Plan Deep Space Nine from Inner Space

It's 2017, people. The abomination known as 2016 AD/CE is finally dead, and long may it rot. In celebration of its much-belated demise, here is the last significant dream I had in that cruddy year!

* * *

Had myself another Star Trek dream. It took place during the Dominion War, before Jadzia Dax's death.

(She may have left this world, but not our hearts.)

The premise was this: For the last several decades/couple centuries (the dream wasn't clear which), an offshoot of the Federation of Planets had been living within a pocket universe in self-imposed exile. With the coming of the Dominion War, they'd decided they wanted to return, rejoin the Federation, and help them out in their struggle against the Dominion.

Assuming the role of an anonymous goldshirt who had the hots for Jadzia,

(We would've been able to make it work, too, if it wasn't for that meddling Worf.)

I accompanied Sisko, Jadzia, Bashir, and a security team to a neutral, uninhabited planet to meet with the representatives of the Offshoots.

Once we were there, we were almost automatically attacked by Offshoot ships. Taken prisoner, we were sent into the pocket universe to the Offshoot capital world, where we learned the Offshoots' true plan was to conquer the Federation and absorb it into their own compact empire.

Some weird metafictional crap then went down. We were placed in a watery cell, 

but it really was just a shallow tank on a set with cameras trained on us.

"Could you be faster, Avery? More intense?"

"..."

Then the tank was a waterlogged wooden floor, which I laid upon and slapped to produce the in-camera sound effects.

We then found ourselves in a small room, where we found a twelve-year-old boy sitting at a table under a solitary bright light furiously cutting and trimming photographs out of magazines.

(I like him already!)

When we asked him if he was putting a collage together, he told us that while the Offshoots sometimes allowed him to glue clippings into a scrapbook, for the most part they were just forcing him to aimlessly cut the pictures out for hours on end as a form of psychological torture.

The dream got hazy from there. There was something involving an evil bulldog alien, a large cardboard box full of Simpsons comics, and Sisko being distantly related to the Offshoot ruling family, but nothing concrete and nothing I can recall past that point.