Had another of my cinematic-style dreams last night. This one told a half absurd, half serious story about a changeling (in this dream, a shape-shifting alien) who took the place of a baby whom a young Alaskan couple had recently lost. The protagonist was a friend of the changeling, who grew up alongside him. Jump to many years later, where the protagonist is working a desk job at a government intelligence agency, when a full-scale alien invasion of Earth begins (the aliens being from the now-grown, slightly jaded Changeling's homeworld). Through a series of circumstances orchestrated by shape-shifters planted all over Earth prior to the invasion, the highly-trained Men-In-Black-esque UFO Defense Force were all incommunicado when the invasion began, and the protagonist, along with the rest of the average joes and janes from around the office, get roped in as stand-ins for Earth's last line of defense.
From that point, the Changeling alien basically is trapped between the human family and friends who raised him, and the alien kin who allegedly sent him to infiltrate and destabilize Earth in the first place. Cue incompetent low-atmosphere dogfights between a grudging human-raised alien, and his childhood human friend who was roped into fighting the aliens off... all the while horribly misusing high-powered sci-fi weaponry.
As happens once in a great while, the dream also included an absurd, and oddly heartwarming, Disney-esque musical number about the value of life and the importance of pushing on through present hardships to get to better days, set to a bunch of refugees from a downed passenger airliner struggling through a snowy cliffside (and eventually sledding down on metal shrapnel once the song hit full-swing) to get to a nearby mountain-climber's base camp. One of the characters, a woman in her mid-50s, while singing, hints about how days ago she was considering suicide, but now with the world gone to hell and her facing the possibility of death every day, she is really enjoying the moment... which was more than slightly ironic, given their circumstances. I sadly cannot remember most any of the lyrics (they didn't rhyme this time), but I can recall the ghost of it, along with the tune itself.
So yeah, pretty good dream, all in all.