A very movie-like dream last night. Its entire atmosphere (at least at the start) was of an '80s Sci-Fi nature, with "straight to video" production values.
Troops within an entirely enclosed 'bunker'-type world... the whole world, for us all. Modular/angular body-armour and sci-fi weaponry, 'clamshell' sliding doorways. Smoky atmosphere and muted colours. 'Opposing' troops came through one of the doors, but for some reason (perhaps because we all looked identical, each 'side') slipped past them and discovered ED209-type walking robots behind them that seemed to be the real enemy (although they were just the rear support, as far as they were concerned).
I knew that the Ed-209 was the enemy and, somehow conveyed this to everyone, so that we all started up some little-used stairways, as if up the terraces of an arena (yet still enclosed). The Ed-209 had... 'difficulties', naturally enough, but I'm not sure how we all got up the stairs, given how crammed together everyone was. At the top there's a lot more light, a much more open areas and possible glass skylights giving natural light to the scene, the first indication that anyone had that there was more to the world than that which we had already experienced. And a whole raft (NPI!) of floating 'magic carpets', some kind of polymer sheets with markings on to indicate where to lay hands and feet, technologically floating high above the space the back-end of the 'stadium steps' overlooked.
Everybody is to get onto these strange mats (bouncy bouncy!), a substance quite unlike anything we've encountered before, and the internal 'workings' easily allow us to fly those mats out and through a green forest (the first time we've seen any plants like this!), somehow interpreting natural movements (or perhaps thoughts) to take us swooping through the branches. In a couple of cases accidentally picking up a monkey and a squirrel as a temporary passenger, either accidentally knocked off the branch they were on to land on the carpet-flier involved or else willingly jumping on board for a few moments before returning to another branch on another tree.
There's an outside world, it is plain to see. We regroup and look back at the building (an angular, stepped-pyramid-style 'brutalist' concrete building with rarely-used windows at the top end, our former home/battleground doubtless being deeper with bowels of the construction, if not underground) and then we move on.
Just as we had been used to the mechanically-minded battleworld that spawned the Ed-209s and the Starship Trooper armour, to be surprised by the polymer-film 'carpets', the outside world is far more amazing. Electrically-driven (or assisted) vehicles with a plastic sheen instead of the dulled and abraded metallic/concrete one we were used to. And the dream now moves into a new storyline that seems to continue the 'escape from the system', but this time as fishes out of water rather than trying to escape the barrel that we were being so easily shot in.
But that part's more esoteric. A vehicle being driven by an (apparent) hologram that our electrically-boosted bicycles head towards the rear of, a signal and the rear opens for ourselves, rapidly catching up, to 'load' ourselves into the car itself so as to (possibly) shake any distant pursuers we may have had on the look-out for us. The ultimate aim was not resolved, but I think I can put that down to being the 'unsure future' ending of a film, perhaps the first in a series, intended to depict the transition from one level of existence into a totally new one (and, incidentally, transition into '90s-style utopian-future styling, over-saturated and with soft-focussed lenses). The second film might continue the action in the new flavour, or concentrate on the dregs of the brutalist regime coming out of their bunker to deal with a world so far largely ignorant of its existence and purpose.