Steampunk Dream
Mar. 28th, 2010 04:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unforthI just had a dream so cool that I decided to get out of bed at 4 in the morning rather than risk forgetting it.
It started as a different dream than it ended as. Early in the dream, I was with my grandfather at his house. I'd gone there with Gerardo and Gerardo's step dad, and this event was take place right about now, as in the dream I remember thinking about how I had grants due on the 7th of April (not true, though I do have a big meeting that day) but that I would tell everyone that on the 5th I was completely unavailable, because I didn't want any of them to bug me with work on opening day (true). My uncle was there too, but he didn't arrive with us, so every time he showed up he startled the living hell out of me. Meanwhile, my grandfather was acting funny (not much different than he acts normally nowadays) as, for example, he told me that he hadn't been sleeping in the patio, but had been sleeping upstairs in his bedroom, even though I knew that wasn't true, in part because the patio bed was all made and there was other evidence he'd been sleeping downstairs. Aside from the bed in the patio being on the opposite wall and the addition of a table, most of this part of the dream was startlingly accurate.
The configuration of his house increasingly changed from reality the further along the dream got, and there was a shift as in the entire dream as I got startled by my uncle again, then went to sit in another room in the house. This room was very large and had a lot of long tables in it, the walls were dark gray stone like a castle, and the ceiling very high and held up by pillars. I started to think about something Andy Fisher used to do (the dream is now entirely fiction, by the by) involving these games where he'd draw a picture, and by following a set of instructions, he could send a sweet message to Jess. One of them, he'd enabled her to transform the letters ?LLLLLLLLLLL into another message. One of the funny things about these pictures was that on closer examination, they were made up of lines and numbers, and this was somehow an important component of the puzzles.
At this point, someone who looked kinda like Hugh Hefner and someone I know was (in the dream) supposed to be Stephen King came in to the room, and King was holding one of these pictures and it's instructions. The picture showed flowers, like sunflowers, made up almost entirely of 0's. Most of the zeroes (not o's) were small and composed the lines of the flowers, but some were bigger and again, this was the key to the puzzle. I don't remember going through the process of solving it, but when I had solved it, it told me and the people I was with (two others, I think, now both fictional) HAD to go to Patterson, New Jersey.
So we hopped in my car and made the drive, which proved to be longer than we had expected. I must have been starting to wake up at this point, because I remember thinking that the people driving must be pretty clueless, Patterson isn't far at all. Still, the dream segued the drive until we were almost there. Just before we reached our destination, we passed a Shell gas station which had a side building that was fancifully painted in purples and blues with some sort of fantasy scene, and I remember thinking that that was where![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fireun lived. Then, we realized the building on our left was our destination. It was immense, and resembled a castle, but it had large industrial style windows, very old and milky and impossible to see through. The entire castle was surrounded by a wall that looked like newer construction; think the difference in coloration between, say, a Welsh castle from the Middle Ages - and with stereotypical uneven sized stones, rounded on the edges - versus the walls at Vincennes (which I saw when I was in France). Yes, these reminders are more for me, this part got neat and I think I want to write a story based on it.
As we approached our left turn, we were amazed by how large the castle is, and we were conjecturing as to what it was. We thought maybe it was a place for rich people to go for entertainment, like they'd stay there and hunt and dance and generally do old-fashioned type things. The entrance to the parking lot was through a gap in the wall, and was a gravel parking lot, and there was a sign which ended our conjecturing: it was an Italian Icy plant. (I couldn't make this stuff up).
We thought it must be shut down, because it looked completely abandoned, but when we got closer to one of the windows, we could see people inside working on making and boxing frozen confectionary of many kinds, most seeming to involve frozen lumps that must have been fruit. I remember thinking that I would be unlikely to want to eat this brand after seeing this. All the people who worked there wore basically surgeons scrubs - the funny things on their heads that tie in the back, long white robes, white gloves - but there was one group in a corner wearing something different, and somehow we knew that was why we were here, so we went close to the group.
Suddenly, all hell broke loose. "Are you here to help us?" asked a short, built African American woman with her shoulder length hair in dreds. A man, with a cybernetic arm, looked eager; a second man, his hair looking like the stereotype of the mad scientist, smiled wickedly. There was shooting in another room (the room we were in, inside the castle, led into a second even larger room through an opening - not a door) about the size of one wall of my apartment, and then the woman, the two men, and a child who was also amongst the differently dressed group went busting in to the other room. A last man - this one entirely a robot, simple polished metal - remained. A woman - the owner of the factory, I knew - came up to us out of nowhere and asked if we'd be able to help move the fugitives.
I knew what this was about as part of the dream. This group of people were all escaped fugitives and convicts, and we were there to help them. I think this must have been sort of an "underground railroad" approach to helping people. At this point, the robot started to tell me the histories of the little group that I had just seen. He spoke like a man, didn't sound like a robot at all, and even rather looked like a person, but I knew somehow that he was part of one of the cyberseries.
I already have forgotten some of these stories, which is a pity cause I'm trying SO hard to remember, but I still have a few.
He started with the mad scientist hair guy (who I will now call MSHG). MSHG was a serial killer, a brutal one. As robot-man told his story, it played out MSHG's first killing; in a stereotypical mad scientist lair that looked like the basement of a castle tower, he beat a person's head in with a paint roller, and the blood sprayed all over the wall, and from the mad glint in MSHG's eye, it was clear he loved it and would do it again. (I have no memory of a part where MSHG actually did something mad scientist like with these bodies).
There were other stories, but most didn't involve describing the crime, and instead focused on their time at the factory. Life was very hard for these people for another reason. Robot-man told me that there had been a different child before, but that that child had died. There'd also been another robot, one of the "real" robots, who had been killed. I don't remember that full story, but the ending image that went with it was of the metal torso of a robot, cut cleaning in half through a diagonal line, with neon green fluid spreading along the stone floor of the castle. The face plate had come off, but as the metal head tilted back one last time in death, it shoved it's face plate (which looked rather like the unpainted version of Iron Man's in the movie) to the forefront, and then died. At this point, Robot-Man spoke bitterly of how only the U series was ever treated as truly human. I knew that U series were cybernetic men.
The next story was about a sentient dog-robot who I hadn't seen. He had the ability to synthesis any living tissue that he had eaten, and so had been helping the members of the group to get rid of their unwanted cyberattachments. One of the fugitives had only one arm, and a second had a cybernetic shoulder; the dog-robot had consumed the arm of the second (who was the African American woman) - at first to her chagrin, because she worried that the fact that her entire shoulder was cybernetic would prevent the dog from synethsizing a new one right. She was willing to go through the pain, though, (I think I might have this mixed up; I think maybe the African American was the one with only one arm, and that the one with the cybernetic shoulder might have been the man with the cybernetic arm earlier) because she knew it would help the person with one arm. Amazingly, the dog-robot was still able to do it's job, and the dream vividly showed how it rebuilt the bones of the arm (kinda like Lilu being built in Fifth Element).
Right about here was when I woke up. There were a few other little things that I can remember, though. The primary is that at some point in this narrative, the robot-man was talking about recent history and all the trouble that they'd been having; this somehow related to the exploration of America by the Spanish, and he mentioned that something had happen in 1690 that had been a serious issue (he was more specific than I now remember) but that surely I must have known it because it was in all our lifetimes. Now, I think I was older in the dream (and possibly a man) but still...
And that's all I can dredge up now. I remember more when I first woke up, and I lay in bed for more than 5 minutes, trying to lock it all in place before going back to bed, but then I decided that I'd rather come and write it down, because while it was issues, I think there might be the core of a pretty awesome story in all that mess. :) )
Now to see if I can fall asleep again...
It started as a different dream than it ended as. Early in the dream, I was with my grandfather at his house. I'd gone there with Gerardo and Gerardo's step dad, and this event was take place right about now, as in the dream I remember thinking about how I had grants due on the 7th of April (not true, though I do have a big meeting that day) but that I would tell everyone that on the 5th I was completely unavailable, because I didn't want any of them to bug me with work on opening day (true). My uncle was there too, but he didn't arrive with us, so every time he showed up he startled the living hell out of me. Meanwhile, my grandfather was acting funny (not much different than he acts normally nowadays) as, for example, he told me that he hadn't been sleeping in the patio, but had been sleeping upstairs in his bedroom, even though I knew that wasn't true, in part because the patio bed was all made and there was other evidence he'd been sleeping downstairs. Aside from the bed in the patio being on the opposite wall and the addition of a table, most of this part of the dream was startlingly accurate.
The configuration of his house increasingly changed from reality the further along the dream got, and there was a shift as in the entire dream as I got startled by my uncle again, then went to sit in another room in the house. This room was very large and had a lot of long tables in it, the walls were dark gray stone like a castle, and the ceiling very high and held up by pillars. I started to think about something Andy Fisher used to do (the dream is now entirely fiction, by the by) involving these games where he'd draw a picture, and by following a set of instructions, he could send a sweet message to Jess. One of them, he'd enabled her to transform the letters ?LLLLLLLLLLL into another message. One of the funny things about these pictures was that on closer examination, they were made up of lines and numbers, and this was somehow an important component of the puzzles.
At this point, someone who looked kinda like Hugh Hefner and someone I know was (in the dream) supposed to be Stephen King came in to the room, and King was holding one of these pictures and it's instructions. The picture showed flowers, like sunflowers, made up almost entirely of 0's. Most of the zeroes (not o's) were small and composed the lines of the flowers, but some were bigger and again, this was the key to the puzzle. I don't remember going through the process of solving it, but when I had solved it, it told me and the people I was with (two others, I think, now both fictional) HAD to go to Patterson, New Jersey.
So we hopped in my car and made the drive, which proved to be longer than we had expected. I must have been starting to wake up at this point, because I remember thinking that the people driving must be pretty clueless, Patterson isn't far at all. Still, the dream segued the drive until we were almost there. Just before we reached our destination, we passed a Shell gas station which had a side building that was fancifully painted in purples and blues with some sort of fantasy scene, and I remember thinking that that was where
fireun lived. Then, we realized the building on our left was our destination. It was immense, and resembled a castle, but it had large industrial style windows, very old and milky and impossible to see through. The entire castle was surrounded by a wall that looked like newer construction; think the difference in coloration between, say, a Welsh castle from the Middle Ages - and with stereotypical uneven sized stones, rounded on the edges - versus the walls at Vincennes (which I saw when I was in France). Yes, these reminders are more for me, this part got neat and I think I want to write a story based on it.As we approached our left turn, we were amazed by how large the castle is, and we were conjecturing as to what it was. We thought maybe it was a place for rich people to go for entertainment, like they'd stay there and hunt and dance and generally do old-fashioned type things. The entrance to the parking lot was through a gap in the wall, and was a gravel parking lot, and there was a sign which ended our conjecturing: it was an Italian Icy plant. (I couldn't make this stuff up).
We thought it must be shut down, because it looked completely abandoned, but when we got closer to one of the windows, we could see people inside working on making and boxing frozen confectionary of many kinds, most seeming to involve frozen lumps that must have been fruit. I remember thinking that I would be unlikely to want to eat this brand after seeing this. All the people who worked there wore basically surgeons scrubs - the funny things on their heads that tie in the back, long white robes, white gloves - but there was one group in a corner wearing something different, and somehow we knew that was why we were here, so we went close to the group.
Suddenly, all hell broke loose. "Are you here to help us?" asked a short, built African American woman with her shoulder length hair in dreds. A man, with a cybernetic arm, looked eager; a second man, his hair looking like the stereotype of the mad scientist, smiled wickedly. There was shooting in another room (the room we were in, inside the castle, led into a second even larger room through an opening - not a door) about the size of one wall of my apartment, and then the woman, the two men, and a child who was also amongst the differently dressed group went busting in to the other room. A last man - this one entirely a robot, simple polished metal - remained. A woman - the owner of the factory, I knew - came up to us out of nowhere and asked if we'd be able to help move the fugitives.
I knew what this was about as part of the dream. This group of people were all escaped fugitives and convicts, and we were there to help them. I think this must have been sort of an "underground railroad" approach to helping people. At this point, the robot started to tell me the histories of the little group that I had just seen. He spoke like a man, didn't sound like a robot at all, and even rather looked like a person, but I knew somehow that he was part of one of the cyberseries.
I already have forgotten some of these stories, which is a pity cause I'm trying SO hard to remember, but I still have a few.
He started with the mad scientist hair guy (who I will now call MSHG). MSHG was a serial killer, a brutal one. As robot-man told his story, it played out MSHG's first killing; in a stereotypical mad scientist lair that looked like the basement of a castle tower, he beat a person's head in with a paint roller, and the blood sprayed all over the wall, and from the mad glint in MSHG's eye, it was clear he loved it and would do it again. (I have no memory of a part where MSHG actually did something mad scientist like with these bodies).
There were other stories, but most didn't involve describing the crime, and instead focused on their time at the factory. Life was very hard for these people for another reason. Robot-man told me that there had been a different child before, but that that child had died. There'd also been another robot, one of the "real" robots, who had been killed. I don't remember that full story, but the ending image that went with it was of the metal torso of a robot, cut cleaning in half through a diagonal line, with neon green fluid spreading along the stone floor of the castle. The face plate had come off, but as the metal head tilted back one last time in death, it shoved it's face plate (which looked rather like the unpainted version of Iron Man's in the movie) to the forefront, and then died. At this point, Robot-Man spoke bitterly of how only the U series was ever treated as truly human. I knew that U series were cybernetic men.
The next story was about a sentient dog-robot who I hadn't seen. He had the ability to synthesis any living tissue that he had eaten, and so had been helping the members of the group to get rid of their unwanted cyberattachments. One of the fugitives had only one arm, and a second had a cybernetic shoulder; the dog-robot had consumed the arm of the second (who was the African American woman) - at first to her chagrin, because she worried that the fact that her entire shoulder was cybernetic would prevent the dog from synethsizing a new one right. She was willing to go through the pain, though, (I think I might have this mixed up; I think maybe the African American was the one with only one arm, and that the one with the cybernetic shoulder might have been the man with the cybernetic arm earlier) because she knew it would help the person with one arm. Amazingly, the dog-robot was still able to do it's job, and the dream vividly showed how it rebuilt the bones of the arm (kinda like Lilu being built in Fifth Element).
Right about here was when I woke up. There were a few other little things that I can remember, though. The primary is that at some point in this narrative, the robot-man was talking about recent history and all the trouble that they'd been having; this somehow related to the exploration of America by the Spanish, and he mentioned that something had happen in 1690 that had been a serious issue (he was more specific than I now remember) but that surely I must have known it because it was in all our lifetimes. Now, I think I was older in the dream (and possibly a man) but still...
And that's all I can dredge up now. I remember more when I first woke up, and I lay in bed for more than 5 minutes, trying to lock it all in place before going back to bed, but then I decided that I'd rather come and write it down, because while it was issues, I think there might be the core of a pretty awesome story in all that mess. :) )
Now to see if I can fall asleep again...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-03-28 05:47 pm (UTC)MSHG is my new favorite acronym. I want to find some way to use this outside of this context.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-29 11:25 am (UTC)Glad you liked the acronym. I was so tired, I just didn't want to have to write out "mad scientist hair guy" over and over as a name. ;)