Had a dream I was in a megamall, with its design being some kind of hybrid between a SE London, Kuala Lumpur and Beijing shopping supercomplex. Everything was fairly ordinary shopping until fucking zombies attacked. Nevertheless we had a plan to stockpile supplies on the sparsely-traversed and easily defendable 5th floor using supplies we hastily grabbed from the 4th floor groceries supermarket. Whilst everyone is grabbing water, knives, hatchets, toilet paper, food and such, I'm grabbing gargantuan bottles of vodka. One of my m8s starts criticising me for the bad prioritising, I tell her I'm not going to drink it, it's for molotovs!
So with 5 big bottles of vodka I run up to the escalator leading up to the 5th floor. Looking down I see the first floor is a scene of pandemonium, just full of zombies moving up to the 2nd floor. As I look up to the 5th floor, I see people running down the wrong side of the escalator screaming about zombies. "No fair" I thought, seeing all of our supplies cut off by ridiculous sums of zombies. Seeing no time to escape and zombies running down the right side of the escalator whilst I was still stuck on the wrong side, I grabbed a kid with bodacious curly hair and leaped off the escalator onto the one below, moments before we were both grabbed by damn zambies. Also all my vodkas shattered on the floor, but that didn't matter anymore.
With zambies attacking the 4th and 2nd floor we went to the 3rd floor and bolted for the shop farthest away from the escalators, taking over a small Japanese store full of cooking utensils & sauces, quickly pulling the curtains down and pressing the button to lower the metal shutters. With the four of us inside, the sounds of carnage outside, we desperately hoped none of the zombies would wander through the paper-thin curtain before the metal shutter SLOWLY finished lowering.
After a painful 10 seconds, the shutter lowered just fine. Then the zombie horde started wailing on the shutter, and the shutters were buckling like a fence in a tornado. Luckily the store had a fire-escape so we all bolt. Problem is, all of the doors are not fucking labeled and there are multiple doors, so it's like walking through a maze of doors. This is a problem because the zombies sound like they've broken into the shop and there are zombies everywhere else in the mall, so we're half expecting to find them in the fire escape stairway too. When we come to a fork in the hallway, half of us decide to take the door to our right, the other half keep going forwards.
The door to the right goes down a staircase, which I hope means bringing us closer to ground level and out of the fucking megamall, whilst I worry the fire escape going forwards is just going to lead to more zombie'd stores. As we go down the staircase for a bloody long time, the sound of zombies behind us, it becomes readily apparent that we are not on ground level, but really far below it.
Fear that we were walking deeper into a dead end, we pressed forward when we saw signs detailing this was a shelter - dreams of strong doors, supplies for years.
Quickly we open the door and one of my friends and the child I nabbed quickly jump in. It's apparent there is only space for two, at which point the "shelter" ejects through a tunnel into daylight like some yellow UFO pod. Quickly climbing through the claustrophobic tunnel after my friends, I arrive at ground level to find they are long gone, and there are zombies everywhere. The zombies are kept at bay by a robot and an ayyylien, who explain this is all just population control measures and that my friends would be safe. We however, were on our own. The two left us and we quickly scurried away to hide from the zombies.
Our efforts to hide went exceptionally well, especially after we found a lot of the zombies had no eyes and needed to hear you. That is when my colleague loudly announced they can't see us... And so they did. Queue great running through the city until we reached the forest, exhausted but very alive
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Tonight's dream I had whilst listening to the sounds of the storm outside, all in all, it was a really good night's sleep. I dreamed I was on the alien's world with the rest of the humans who had been taken from Earth, where we were all waiting in what looked like a giant, pristine and sterile airport environment. Tons of sleek white material that felt ceramic to the touch on every surface, with very few edges to speak of in the architecture - they did like their smooth surfaces.
We were being processed very calmly by an AI kiosk who was rather excited to see us, who it described as "new items." I told the kiosk I did not want to be described as a new item, the kiosk queried why not? Because it was an item and happy to be one. I said nevermind. The kiosk gave me a bunch of clothes which all turned out to be a school uniform, one you might give to juveniles. I asked the kiosk if it knew the difference between adult and child humans, the kiosk said no.
The kiosk explained that the ayyyliens did not have culturally significant stages of development; juvenile spawn were treated as unready adults. I replied that perhaps the kiosk did understand after all! The kiosk replied, that it was unsure what I meant. Nevertheless I explained to the kiosk that the clothes it had given me were meant for a child on Earth, which the kiosk said was a problem, as it had only made school uniforms. Millions of them.
I soon saw what the kiosk meant as I entered the post-processing atrium of the ayylien airport into what amounted to an ayyylien duty-free shopping and leisure area, where I could see thousands of humans mingling amongst the ayyyliens. Some were ancient, some were very young, babes even. All were wearing the bloody school uniforms. I joked with this one lady that it had a very humbling effect, like a great leveler. The ayyyliens themselves were curious of us, as we were of them. As far as I could tell they did not possess eyes, or at least anything I could discern as eyes.
They were tall with white, leathery-skin. Some of them had a blueish tint to their skin, whilst for others their skin was purplish - like the colour of veins under an albino's dermis. They had four orifices in the lower-middle section of their head; all four were used for smelling and breathing, but two also doubled up as primary and secondary mouths. They were arrayed like a T-shape:
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They also had two mammal-like ears recessed into their head. Their hearing was supposedly amazing, with a retractable membrane for when we got too loud for them :[
I later learned from them that they possessed a tonal language. Their language consisted entirely of vowels, with the differences in tone being extremely important. Stressed, unstressed. Long or short vowels. The melody they formed being the thing which captured the meaning. This made translating what neither side of us recognised as words very difficult, but the kiosk tried its best to help. Wandering more still, I found what looked to be some kind of recreational garden, densely spotted with these sharp, triangular pillars that reached from floor to ceiling. They stretched on for as far as I could see, disappearing into a forest of obelisks. When the wind blowed through the sound it created was like a music box made of pipes, the wind catching on each pillar and resonating in the spaces between them. The kiosk began explaining how the pillars were singing the story of the ayyyliens constructing the airport, which sounded very mundane. But in the wind - how beautiful the melody was!
Eventually they let us loose on their planet. I myself chose to reside by an artificial canal that was full of what approximated a frog and thousands of tadpoles. I am unsure if they were related to the alien reproductive cycle, because one of the aliens was swimming in the canal, half-submerged, evidently guarding them. Perhaps they were pets? Livestock? Unsure.
I sat by the canal with the pleasantly warm sun overhead. Eventually the alien came closer to inspect me and I offered my hand to them as a handshake - they just booped by finger with theirs and retreated back to the middle of the canal. Later they sat by me and tried to speak, as did I. I tried my best to copy the sounds they made, not knowing what I was saying, knowing only that I could convey the intent to communicate. The alien seemed pretty expressive for a creature without eyes. After they returned to their frog canal I watched for a while longer before the dream ended