Will someone interpret this dream for me? (WARNING: LONG)
Posted: Tue Sep 18, 2018 7:00 am
Dear fellow participants:
What's your opinion of dream interpretation? I think Sigmund Freud had the right idea; specifically that dreams are ways in which the ego allows the id to express itself and/or metaphorically exorcise its demons in a socially or morally acceptable fashion. But when it comes to specific objects in dreams universally representing certain things or situations in the real world, well, I'm very skeptical. But then again, I have pretty much zero experience with dream interpretation, so perhaps I shouldn't be closed-minded.
Anyway, I dream quite often, and every once in a while I'll have one that's not just your usual random gibberish but one with a specific and definable backstory and plot, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
The following is my most recent one of these. It's been on my mind for quite a while now, and I'm wondering if someone who's a believer in dream interpretation would see anything in it and if so, what. YES, I acknowledge that it owes its basic inspiration to the 2016 movie Passengers with Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, but here goes:
TIMEFRAME:
Sometime in the undetermined future, but before faster-than-light travel had been invented.
BACKSTORY:
I was a passenger aboard a "colony ship" (my word for it; that word combination never occurred during the dream itself) sent out to, uh, colonize a planet an incredible distance away from Earth but known to be able to support life as we know it. The ship was incredibly large, notably with an open interior, but nevertheless able to land on the surface. Onboard was everything necessary to get a colony up and running and self-sustainable, with the ship itself meant to be dismantled for structural parts and spare machinery when necessary. The destination was so far away that there was no hope of any contact whatsoever with anyone from Earth for several generations to come, at the earliest. Ergo, everyone involved with the project--especially me--knew full well that this was a one-way trip.
BEGINNING:
I was brought out of stasis, a.k.a. "hypersleep," with a few hundred others. The ship had already landed on the surface, as was the plan. After wandering around a bit trying to get our bearings, we came to realize, to our surprise, that a few hundred more had been brought out of stasis quite a while before us and were already well underway at the task of unloading the ship and setting things up on the surface to begin life there. This shocked me, since I sort of assumed we'd all be woken up at the same time, but then I saw the sense in avoiding the "too many chiefs, not enough Indians" syndrome at the all-important juncture as the initial landing and debarkation.
As for the planet itself, it was a temperate paradise, with plains and freshwater lakes. The atmosphere was easily breathable and the water easily drinkable. Flowers absolutely ABOUNDED, far more than you see on earth, and their colors were probably more vivid than anything earthly. They were literally "scintillating." They seemed to grow on on top of the other.
MIDDLE:
Fast-forward an undetermined length of time. Everyone was "awake" and the colony was well-established and otherwise running smoothly, but then I had an awful realization: We were at war. All human colonists were at war with "the others"--yeah, creative name, but that's honestly what we called them in the dream. They were the native beings of the planet we were on. The problem was, we couldn't figure out just what, exactly, "the others" were. I or we had narrowed it down to three possibilities: A) They were corporeal beings just as physical as us, B) they were entirely non-corporeal, existing as sentient energies or energy fields; or C) they were a much more sinister version of B, having the ability to occupy human bodies surreptitiously to turn "us" against each other and thereby fight us from the inside.
To make matters worse, it was clear that we were losing. Most humans had retreated back into the original ship, and "the others" may or may not have made incursions into it. Although people were fighting--or doing their best to do so, under the circumstances, since the enemy wasn't easily identifiable--the danger was clear and everyone was looking to board what passed for the escape pods. Yeah, I know that escape pods on landed spacecraft aren't of much help, but these functioned more to provide an impenetrable "safe zone" that couldn't be breached from the outside.
Me and a friend went from one to the other, but they were all already either in use or jettisoned (yes, I'm aware that this contradicts the above paragraph, but hey, it's only a dream). Then we made the decision to find, and board, the "last resort" escape pod, sort of the "boss" escape pod, if that makes any sense at all. We made/fought our way to it--I can't remember the finer details--and upon reaching it, we found that we were the first ones there. Ours for the taking! We boarded it and then sealed ourselves inside.
END:
Upon sealing it shut, I found out, the hard way, that this pod functioned in a way entirely separate from all the others: Whereas the others created a hermetic seal against outside danger, ours was fully that but also provided a second escape feature: Escape via temporality. Specifically, our pod slowed down time itself in the interior so that time appeared, to us, to be passing at an incredibly fast rate on the outside--with the intent that by the time we left the pod the danger would've permanently passed.
While watching things unfold at a blindingly fast pace, I saw that we humans somehow rebounded and, against the odds, won the war. With the danger gone, I saw activity uptick, with tiles being laid all around us, just inches away from my face (the walls of the pods were mostly glass). When my friend and I eventually left the pod, the colony was a fully-built, fully-functional township with all of society, along with every mechanical system, fully operational and running like utopian clockwork.
So, that was my dream. Does anyone have any ideas on what any of it means, if anything? Assuming that there's even a little bit of validity to the concept of dream interpretation, of course.
What's your opinion of dream interpretation? I think Sigmund Freud had the right idea; specifically that dreams are ways in which the ego allows the id to express itself and/or metaphorically exorcise its demons in a socially or morally acceptable fashion. But when it comes to specific objects in dreams universally representing certain things or situations in the real world, well, I'm very skeptical. But then again, I have pretty much zero experience with dream interpretation, so perhaps I shouldn't be closed-minded.
Anyway, I dream quite often, and every once in a while I'll have one that's not just your usual random gibberish but one with a specific and definable backstory and plot, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
The following is my most recent one of these. It's been on my mind for quite a while now, and I'm wondering if someone who's a believer in dream interpretation would see anything in it and if so, what. YES, I acknowledge that it owes its basic inspiration to the 2016 movie Passengers with Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, but here goes:
TIMEFRAME:
Sometime in the undetermined future, but before faster-than-light travel had been invented.
BACKSTORY:
I was a passenger aboard a "colony ship" (my word for it; that word combination never occurred during the dream itself) sent out to, uh, colonize a planet an incredible distance away from Earth but known to be able to support life as we know it. The ship was incredibly large, notably with an open interior, but nevertheless able to land on the surface. Onboard was everything necessary to get a colony up and running and self-sustainable, with the ship itself meant to be dismantled for structural parts and spare machinery when necessary. The destination was so far away that there was no hope of any contact whatsoever with anyone from Earth for several generations to come, at the earliest. Ergo, everyone involved with the project--especially me--knew full well that this was a one-way trip.
BEGINNING:
I was brought out of stasis, a.k.a. "hypersleep," with a few hundred others. The ship had already landed on the surface, as was the plan. After wandering around a bit trying to get our bearings, we came to realize, to our surprise, that a few hundred more had been brought out of stasis quite a while before us and were already well underway at the task of unloading the ship and setting things up on the surface to begin life there. This shocked me, since I sort of assumed we'd all be woken up at the same time, but then I saw the sense in avoiding the "too many chiefs, not enough Indians" syndrome at the all-important juncture as the initial landing and debarkation.
As for the planet itself, it was a temperate paradise, with plains and freshwater lakes. The atmosphere was easily breathable and the water easily drinkable. Flowers absolutely ABOUNDED, far more than you see on earth, and their colors were probably more vivid than anything earthly. They were literally "scintillating." They seemed to grow on on top of the other.
MIDDLE:
Fast-forward an undetermined length of time. Everyone was "awake" and the colony was well-established and otherwise running smoothly, but then I had an awful realization: We were at war. All human colonists were at war with "the others"--yeah, creative name, but that's honestly what we called them in the dream. They were the native beings of the planet we were on. The problem was, we couldn't figure out just what, exactly, "the others" were. I or we had narrowed it down to three possibilities: A) They were corporeal beings just as physical as us, B) they were entirely non-corporeal, existing as sentient energies or energy fields; or C) they were a much more sinister version of B, having the ability to occupy human bodies surreptitiously to turn "us" against each other and thereby fight us from the inside.
To make matters worse, it was clear that we were losing. Most humans had retreated back into the original ship, and "the others" may or may not have made incursions into it. Although people were fighting--or doing their best to do so, under the circumstances, since the enemy wasn't easily identifiable--the danger was clear and everyone was looking to board what passed for the escape pods. Yeah, I know that escape pods on landed spacecraft aren't of much help, but these functioned more to provide an impenetrable "safe zone" that couldn't be breached from the outside.
Me and a friend went from one to the other, but they were all already either in use or jettisoned (yes, I'm aware that this contradicts the above paragraph, but hey, it's only a dream). Then we made the decision to find, and board, the "last resort" escape pod, sort of the "boss" escape pod, if that makes any sense at all. We made/fought our way to it--I can't remember the finer details--and upon reaching it, we found that we were the first ones there. Ours for the taking! We boarded it and then sealed ourselves inside.
END:
Upon sealing it shut, I found out, the hard way, that this pod functioned in a way entirely separate from all the others: Whereas the others created a hermetic seal against outside danger, ours was fully that but also provided a second escape feature: Escape via temporality. Specifically, our pod slowed down time itself in the interior so that time appeared, to us, to be passing at an incredibly fast rate on the outside--with the intent that by the time we left the pod the danger would've permanently passed.
While watching things unfold at a blindingly fast pace, I saw that we humans somehow rebounded and, against the odds, won the war. With the danger gone, I saw activity uptick, with tiles being laid all around us, just inches away from my face (the walls of the pods were mostly glass). When my friend and I eventually left the pod, the colony was a fully-built, fully-functional township with all of society, along with every mechanical system, fully operational and running like utopian clockwork.
So, that was my dream. Does anyone have any ideas on what any of it means, if anything? Assuming that there's even a little bit of validity to the concept of dream interpretation, of course.
