I had this dream a couple months ago, but it's the most vivid and interesting I've had in a long time, and seemed to be unusually infused with random allusions. This ended up way longer written out than I expected.
I was on a college tour in a dark city (the time of day was very inconsistent, or else it took me a very long time to find the college) that reminded me of the Martian city in Total Recall. A huge canyon split the city, incredibly deep but not that wide. The campus, for whatever reason, was accessible only through a tunnel under one of the bridges across the canyon. I met up with a group of students before the tour, who were stuck trying to get to the tunnel. The only access to it was via a ladder at the far end of the bridge, which allowed us to climb across the support structure beneath. It was dangerous; we had to walk single file across slippery, sloped I-beams and shimmy around them, hanging by our fingertips over the abyss. Some boy who looked way too young to be touring a college, maybe 12, disappeared up a ladder and took some safer way in, apparently because he "had connections." Whatever his shortcut was, the rest of us couldn't follow. Someone fell off at one point, or maybe I was thinking about whether I'd look away if it happened. Most of us, at least, got to the tunnel safely and were greeted by some blond, stereotypical frat boy.
Apparently the bridge crossing had been an exercise to get us to bond and form some sort of group that was supposed to stick together for four years. The girl who had fallen off, if it had happened, had been somehow rescued below. Through some sort of mind control and supposed psychological engineering, this convinced us all to apply, and it turned out that there were several problems with that: The university was very expensive, and we would all have to serve in, for whatever reason, the "Chinese Army" for two years before attending. (If my dreams have an oppressive authority, it seems to often have a very specific and completely irrelevant name, like the North Korean military police or whatever this thing was.)
A huge column of students, ten abreast and stretching as far as the eye could see, had to march along a bridge through featureless white space to get to the military base, escorted by Japanese (?) models wearing skimpy Halloween-costume-style uniforms. Every once in a while we'd have to drop to the ground as quickly as possible, then get up and continue marching. I took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up following along in a rope net suspended above. Everyone seemed to pretend not to see me but I could feel people staring. When we arrived we were issued two helmets each: one straight out of Halo with all sorts of inscrutable fancy technology attached, and the other a one-size-fits-all bicycle helmet crudely spray-painted lime green. Every day we'd go out for training exercises and be told, in "wands away" style, that today we'd be using the Old Helmets. After some confusing drills, which mostly consisted of hiding behind mounds of dirt as quickly as possible, we were transferred to the Chinese Army's secret project, which consisted of dredging up early 20th century ships and refitting them as warships. Considering that the ships included the Lusitania and Titanic, I suppose it was more of a psychological warfare tactic than a cost-saving measure, though it was presented as one.
I was put into a small group under drill sergeant Shaojie Zhang, so apparently this dream took place after the events of XCOM: Enemy Within or something. Explains the technology and China's obsession with space weapons (which I'll get to later) at least. The whole thing felt a lot like Command School in Ender's Game in that most of the trainees didn't know why we were being taught to operate the boilers on the Lusitania and such. The training would take place in a sort of hybrid drydock-theater with ornate balconies surrounding the ship, packed full of uniformed recruits. The dream switched to a sort of montage covering the next couple months, during which we graduated from the Lusitania to the Titanic, and returned to normal pace with a conversation between me and Zhang. We were discussing the helmets and how we would likely (he didn't seem to know) be allowed to use the fancy helmets once we gave up on bringing them, to teach us some lesson about how we'd use anything we were told to if needed.
I got a nice cinematic view of the Earth from space at this point, revealing a humongous cannon China had built to lob asteroids (it looked like an actual asteroid somehow brought to Earth in one piece, just to be launched again) at other continents. Somehow, despite its barrel being large enough to fit a small country in, it had remained hidden for months. And now, due to some international inquiry, it was going to be used to destroy all evidence of the steamship dredging operation. I saw the asteroid like in a movie, a giant ball of flame even outside the atmosphere, and when it exploded my first thought was to yell "cover your ears!" as I looked away.
Somehow I survived. I don't even know what happened, but a few weeks later I was somehow with my mother on a sailboat (we both windsurf) being, again, trained in the operation and military applications of a wide variety of archaic ships. We would sail around on some river, tethered to a cartoonishly proportioned sailing ship so we wouldn't escape. The ship could have fit in a cube and almost touched all the sides, not even counting the stubby masts, and was manned by a group of chubby officers who looked Korean (I don't think anyone in the "Chinese" "Army" apart from Zhang was actually Chinese, at least that I saw) and watched us from lawn chairs on the deck, like it was a cruise ship. After going through a variety of small boats, we were trusted enough to be untethered, at which point we immediately escaped.
My mother was in a two-person kayak alone, and I was sailing an orca. Using some sort of harness, a shortened windsurfer mast had been attached just behind the dorsal fin, so I could sit on its back, feet dangling in the water, and sail around. It was the most fun I've had in a dream in a long time, though turning was difficult as the tail or mast kept getting in the way of my legs. As we traveled down the river space seemed to compress (I could see all the way down the river, and time seemed to pass faster. Really just a very strangely presented compression of time) and we reached a point where the water was full of floating ice. Having my feet in the water wasn't so much fun anymore, so I climbed into the kayak and set the orca free. The navigable river ended abruptly near a small building, a lone shop in an endless snowy waste. No one was inside, we had no money, and we were hungry from a long day's escape, so we ate some weird green pudding from a refrigerator. It came in little plastic containers with foil on top, except the foil went all the way down one side and the opening was on that side, just smooth plastic under the foil on top. You'd have to flip it sideways to open it without spilling all the pudding.
When we left the store it was in a crowded street, which was much more convenient than the arctic plains we'd entered from. At this point my subconscious must've run out of ideas and decided to deus-ex-machina us out of china, because we bumped into some excited woman who claimed to be a distant relative. She and her husband had wanted to send me birthday gifts for years but couldn't (because censorship? but it was money) and had saved up all the money. To make it really contrived, she might have been on her way to mail it to the US after some change in policy. (I can remember the plot, I can remember the details, but I can't remember who DIED and what happened here.) I'm fairly certain we never saw her apartment or anything, so there was some ridiculous excuse for her having the money with her. In any case, my mother and I graciously accepted the wad of cash and bought a plane ticket home.
It seems remarkably complete for one of my dreams, though most of the ones I've remembered the longest also have some vaguely coherent resolution.
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Topic: The Dream Thread (Read 609708 times)