More on the Dream Theme

Nope, I didn't end up dreaming about naked test-taking while plummeting off a cliff, after all. Instead, my subconscious apparently picked up on an entirely different part of yesterday's ramble, and gave me lots of dreams featuring science fiction characters. (Yep, that's my subconscious, all right!)

The beginning of the first dream was pretty vague (or at least, my memory of it is pretty vague), but it involved a bunch of characters from Blake's 7. I'm not entirely sure which ones, but Blake was definitely there, so presumably it was the first or second season crew. They were out in the woods somewhere, apparently involved in some sort of Surivior-style stay-alive-in-the-woods competition (although apparently not by choice). The main thing I remember from that part of the dream is an image of them all walking along a forested ridge, with Blake, unsurprisingly, in the lead.

And then it turned out that, whatever was actually going on, Scorpius from Farscape (yup, him again!) was behind it all. I honestly have no idea just what he was doing and why, but apparently it involved some extremely complex behind-the-scenes machinations. I don't have a clear sense of what happened next -- indeed, I'm pretty sure I didn't in fact see it happening in the dream at all, and I suspect my brain simply interpolated it in there somewhere to explain the shift from the B7-in-the-woods part of the dream to the Scorpius one -- but it seems the B7 gang did something that accidentally released a huge blast of some kind of radiation. I had the definite impression that it was entirely inadvertant, and that they probably hadn't even realized it had happened. I guess it didn't have an effect on them, for some reason.

But Scorpius, it seems, had built this nifty little secret chamber into the side of a hill, and that particular hillside must've been what got irradiated, because I got this neat little shot of the "camera" panning through a door and coming to rest on Scorpius, lying very, very still, with his normally pasty-white skin all burnt pink. (It was actually kind of gross.) It turned out, though, that that wasn't actually Scorpius at all, it was a clone of him. But Scorpy's girlfriend, Natira[*], was actually in the chamber, and she took a lethal dose of radiation. When the real Scorpius showed up a moment later, she was already dying, though she did find the time to inform him that she'd been pregnant before she expired. Well, Scorpy was really, really pissed off (gee, who knew he even wanted kids?), and immediately got himself psyched up to go off and wreak some terrible vengeance. I suppose I ought to have been worried for the B7 guys at this point, but instead I just felt this overwhelming feeling of heartbreak on poor Scorpy's behalf. And then I woke up, which really annoyed me, because I was enjoying the story! (As I believe we've probably already established, I like angst.) I attemted to force it to continue as I fell back to sleep, but it didn't work.

I did have another dream later, though. I was with a big group of people, and we were going to do some role-playing. I distinctly remember that it started out being some sort of superhero game we were going to play, but somehow, by the end of the dream, it had mutated into Stark Trek. Anyway, during the period when it was still a superheroes game, we for some reason got on the phone and called up Wil Wheaton (?!) and were trying to get him to play. But he didn't want to come, giving us us a whole bunch of reasons and excuses concluding with, "Anyway, I already know how it ends. I've played that module before. Twelve times." But he added that, if he got enough caffeine and sugar, he might change his mind and show up, anyway. I'm not sure whether he meant that if he got hyped up enough on his own caffeine and sugar at home he'd be in the proper gamer mindset and would want to come over and play, or whether he meant that if we were offering enough caffeine and sugar to provide an incentive for him he might come over and play. Either way, we pretty much wrote him off as a no-show. (Disclaimer: I have never met and do not know Wil Wheaton. I sincerely doubt that he is, in fact, a caffeine-and-sugar-junkie gamer in real life. My subconscious appears to have the gentleman in question confused with people that I actually do know. Like myself.)

Anyway, we were going to go ahead and play anway, but I suddenly realized that we didn't have anyone to GM. It looked like I was going to have to run the game myself, and I've never GM'd anything in my life. I was expressing my concerns about this to, of all people, Noranti, that weird old woman from Farscape (maybe she wandered in from the Scorpius dream, I dunno). But she said, "Oh, don't worry, I'm doing it. We're going to run it, Carl and me!" Which just left me kind of speechless, thinking, "What? You're going to GM?" At which point my alarm clock went off. I have absolutely no idea who Carl is, by the way. I don't even know anybody named Carl.

The really interesting thing is that, Carl aside, I can identify where pretty much every single element in those dreams came from in the waking world. The B7-Survivor thing came from something I was thinking about right before I fell asleep, though I couldn't really tell you now just why I was thinking about that. Scorpius, I'm fairly sure, didn't come just from my general obsession with Farscape, or even from talking about him here, but from a specific phone conversation I had the other day, in which I also mentioned Natira and possible resentments over dead girlfriends. The Scorpy-clone doubtless came from a theory I read on the internet trying to explain how he might have gotten out of his latest there's-no-way-he-could-have-survived-that situation. The pregnancy and lethal radiation elements also obviously came from Farscape, but from completely unrelated parts of the show. The Star Trek RPG and possibly the bit about having trouble getting people to show up for games probably came from a different conversation I had over the weekend. And I think Wil Wheaton came from having seen this cartoon yesterday. That Carl thing still has me stumped, though.

Imaginary conversation:

"So, does any of this have any meaning, Dr. Freud?"

"Why, yes. It means that, even in your dreams, you're a great big geek."

"Thanks, Doc, but I already knew that."

Yup. That sounds just about right...


[*] Who I'd actually assumed was already dead, anyway, but then, in Farscape it's generally a bad idea to write anybody off until you've seen the body. And not necessarily even then.