Vivid Dreams

[Radivis (Michael Hrenka)]

Tonight I has a rather intense dream – of which I’ve probably forgotten some of the most interesting parts. Most of its content was rather abstract, and it may not seem very impressive, but the feeling associated with it were unusually intense. I attribute that to the biphasic sleep pattern I’ve fell into yesterday. After being quite tired yesterday I too a long nap at 8 PM, and woke up again at 11 PM. Then I couldn’t fall asleep until 4 AM. But then the following dream hit me:

The dream felt like some kind of computer game. Like a horror adventure more specifically. I was in a big mansion without knowing why I was there. I accepted that fact as part of the setting of the game. It was a generally dark and spooky mansion. Perhaps comparable to the mansion from the movie The Shining, but a bit smaller. After a while I noticed that there was something under the carpet in the main hall. There was a large circular plate on the ground that looked like a portal to a nether region. Hey, I was in a game and curious, so I opened it, after removing some seals.

After opening it a little bit I heard demonic noises, I slowly closed it again and tried to reseal it. Then I went upstairs to look for items that might be useful for fighting demons, and for hiding spots. Instead of hiding spots, I found a passage to an other place. So, I started a journey though portal after portal from weird underground places to astral dimension or hell, or heaven, or whatever those weird places were supposed to be. I’ve met angels and faeries who partially had to flee with me together from the demonic forces that were always a few portals behind us. It was a good game, if only because the dream labelled it abstractly as good game. There were riddles like in any good adventure. The choice of items was less important in the beginning, but it became very important to choose the right items later on.

Those places I travelled through were full of ethereal entities, most of them not moving, often arranged in crystalline patterns. It wasn’t clear whether they were of angelic or demonic nature (hint: after a while I figured out that spikes indicate demonic nature), but if I touched a demonic entity, I had to start the game from the beginning.

The closer I got to the end of the game, the more secure did I feel, because I was often surrounded by many angels. At the end, I finally reached some kind of astral palace where high ranking angels and gods were standing around. Reaching that place apparently concluded the game. Then I felt the information about the game running though my mind. It was an aesthetically highly appealing game that was completely made by a single programmer. Even more impressively, it had the most advanced facial expression analysis AI in the whole world, which is basically only used by the gods in the astral palace, so that they can communicate in an eerily deep way. At that point I was totally awestruck by that creative genius and I broke out in tears of sheer joy, wonder, admiration, and ecstasy. The feelings that went though me at that point belonged to the most intense I’ve experienced in years! It was like I was in a unique magnificent piece of art made by an exceedingly brilliant genius, just for the purpose of blowing the minds of the players.

Then I woke up, slightly clenched in cold sweat – and very happy about my fantasy having produced this unique gem of a dream.

Well, occasionally I have dreams like that. Dreams I treasure very much, because they represent a satisfying departure from the real of the mundane into the realm of the mysterious and unknown. Do you sometimes have dreams like that, too? @sandu might be interested in this.

[Radivis (Michael Hrenka)]

This time I had a sci-fi horror dream about a scenario in more than 100 years in the future when the solar system has been colonized and partially terraformed, and some moons of Jupiter are filled with artificial ecosystems. On one of those moons there was a spontaneous mutation that turned of the the animals there into what the dream classified as something like a “meta-multicellular life form”. Instead of storing its genetic information in each of its cells, it distributes its genetic material in clusters of multiple cells. And in the dream it behaved in strange ways. For one, it would be eager to present itself as prey for other animals, but when they tried to eat it, our mutant would kill them very quickly with a potent toxin and assimilate its body as new shell / body.

It’s not very clear in how many ways that critter could replicate. But it produced spores that could turn humans and other animals into other examples of that mutant critter when inhaled. So, it was quite hard to limit the spread of that new species. In fact, it quickly spread throughout many moons of Jupiter before many humans were even aware what was happening. After they realized the threat, many crews on spaceships tried to contain the new species with beam weapons and nanobots, with only limited and temporary success.

After a while, a scientific research ship tried an approach to attack the critter with electromagnetic waves of specific frequencies which it seemed to be susceptible to. Unfortunately, it turns out that the critter was even able to assimilate space ships and those assimilated ships then attacked and destroyed the research ship in a panicked and coordinated attack.

On another moon of Jupiter (or even on Jupiter proper), there were at the same time experiments for creating a self-replicating semi-intelligent inorganic life form based on some kind of hot liquid crystalline-ish metallic element. That was another beast straight from a horror movie, but a modified form of that inorganic life form seemed to be a promising counter-agent against the rampant meta-multicellular species. Releasing a monster to fight another monster didn’t actually seem like a really good idea, but the humans were quite desperate in that dream. At that point the dream ended. It seemed like the newly created inorganic entity was quite effective against the meta-multicellular species, but only near the surface of the planet. The space based versions of the meta-multicellular species still had free reign. RIP humanity?

Overall, the dream felt very much like a movie version of a good science fiction space opera from authors like Greg Bear, Greg Egan, Iain Banks, or Stephen Baxter. And the dream felt really terrifying. Very horror. Much intense.

Oh, but at times I was in the perspective of the meta-multicellular organism when it started out. That was fun. Still, very weird and alien feeling…

[Radivis (Michael Hrenka)]

I’ve found an old text file with some of my most interesting dreams:

Medusa dream

The absolutely most cinematic dream I ever had: It was about some kind of ambiguous superhero named Medusa. At first she just a normal woman, attacked by a small squid-like alien creature, which kills everything just by looking at it. She managed to stab the creature with a knife and kill it just before she died, but was extremely disfigured by the alien gaze attack and actually inherited it, so that every living thing she looked at was reduced to slime in no time. It was in a very dark cyberpunk future where the government was absolutely corrupted and experimented with aliens to create some kind of zombies. Somehow Medusa managed to steal some kind of motorcycle made out of organic xeno fibers. Then this motorbike was shot by a rocket attack from a fighter jet. But just in time Medusa figured out she had control over those xeno fibers and could reshape them into any form. So she turned the bike into an extremely stylish protective suit. But here comes a very weird thing: I actually started dreaming with Medusa in this suit being attacked by a cybernetically enhanced mercennary in an armored exoskelleton send by the government to kill her. So I dreamed first a prequel to that scene before it went on. Then, later on somehow Medusa found some companions, don’t know exactly anymore. At the end the dream was just absolutely crazy with Medusa finding a teleporter leading into a huge sphere filled with millions of zombies, which she killed in less than a second with her gaze. All the time the dream had an absolutely amazing super sinister superhero comic feeling/atmosphere. Too bad I haven’t written it down in time. I have probably lost most of the details and scenes.

Underground superpowers

Another dream which began with a fighing scene between some people with super powers. The whole dream was a prequel to that one. It stared with an actress applying to some role in a new movie. She was sent down into an underground labyrinth below a train station. - here comes a part I don’t remember - Suddenly I am one of hundreds of persons trapped in that underground labyrinth, together with two friends, one of them is probably that actress from before. Strangely all persons in the labyrinth have super powers and can’t escape from that place. Most people try to stay friendly, but their situation is barely manageable, because some people have super powers which can kill other people pretty quickly. So there are deadly fights some times, although all people just want to survive in there and try to stick together with their friends, but isolate themselves from other people and groups. Some time my group was attacked by another group, so I used my “ash rays” I could cast with my fingers to turn the attackers to ash instantly. Later on I killed a fierce and evil dragon (!) in the same way. At the end of the dream I finally found an exit, but strangely I was overrun by an endless stream of people coming down the staircase, which was the exit. So I extended some very sharp claws and clinged to the wall and ceiling of the staircase to be able to escape finally. The initial fighting scene was then explained by the fact that those people from the labyrith escaped, but were still somehow connected by their collective trauma and simply just lost their minds through that terrible experience.

God players

A dream in which I was an angel (actually a rather more superior being just playing a computer game) which had to protect hell against the cruel attacks of a godlike being, which was also a player, but a very evil one playing god. The demons didn’t like me at all, but I protected hell, which presented some kind of very bizzare beauty. Finally hell was completely overrun and I managed to get to heaven on my own and fought the evil god, but lost. Luckily I was pretty immortal and could revive myself and all the other demon lords which were killed by some kind of magical ritual. Together we could defeat the evil god with our collective power, but it was still a fight we had barely a chance of winning. At the end we united heaven and hell in peace.

Political topology

A dream in which I was in some kind of afterlife with a rather strange topology. It was a space filled with atmosphere everywhere, but there were small spheres with their own gravity on which people lived. There were also big spherical craters which also were settled. Maybe they were located on huge spheres, but I don’t remember that exactly. The funny part was that this afterlife world was rather infinity and that the societal structure was rather extremely anarchistic. I wondered what that was so and figured out it would have something to do with the topology of the space. Sometimes other forms of social orders appeared, but were always restored to the grand anarchistic order (yeah, it worked rather extremely well, better than anyone would expect, with absolutely free trade and totally free cooperation) by some idealist anarchists. At the end I was involved in fighting against a small fascist cell.

Research in hell

Another dream in which I was some kind of angel agent fighting demons with my awesomely superior superpowers (like creating walls of lava). Then a group of demons go in diplomatic contact with me and asked my why I fought against them. They explained that actually the angels were the aggressors in the war, so I changed sides. Afterwards I lead a crazy scientific expedition of humans into the depths of hell to explore the strange biology of life down there. I guess they found some funny plants or something like that and were completely surprised and fascinated. I ended up being the chief diplomat and mediator of the conflict between the angels and the demons.

[Radivis (Michael Hrenka)]

Alien reimagined

A dream from the night of 2017-02-19 to 2017-02-20 – in this dream my brain imagined a kinda wild successor to the movie Prometheus which tried to create a connection with the original Alien movie.

A rescue call came in from an emergency escape vessel, the Nostromo, fleeing from a colony attacked by an alien lifeform. This life form seemed to be a parasitic fungus which attacks the brain of its host. In an act of quarantine, the head of a patient was severed, so that the infection couldn’t spread. The head was kept alive in a liquid by some kind of machinery. Then, the researchers were curious how the alien interacts with cybernetic devices and augmented the device with synthetic appendages which resembled arms and legs, but rather had tentacles for arms.

Somehow the alien could overrun the ship, and even assimilate the robots on it. This part of the dream supposedly contained a lot of action scenes similar to the original Alien movie. But it was a bit more intense since robots were involved and stuff. Also, the aliens started using humanoid bodies.

In the middle of the attack, a women teamed up with a small tool-like AI and fought in the ship and even escaped for a time to the outside of the ship when the action got so rough that the ship’s hull got torn apart in certain places. Since she had an augmented body, she didn’t need a space suit to survive in space. But at the end, they used this trip to find a better hiding spot in the utmost rear section of the ship, where she froze herself cryogenically, while the AI went on to subvert the systems of the ship that were controlled by the aliens in a most subtle fashion. It was only detected by the aliens long after everything else was assimilated, including the ship AI and stuff. The toll AI only made itself known by communicating with the rest of the ship in a highly elaborately encrypted form of communication. One of the aliens managed to decrypt that code, but instead of assimilating the AI, allied itself with it, and started a counterattack of the alien hive, using 3d printed weapons (mostly axes). That was surprisingly effective, for no concinving reason, other than that kind of attack being unpredicted and somehow exploiting certain weaknesses of the aliens.

Somehow the counterattack was successful and the converted alien revived the frozen crew, which was still kinda human.

Then they found out that there were actually on the colony planet (again). After all, the aliens were more aftraid of humanity than otherwise. The idea of an outright invasion of Earth seemed to be suicidal to them. So, the Nostromo was back of the colony. And a flashback played the moments of the attack of the aliens on the human colonists. The colony was real and already quite developed and beautiful. Like a colony out of Star Trek TNG. First, the humans were attacked by worm-like creatures. Then, as the first victims were assimilated, human/synthetic/alien forms attacked the humans. Escape was futile for most, which quickly got assimilated.

The attack of the aliens was planned meticulously. The aliens had some kind of queen deep underground, a massive brain, more or less, that connected the other aliens in some kind of rhizomic neural network. First, the aliens simply observed the humans who arrived on the planet, and tried to learn from them. Then they struck hard to drive them back from their homeworld.

Now the insurgency from the Nostromo spread to the colony. After some brief attempts at counter-assimilating the cyberinfrastructure of the planet, only few humanoid insurgents were alive. They were lured into a cathedral-like building within an area that was reimagined after France by apparent conspirators which turned out to actually be an elite squad of insurgency eliminators. The insurgents were transferred to a chamber which slowly heated up from all sides. They started hacking at the ground and quickly got to the alien communication network layer with which they escaped into alien cyberspace by uploading themselves to the alien cloud, or something.

So, a second stage of the insurgency started with the escaped printing new humanoid bodies. But instead of continuing the insurgency on a regular way, to voluntarily aggregated to the incineration chamber again, which this time was more complex, and was turned into a “Cube” (movie) like maze from which they should try to escape. Only by sophisticated cooperation, could the escape the first rooms of the maze. Meanwhile they created ever more sophisticated tools, starting with ladders and such. They actually got a music replay stone gifted by the outsiders which played human music.

The escapers created artifacts in a hard takeoff fashion, using tools to escape and make music storage devices that could store all of mankinds music. It was stored on red cylinders slightly thinner and longer than coke cans that were then shot out of small cannons outside of the building.

They were incinerated by the aliens. And the escapers faced the same fate, when being enclosed in the building at the last second.

One of the observing aliens wanted to give a high five to the leader of the death camp, but flailed his arms wrongly after which he said “I am wrong”. To which the leader replied conspicuously: “But only today. Tomorrow you will be right.” implying that it’s his views that will soon be seen as right in a merged alien / human civilization on the colony.

What’s very peculiar about this dream was that both factions were intensely fascinated by the other side and more curious than antagonistic (although they killed each other to death after all, mainly because they were so afraid).

[badger2 (Mike Lansing)]

The superpower image might be correlated to time of season, as when Persephone awakens again each spring, as in Hubertus Tellenbach for the concept of endocosmogeneity when he quotes Ludwig Klages: ’ …" that primal feeling through which human regulation comes under the sway of daemonic rhythm, dissolving the vitreous resistance of law in the undulating ether of the cosmic pulse." '
(Tellenbach, Melancholy)

[begeistert]

the “research in hell” dream is quite cool. should be a movie!