February 8, 2012

Wacky Dream

When the nights turn cold.....but not too cold, I tend to have the strangest dreams.  With the mild winter we've been having it seems that things have hit the sweet-spot for my nocturnal fantasies.

I'm not one to keep a dream journal, but sometimes I don't need one.  Some of my dreams continue on from night to night and others simply replay themselves on different (not always consecutive) nights.

The last two nights I've had the same dream....and it was a weird one.


My dream started on-board a huge Russian aircraft flying low across a desert landscape.  This aircraft was so large that the engines were actually Saturn V rockets (Why it wasn't the Russian N1 rocket I don't know).  Most of the aircraft was cargo space, but there were a few passengers.  I remember talking to another passenger who was someone famous, but I could not recall who that person was.  The aircraft was flying too-low and you could hear the "Bitching Betty" telling the pilots to pull up.  There was a great rumble and roar as the rockets strained to lift the plane up above the approaching plateau where we landed.

Something like this (rockets are to scale)
Once we landed a whole slew of locals greeted the plane on the large, unimproved airstrip.  Whole caravans of camels, pack horses, and even goats were loaded up with supplies from the hold of the plane.  Our small group of a few Land Rovers had to transition through this throng on our way out to the open scrubland desert.

A couple day's worth of dusty driving took us to another plateau on the extreme edge of the wilderness, the point where any human civilization ends.  On this plateau is a small monastery of  Buddhist Warrior-Monks.  These monks are to help us as we foray into the great unknown and are part of a side-quest in our studies.  The concept of pacifist warriors is too interesting of a topic to go unstudied.

I'm a junior member of the group, which in my dream has me depicted like a teenager as far as my stature goes.  Our expedition was rather small and well-equipped but we didn't want to flash our wealth and equipment around with our first meeting with the monks.  Instead of setting up our campsite we would just shelter where we could outside the monastery.  Soon after we spread out and bed down one of the lead researchers starts going nuts because he is missing some important papers of his.

This researcher makes the junior members of the crew spread out and search the monastery while he bumbles around the vehicles.  We end up having to maneuver through a warren of odd passageways and barren rooms which are open to the cliffs around the monastery.  The monks have power in these unused sections and we turn on the lights to help with the search.  Small insects quickly swarm into these rooms and soon it is a scene out of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

After an initial walkthrough into areas of the monastery we hadn't even visited, the researcher hasn't even bothered to search his vehicle.  The junior researchers have to go back through the warren of passageways and look again...and shut off the lights we left on during the initial walk-through.  In the time span between walk-throughs, the insects not only became more numerous, but larger.  It is hard to keep the buggers off of me as I work my way through the rooms.  One of the final rooms has a spider the size of a small pony in it and it attacks me.  Fortunately I manage to parry with a walking stick I had picked up.  The beast left me a little gift of two fans.

When I got back to the party I just went off on the older researcher.  Evidently his all-important paperwork was in the cab of his Rover and he couldn't be bothered to look for it before sending the junior researchers off to uncertain death looking for something we could never find.  No way was I going to let this a-hole lead the research team.  As I berated him he tried to pull rank, but it wasn't happening.  The expedition was on the precipice of failure, until I showed the stick that still bore the spider's fangs.  That lead researcher was rearing back to strike me in a final attempt to wrestle back control of the group, but was stopped by a monk.

The monks have been largely quiet and passive throughout this whole exchange.  They haven't even agreed to assist us with our studies yet.  The monks quickly changed their minds when they saw the fangs and pledged to help our expedition, or more specifically, follow me.  Evidently the empty corridors and rooms that opened up to the outside were designed specifically to encourage the creatures from the wilderness to the monastery.  These normally peaceful monks were highly trained to combat these beasts and confronting the spider, which was called a Shoggoth (I know that doesn't quite make sense), and living to tell the tale was some kind of right of passage.

My dream ended there unfortunately.  This could have ended up being an epic serial dream, the likes of which I hadn't had since my youth.

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