I had another dream with a train. I just remember one part, me with my parents buying tickets somewhere. There were two trains, and both went to the same destination. It got a bit strange from there, never consistent, the trains never looking the same when I looked back, the station shifting between a few I've been to. The only constant was incredibly bright sunlight coming down from straight above, really the only way I can distinguish it from other dreams I've had about trains. (or maybe some of those were part of this one?) We're discussing what kind of ticket to buy. There's a flat car at the end of one of the trains and, since this will be my last time on one of these trains, I want to ride on it. That's allowed, apparently. We go out to the platform and the trains are now very different. The one closer to us is Amtrak or something, the other is much wider, a bit taller, and apparently a bullet train. The flat car is on the back of the Amtrak one. I have some discussion with my parents about the price of the ticket and how if I'd known that the flat car was going to cost 155$ (no idea why I remember this) I wouldn't have asked for it. Turns out this is because the flat car is on the bullet train. No, now both trains have one, but the cheap train goes somewhere else. (Apparently a normal ticket would still get us where we needed to be?)
We look at the clock above the platform, which is currently in the form of the Tel Aviv University station, look over the fence past the end of the tracks as though the trains are pulling into the station, and jump down onto the tracks to run to the bullet train when the time is right. It is on a track with no corresponding platform, so we have to vault off the "unavailable" cheap flat car to get to it. My stepfather reaches it first, and it starts to move.My mother and I turn back to get on the other flatcar, which will apparently not only take us where we need to go, but at the same speed, so we can stay "together" across the gap between the trains. She's on the train already, asking if I need help, and I'm grabbing at whatever I can get to climb up as it starts moving, too. I have a brief idea to somehow slingshot myself across the gap using the train's momentum, but even dreaming I realize that will never work. Somehow I just can't grab onto anything on the train; instead of the utilitarian industrial tread you'd expect, it's styled like those rubber-coated playground platforms, with big circular holes that I can't quite reach to hook my fingers into. I'm about to slip off when I trigger a cutscene or something and just skip ahead to when the train pulls into a museum. A specific museum. I can't remember the rest, but it was vaguely similar to my actual visit there.
The ticket pricing, though it's really barely related at all, reminds me of a specific conversation I had earlier this week about helicopter taxi service. I don't know why.
Edit: I had another dream. No trains this time. Then I typed most of it out, bumped my mouse, and lost it all... Here goes the second draft!
It was an overcast day, and the alien occupiers were leaving. From some specific area perhaps, or just moving some cargo. Whatever it was, they were doing something that involved putting lots of aliens and boxes in a squat, froglike, blue-gray aircraft. They seemed unnaturally calm, continuing with their business even as rocks were thrown at them and some collapsed from concussions. I didn't get a good look at them through the crowd, but they were tall, thin, greenish gray, and obsessed with making select pieces of high technology glow painfully bright blue. For the most part, that meant weapons. I was holding one, for whatever reason. It was bulky in proportion to the aliens' size, but surprisingly light, made of the same material as the ship. I didn't really notice I had it until someone with curly hair and a top hat whispered in my ear to fire. That was probably an alternate version of me. A very specific one, that I could probably go on for a while about... but he was telling me to shoot, so I stood up straight and did so.
The projectile was a crescent of bluish light maybe a foot long, oriented more or less in the direction of motion and spinning slightly off its long axis, shedding sparks. The rotation produced an obnoxious Dopplered screaming as it flew. It exploded on impact, killing one of the two guards and all the aliens on the loading ramp. All hell broke loose. A few other members of the crowd pulled guns, the remaining guard halfheartedly returned fire, and within a minute the aircraft was a lifeless, mangled wreck. Something in the sky got angry. A bunch of soldiers had appeared at some point, possibly joining the fighting partway through, and together we hid in a fenced off area full of metal lockers from the wrath of the sky thing. It would bring down something that would make the weapons just employed look like firecrackers, and that particular phrase could only mean one thing: nukes. We were barely fifty feet from the craft, but of course the lockers would protect us. And so they did. It was probably something more like a dirty bomb, really. I panicked about "fallout", and lacking any sort of mask I pulled my shirt over my mouth and tried not to breathe. This served me all right until I could get a "proper" mask, which was actually a paper towel on a rubber band and made me feel really silly, especially when I returned to the blast site in an inexplicable crowd of teenagers and realized no one else was using masks. It was all a sham! And so it ended.
Now, for the wonderful, wonderful tabulation of inspiration. The alien craft was parked next to the barn/military base from XCOM:EU, and the crowd was backed up against it. The alien weapons probably came from some discussion here on plasma weapons I read last night. The projectile itself is a blue version of the attack animation for Terraria's Arkhalis. The soldiers were in vaguely WWII US uniforms, and probably come from Cryptonomicon, though one who stood out is how I imagined Billy Pilgrim to look. The fenced in area is the overgrown substation map element from XCOM 2, with the transformers replaced by the bath house's lockers from Stardew Valley. I've had a cold all week, so paper towels, covering my mouth with my shirt, and considering wearing masks in public have become very familiar. The overdressed high school students and the path they walked on are from a performance I attended a week ago. And last but not least, the "the radiation is not actually there!" comes from a weird cold-war-conspiracy-theory sci-fi piece I read last night, which I've regrettably forgotten the title of. It was very good and involved nuclear rockets.
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Topic: The Dream Thread (Read 607471 times)