From the Dream Archives: War of the Necronauts!

(ORIGINAL ENTRY DATE: 15 SEPTEMBER 2016)

I had a pretty strange, semi-disturbing dream recently.

In the dream, Earth was at war with a race of aliens who flew around in biomechanical airships which resembled giant flying manta rays.

These airships would drop smaller manta rays to the ground.

These smaller mantas were actually bio-bombs, fleshy shells containing a short-range but incredibly virulent viral agent which turned any living creatures exposed to it into zombies. These zombies weren’t particularly violent — they weren’t brain or flesh-eating monsters — but they were extremely contagious and a danger to anyone close to them.

Anyway, I was a soldier in a squad stationed at a derelict ranch house, and we were tasked with taking out a bunch of bio-bombs before they could hit the ground and turn anybody into zombies. After dealing with the bio-bombs, we rendezvoused with another squad. At first, the men of the other squad were friendly. Then for some inexplicable reason, they became aloof and then violent towards us, taking their weapons and firing upon us. Though caught off guard, we quickly started fighting back.

As it turned out, our squad members all got exposed to the viral agent while we were dealing with the bio-bombs, which began transforming us into decaying zombies; that is why the other squad turned against us. Something in the viral agent rewired our brains to prevent us from recognizing the undead state we were in.

Trance Loses Her Hair/The Orgy on Ferenginar/Don't Buy This Product!!!

Trance Gemini and Seamus Harper from the TV series Andromeda were on a ship stranded in a pocket universe.

(As is wont to happen with my luck, it was Gold Trance, my least favourite incarnation of the character.)

Since this pocket universe was so minuscule, there were very few stars present inside it. This proved detrimental to Trance, as being the living incarnation of a sun, she needed long-term proximity to stellar bodies to remain healthy.

Growing progressively weaker the longer they spent trapped in the microcosm, Trance's hair started falling out.

(You won't see me mourn that rat's nest.)

She gave a lock of it to Harper, asking him to weave it into his own hair.

(While the dream trailed off there, I like to believe that Harper and Trance escaped the pocket universe off-screen, culminating in her transformation back to her former, perfect purple self.)

* * *

On the world of Ferenginar, most of the Ferengi — bodies slathered in silver body paint

— were engaged in a worldwide orgy.

(Lots 'n' lots of oo-mox. Ooh yeah!)

Then the Cardassians arrived. A large invasion fleet at their command, they conquered Ferenginar with next to no resistance. Once their ships landed, the Cardassians began rounding half the Ferengi population up for transport to offworld internment camps. The remaining Ferengi? They began having consensual sex with their new Cardassian overlords right away. One of the Ferengi being hauled off called this action a "rank abomination".

* * *

My parents bought a purple cleaning product advertised in an infomercial.

Unfortunately, the stuff proved too caustic; it began eating holes in the floor soon upon application.

Furthermore, the seller of the product turned out to be the thrall of a skeletal female vampire.

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.