequence which has a classy pixel art retro vibe. It unexpectedly reminds me of something my former crush would really like. I get a bit sad when I remember we don’t speak anymore.

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Dream Journal

Last Day of School

basketballs on court

Enacting last days of an ancient invasion between two peoples, visiting a string of gates which jump to different reenactment zones, stories of the war. Lofty snowbanks, rocky canyon passes, battle plans, gruff male voices, muscular insectoids (they look like the Krogan from Mass Effect).

It’s the last day of the school year, at a place that feels like my middle school. They have us sit at other’s desks and read aloud from their journals of that year — an exercise in “seeing though other’s eyes”, so we’re told. But it feels very much like tricking us into spying on ourselves.

The drama teacher at my high school, Mr. Thelan, is lecturing after the last bell of that year has passed. He hasn’t even told his assembled students they could go, if they wanted. I would guess it’s a test or object lesson for his theater students: that actors can be held longer than in their interests, by their love or fascination or even novelty with the story. I myself am lounging behind this herd of a class because there’s comfy chairs and internet on the stage. One guy tries to argue with me for being there instead of a class and I have to quote the school district handbook about when “school year” is defined.

Digging through drawers at the side of the gym, making sure I don’t leave any of my stuff (clothes or information, etc.) since I’m not going to be here again. I’m asked about moving a pair of giant owls constructed over the year from a massive amounts of wooden boards. I start to give an answer, but the answer becomes “this being 2020 I don’t even think we can donate it to Urban Ore.” I resign myself to the idea of someone else deciding if they’re lost.

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Dream Journal

Bait Locker, Alien Repellent, Rustbucket RV-land

In a locker room, lots of stuff I need to gather. I head out once my time is over, my two friends waiting outside the heavy glass door, before realizing I still left a bunch of stuff. In the bottom half of the locker, the compartment is open so I can reach in and find other people things. There’s at least a few pieces of funny money left as a trap, I assume. The steam room hot tub adventure cost at least a couple hundred bucks.

I am a scientist like Rick Sanchez and I’m inside my house during the course of an insectoid invasion. I am one of the only people with an alien-repellent sound barrier. The insect forces go to great links with transparently fake news reporter interviews trying to discover how it works and to overcome it. I see a diagram of the architectural plan of the house with the bedroom just outside the laboratory and the clean room.

I’m in the small kitchen of my family’s old Cathedral City house. About twice as many people live with us now, and I think of them as in my family. There are two refrigerators and an upright freezer next to each other and we’re even thinking of putting another refrigerator blocking off the counter corner. I’m using a glass tray to keep a group of aquarium feeder worms alive. I have to use the same tray to store macaroni and cheese above the worms. Meanwhile, two younger kids are bothering me, throwing food and interrupting my project. I ask my dad, who is staring into space eating cereal, to tell them throwing food wasn’t okay. He responds apathetically, and in frustration I fling a spoonful of grits at him, spraying the entire kitchen corner. He still doesn’t react.

I move into a community of rustbucket houses. Old RVs and trailers are pushed together into a complex warren-like structure — everyone seems to have built a private hobby space so they can sneak off by themselves to do work, camp chairs inside old shipping containers stocked with rebar. One green RV from the ’40s has a particularly unpleasant individual in it, but a beautiful slide-off stove in the kitchen, converted to be an outdoor courtyard. It’s a very welcoming community, but also “is this how poor people really are?” is a question that comes up. At some point I try to see if I can build a large house on one of the unfilled plots of land. The small house just downhill from the main road was one of the first built.

We go off and drive on an adventure in an old VW van. We stop at a large gate down the road, waiting with an invisibility power-up activated. When a train comes behind us the gate opens and we can use a speed boost to drive overland far away from where we’ve driven before. What would take 20 minutes only takes about 3, but we still don’t reach our destination — a place called Challengeburg.

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Dream Journal

Alien Math Slip, Party Picnic

Cartoon Ian Malcolm (who’s also an alien incarnation) giving mathematics talk and accidentally reveals that 910 goes into 977, thus setting off an academic stampede to discern their number base.

DMT, Arizona — picnic partying with Mickey and conserving a bag of white powder. Somehow this is also Germany. We cross a small river of juice and I thank him for helping me catch my wireless earbud before it falls in the substance. It’s a fun and celebratory mood. Could be a combination of Mickey and Lauren, come to think.

Earlier: Lynae going down on me. I realize at some point it’s a dream and am impressed I feel it, although I know it isn’t very intense.

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Dream Journal

An Inferior God

Story interpreted from a dream in three parts. Recovered/copied from where I originally wrote it, a wiki maintained for my own creative writing.

Suppose a technologically advanced alien civilization does somehow accidentally interferes in the development of another culture. They are forced by circumstance to rescue it from annihilation — a rogue individual sets himself up as a world dictator, or some such disaster, a disaster which could in fact be their fault. The damage is done and the worst happens: the aliens (or their agents) begin to be worshipped as gods. The culture’s development shifts focus to them instead of keeping any semblance of forward momentum. The mentality of a cargo cult sets in.

Then the only moral thing for those aliens to do would be breaking the culture of its dependency; the only way to do that is to further interfere. Very methodically they must instill the idea that god has limited resources, that [a] god isn’t omnipotent. To do so such that seems it’s been this way all along. Offerings to the gods might come in the form of donated energy. CCTV cameras are the way to watch over worshippers and guard holy places. The central idea is for the “contaminated” culture to indulge its obsession and work through it, to raise its collective self-esteem by doing as much for the gods as the gods have shown they can do for themselves. Outwardly it may appear as an oppressive and subjugated society, but the ultimate goal internally is to subvert the entire artificial structure.

The deals with a few things: how oppressive societies contain the seeds of their own destruction, but also how [human] nature inherently desires order, explanation, even its own subjugation. It also deals with the pace of enlightenment, in that the artificial boundaries are only crossed when an individual chooses to cross them. It contains the hope that, even with senseless repression, some good may come of it.