Dream-Source

"The Sandman's been teasing me father away in the dreamscape, lately, and it's starting to frighten me."

"Are you having nightmares more often than not?"

"Well, not exactly.  I wouldn't call them nightmares really.  It's hard to explain."

"How so?"

"See, I generally think of nightmares as dreams where something is trying to hurt me, or where I'm expecting a terrible fate if I do wrong."

"Do you mean that you feel fear during your nightmares?"

"Yeah, like I'm actually scared of what's happening, same as if I'm awake.  Or I at least believe that my situation is real enough to be horrified by how wrong things seem."

"Then would you characterize your more recent visions as less realistic?"

"Well, yes, or maybe I should say more dreamlike.  Because some of them are pretty vivid, but I can tell that they're just nighttime illusions."

"So you do not believe in these dreams enough to feel afraid while they are occurring, as you would during a nightmare, but the nature of these dreams disturbs you once you wake up?"

"Yes, that's a pretty good summation.  But I think maybe I'll tell you about the latest one, in case that sheds more light on things:

"We were on a spaceship, that much I caught onto quick enough.  It resembled one of those dark, pseudo-organic things you see in monster-heavy scifi flicks.  Picture the insect-styled ships from the Alien movies or that living Leviathan ship from Farscape.  Beams made of segmented black carapace were all around us, and every arched corridor felt like a vein we were flowing through.  Beyond that my description fails because, frankly, I had no idea what I was seeing.  The vessel was alien, but whether I gleaned that from the dreamscape or from my own sensations of confusion, I don't know.  In any case, we were exploring the craft, it wasn't ours.  Outside my vision we had our own spacefaring vessel; we had boarded this one.  And we had gotten really spooked by the emptiness and evidence we had found.  Again, I had no grasp of the specific discrepancies bothering us, but a general air of wrongness had taken over my mood.  Then we walked into a chamber with rows of raised pallets -- the barracks, infirmary, or morgue? -- and my dreamland prescience pulled my eyes to the ceiling.  Arcing blue electricity danced across the room's vaulted roof in jagged, branching patterns.  The overall tension of the scene increased.  Then a new spit of lightning traced an oval shape that filled with blinding light and suddenly disgorged an armored form down onto the floor.  The moment this alien landed I knew it would open fire on us.  Human-shaped in futuristic army gear, the intruder did not fail my prediction, blasting incandescent cylindrical shots at us.  I keep referring to 'us,' but besides a vague sense of companionship, I never found out anything about my allies, nor had I seen much of them until that point.  But as the alien from the ceiling portal attacked, I began to spot humans in more stereotypical American Army garb firing back laser beams around me.

"Now, the conflict picked up here, which really disoriented me in the dream.  More of the armored aliens were dropping from light flashes in the ceiling, my visible companions were shooting back at them, and I was dodging and diving in an attempt to not get blasted.  Even as my view was shifting, though, and I was knocking over pallets in my scramble, I didn't fear getting shot.  Like, I intellectualized that I didn't want that result.  I acted to prevent injury to myself.  Yet I felt less worry about harm to my dream body than I would to a video game shell.  Just as easily could I have been operating the first-person POV camera on a movie set -- that was how little I cared.

"Eventually, the aliens fighting us -- not knowing whose ship we were on, I can't rightly say attacking or defending -- drove my group out of the contested room.  At the door, however, I sensed the lone human behind me fell trapped and wounded.  I had lingered fearlessly in the second-to-last position for exiting, and that final rearguard was our Lieutenant.  The aliens pressed in on us, and I immediately calculated my chances of being hit were rising fast.  But the officer needed saving.  Typical dreamland futility, I could not cry out to alert my allies.  Nor could I force my own laser weapon to ignite, no matter how my sleep-addled mind imagined me fiddling with the mechanisms.  To my invisible left, one opponent seized the LT.  Then one of the aliens' cylindrical photons passed through me, and my overworked dream processor failed to register the hit as damage.  I was too confused and frustrated with my gun and the overall scenario to even generate or comply with dreamscape rules.

"And I awoke then, somewhat more tired and weirded out for the night's journey."

"I am sorry to say, but your dream sounds fairly routine in its details thus far.  What elements struck you as most weird?"

"Well, I had to think about that one, because the dream seemed normal enough, or at least too similar to movies I liked to warrant my emotional reaction."

"That was a very good starting thought.  Where did it lead you?"

"That's just my problem: The dream road led me.  I mean, if the dream had come entirely out of my own mind, I think it would have played out even more cinematically, and my emotions would have stayed monotone and intense."

"Please explain."

"I would have felt excited the whole time, and I would have known what to do.  Or, if it was nightmare sand that got me, I would have been really terrified and understood exactly why.  Either way, I think all my frustration with the gun and the foreign sense of my setting would have vanished!"

"So you believe your brain would craft a dream scenario in which the component structures, details, rules, and plot points -- I think those are the four areas that struck you as bewildering -- all would make sense and be subject to your omniscience."

"That's a lot of words, there.  But, yes, my normal dreams don't usually confuse me until I wake up and wonder what the hell I ate."

"If your mind didn't entirely concoct your example dream, then where did it come from?"

"Some bad sand got in my eyes?  But that's what has me spooked: I feel like the dreams don't come to me anymore, so much as I drift out into them.  I'm not sure I want to go."