Wherein Melancholia, Criminal Minds, Assassin's Creed, and a random assortment of sci-fi/fantasy nerdery have had way too much of an influence on my subconscious.

It has been a long time since I've had a dream worth remembering that I actually remembered long enough to write it down, but here I am again, with another quasi-apocalyptic, quasi-lucid dream.

This one's actually in Tunisia, but whatever.

I was sitting at the window of a minaret in 16th Century Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul, but which was also kinda present-day, I think, staring at the sky.  It was night and the sky was dark and scattered with clouds.  A celestial body which I could not identify as the sun or the moon was on fire, encompassed by an eerie halo of flames, which sometimes appeared to snuff out into a halo of smoke, but then would reignite again.  Because clouds were passing across the sun/moon/whatever, I thought maybe I was just confusing cloud cover as smoke, but I wasn't sure.

Once again, Nick's painting, Equilibrium, depicts it best.

Suddenly, a dramatic spray of sparks showered from the mystery body into the clouds, and I realized that it was a planet that had just entered our atmosphere and was headed straight towards us.  As it burst through the clouds and sailed ever closer, I thought, Oh shit, this is it! This is really happening! The whole planet is going down! Wait, is this real? Or am I dreaming? Real? Dream? I can't tell!  The planet, whose diameter was roughly the length of a small town, floated by a few miles overhead. Oh hooray! It's going to be a fly-by! Wait, hold up, this has to be a dream. If this were real, that thing would have a much more destructive effect on the atmosphere, and wouldn't be moving so slowly. Yay! Just a dream!  With that comforting realization, I was able to watch calmly and curiously as the planet gradually descended and finally crashed about 20 miles away--just on the horizon.  The impact made a low, booming sound, and the shockwave rumbled outwards in slow motion.

I got down from my windowseat and ran down a flight of circular stairs into a round, candlelit room which was filled with my group of friends--which, in addition to Irene, Aaron, Nick, Natalie, Caitlin, and Chuck, also inexplicably included the cast of Criminal Minds and our fearless leader, Jeremy Irons dressed as a White Wizard, complete with flowing white hair and beard.

Too bad I don't care enough to Photoshop his face onto Ian McKellen's wizardy body.

Except for Mr. Irons, we were all dressed in period garb, but additionally had to put on stilts because apparently there were aliens among the humans of the city who were there to ensure that all of us stayed on the planet for its, and our, demise, and they would turn anyone who tried to escape into zombies.  The "people" who had paid to be on the planet were on stilts, whereas those who were serving the paid guests were the humans who had to be kept under control.  We were wearing stilts to disguise ourselves as paid guests.

Our task was to make our way through the bazaar to this wide, flat, paved area where we could make our escape.  We had broken up into smaller groups who were taking different routes in order to appear less suspicious.  My group was Irene, Chuck, and a Cuban woman who was not dressed in period garb, but rather a white tube top, white Daisy Dukes, and had a clitoral piercing donning a gigantic hoop earring that hung outside of her shorts and dangled between her legs.

Imagine that sucker hanging from your clit. Ouch.

Irene leaned over to me and whispered, "Do you know her? I don't remember her being a part of our group."  I looked at her closely and tried to remember if she'd ever been a cast member of Criminal Minds, then determined that she hadn't, and was therefore a stranger.  Chuck got up in her face and whispered harshly, "YOU ARE A SPY.  NO SELF-RESPECTING HUMAN WOULD WEAR A HOOP EARRING AS A CLIT PIERCING.  THAT IS A DEVICE TO SPY ON US AND GIVE AWAY OUR LOCATION, AND MUST BE DESTROYED."  He ripped the hoop earring out of her crotch and smashed it to pieces with his boot, but she didn't even flinch.  Irene yelled, "She's not human! That should've hurt like a bitch!"  Chuck threw her over a bridge into the water below and we hurried away.

But as we walked I realized that all the women of Criminal Minds had been captured and turned into zombies.  Even in a dream-state, however, I'm still a raging feminist, and since the dream was partially lucid I was like, "No.  I reject this.  This plot is completely misogynistic.  Women, you're fine.  Stop being zombies and get on with it."  All the women stood up straight, pushed past their captors and walked off into the crowd, which made me quite proud.

The part of the dream where we walked through the bazaar and buildings to get the meeting area was long, convoluted, and somewhat hazy, but the one noteworthy part was that I temporarily got separated from Irene and Chuck in a building that resembled the bar scene from Star Wars.

Except the aliens were, you know, incognito.

After we found each other again, we quickly arrived at our meeting place.  White Wizard Jeremy Irons handed us each a glowing cylinder, and we were supposed to stand in a certain pattern on the paving stones.  The shockwave from the crashed planet had finally reached the city and was starting to devour it.  It was getting close enough to us that we were being buffeted by hurricane force winds.  I shouted over the wind to Jeremy, "But where are we going to go?  The entire planet is destroyed!  There's nowhere else we can survive!"

"Wrong!" Jeremy crowed, "We're hitching a ride on the Heart of Gold!"

From Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, for those of you who aren't hip.

The glow from the cylinders swelled and enveloped us right as the force of the shockwave hit, and as a cascade of images flashed by in quick succession I thought, "This is so fucking nerdy.  You are such a nerd to be having this dream, Emily.  Ugh, just stop already."  Thus ended my nerdiest dream yet.

It's raining oil! Hallelujah! (Backlog, pt. 4)

(from some time in May, 2010)

My family and I were all in this huge all-wood, homestead-style ranch house out in the desert of West Texas, where there was absolutely no vegetation whatsoever, just miles of dusty beige rock as far as the eye could see.  We were inside the house for the first half of the dream, but then Dad and I went out to sit on rocking chairs on the porch, and we were just talking and staring at the old timey wooden oil derrick that was just a few yards in front of us.

Suddenly, oil burst out of the top of the derrick and started raining down onto the yard.  Dad and I just looked at each other calmly and I said, "Well, this isn't much different than the oil rain we'll be getting from the Gulf pretty soon."  He just nodded his head in agreement, and we watched the oil rain for a while longer.

After a while, Jay came out onto the porch and he and I stepped into the yard and stood in the oil rain, looking out at some of the other derricks farther off.  Suddenly, way out on the horizon, there was a huge explosion of dirt and rock shooting into the air.  It made a loud booming noise, so we thought that someone had set off some explosives.  But then another one happened closer, and then another one even closer, and we realized that the earth was splitting in half, one half rising up into a sheer cliff wall and the other half sinking down.  Every time a piece of the ground would split, it would cause the big booming dirt explosions that we were seeing.  We realized that the split in the earth was coming directly towards the house, so, logically, Dad told us to all go inside the house.

Once inside the house, Dad told us all to huddle towards the side of the house with all the windows, nearest to the porch where we had been sitting.  But I wanted to go to the other half of the house, because it was closer to the well, and there was some kind of escape tunnel on that side of the house.  No windows, though.  So there I was, on one side of the house by myself, looking at my entire family on the other side of the house.  The ground was already starting to part and my side of the house was starting to sink, so I felt an urgency to make a decision: do I stay where I know there's water and an escape route, or do I join my family?  A dirt explosion happened right outside the kitchen window, and I woke up.

Science is wrong: the sun is just a gigantic orange. (Backlog, pt 2)

(from 9/2/08)

I was inside my house (although it wasn’t any house that I’ve ever lived in in real life) doing something unremarkable, perhaps reading a book, when my father came in.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him.

“You need to come outside with us. The world is ending soon and you should spend the final moments of your life with your family,” he replied, somewhat more placidly than the situation called for.

I followed him outside to the lawn, where the rest of my family was sitting. We were on the peak of a low, broad hill that looked out onto a wide sky. Hanging low in it was a too-big sun that had the charred appearance of a dying ember. Its outer layers had peeled away like the skin of an orange and coiled like a fiery helix from the north end of the sky to the south, lying parallel to and just above the horizon. The atmosphere was a terrible red, and I felt a stab of fear in the pit of my stomach as I surveyed the phenomenon and wondered how long it would take for the world to succumb to its inevitable fate. But then I relaxed and smiled as I thought, “Thank god! This means I won’t have to get Alzheimer’s like my grandparents!”