Bruce Christianson and Adrien Olichon, via Unsplash (modified by author)
This is a weird one. Disjointed somewhat as I woke up several times during the night. Usually that produces something like the dream equivalent of a clip show, only rarely does the dream continue cohesively from one sleep session to the next. This time it mostly did, except for the initial mermaid church dream which didn’t have much to do with everything after it. Without further delay:
I apparently won some sort of contest. The prize was an awesome indoor pool made by flooding the lower half of a derelict church, lined on all sides with stained glass windows depicting mermaids and other sea life. The pool had an underwater viewing room, the viewing window possessing decorative structural flourishes in the metal reinforcement bars. Very similar to a stained glass window but the glass bits were transparent and not colored.
Inside the pool is swimming a mermaid who reveals her tail comes off. She pulls a drawer out of the wall to reveal it’s only one of three tails she can choose from of different colors, scale shapes, and fin shapes, each with different abilities.
She pops off her orange goldfish style tail to reveal the ball and socket joint that it connected to her upper body by, like action figure limbs. Then she puts it away in the drawer, exchanging it for a smooth grey dolphin tail which grants her echolocation. She’s able to find me and pull me into the pool just because one of my shoelace tips was poking into the water at the pool edge. She apologizes and says she thought it was a fish, an obvious lie.
From the pool, I drive my white, electric three wheel enclosed trike to university. I park it in a small lot up behind campus, next to a plain brick building. Once inside, to my horror I accidentally sleep through my first, second and third class periods inside of my bed tent, which is somehow at school with me. Shortly after awakening, I discover anarcho-communists are taking over the school and executing everybody whose Twitter post history indicates they aren’t also anarcho communists.
They wear black and red uniforms and carry black and red flags. Wooden handles, black fabric, logo is a red A inside a red circle. I make my own copy of theirs to blend in, searching for the correct parking lot with my vehicle in it so I can escape. I realize after making my counterfeit uniform and flag that some of the details are off, and hope they don’t notice.
I have to walk all the way around the school perimeter to find the lot. I’m blocked at one point by a hill of slippery gravel I cannot traverse. During this time, actual aliens begin invading. Now it’s a three way fight. I find an arcade in the large, central building on campus where light guns from shooting game cabinets turn out to secretly be real energy weapons based on studying the alien weaponry, recovered years before this attack. They were developed and stored there in plain sight, just in case of invasion.
The resistance leader hands out these guns to a small group of survivors. I want the shotgun but get a pistol that hangs around my neck on a metal bead lanyard and a gatling gun with a slow spin up. The sky outside is red from all the fires, there’s constant noise from distant and nearby explosions, energy weapon discharges, and the ground has begun shaking.
The ground is shaking because of incoming “Animoids”. Giant animal shaped war robots patterned by the invading aliens after Earthly fauna. One looks like a robot wolf. One looks like a robot cat, another like a robot iguana. Now the US military is fighting them with tanks, ships and artillery.
I run through the school courtyard blasting alien infantry with the energy gatling gun. They look like T-1000s, smooth fluid metallic humanoids, but with glowing orange eyes and visible seams at their joints. They go down with a couple headshots, and their aim is poor, so I make it through the courtyard unharmed.
I finally find my way to the correct parking lot up a hill, behind the campus. Confusingly, there are several white electric trikes that look like mine. I search among them, peering in the windows until one opens the door and I hear “Get in!” The driver is Gawr Gura (a popular Youtube personality).
I have reservations about her driving which are vindicated when the trike plunges down a hill because the road section ahead of us had not yet loaded in, whereupon I realize at last that we’ve been inside a videogame all along. The trike slides down the hillside, back onto another road and we keep going even though I was still uncomfortable with Gura driving. I wanted to take the wheel but she wouldn’t let me.
The world map was based on Google Earth data for my home town, so I wanted to show Gura some of the landmarks, but she said priority 1 was escaping the alien mechs. We passed a McDonalds with 2 giant outdoor inflatable wave pool thingies, water being pumped in by multiple fire hoses from the 4 outside corners of each pool to create a vortex inside that kids were laughing and spinning in. Gura wanted to stop to swim but I said if we couldn’t do my thing, we weren’t doing hers either and she became grumpy.
We arrived at a marina under the city platform with some boats docked at it. The city was built on a platform, on supports coming up out of the water so there was a huge layer of structural stuff underneath it. Supports, pipes, cross bars, cables, conduits, etc. We stole a boat and kept running into the pillars supporting the city platform above us because the alien mechs made waves as they stomped through the coastal sea. One not too far from us resembled mecha Godzilla.
We arrived by boat at a dock outside some kind of pipe complex built into the underside of the city platform. Differently colored Super Mario style pipes went to different levels of the facility built into the massive cylindrical support pillar, with a central elevator to take you between the floors. But soon after entering, we were besieged by ball clowns. Like those toy clowns where the lower body is a weighted ball so you can’t tip them over. They had stubby little arms and sharp triangular teeth, with cameras for eyes.
They were mostly spherical, it turned out, for easy fast travel through the colored tubes. Presumably they were robots of some kind for security and maintenance of this pipe complex? We fled their pursuit by encapsulating ourselves in colorful Monkey Ball style plastic spheres just big enough to crouch inside of, which were loaded into the tubes by an automatic mechanism and then shot down the tube to the destination.
I lost track of Gura here because she went to a different floor than I did. I called down the pipe and her voice echoed back that I should continue without her. Instead I used the elevator to search the floors, not wanting to leave her with the ball clowns. Dream stopped here as I awoke.
Disappointing ending, but I have no control over when I wake up and more often than not, it’s right when things are getting good.