Dream #25

Summary:
This dream felt like it went on all night. The very earliest memory I can go back to is being at my grandmother's country ranch-style house, kind of doing that thing where you explore spaces from your childhood and reminisce.  In this version of her home, there was an upstairs (not one in real life) and I was snooping around looking for the room where we used to play as a kid. I remember stepping over an xbox one with a sticker decal on top that was on the top floor. Eventually this space sort of morphed into a blend of grandmother's house (her bedroom where she had a separate TV) and my uncle's house which is really nice and had awesome upstairs bedrooms. From downstairs I could hear people playing old school video games, specifically I remember seeing a box for an adaptor on the floor that would let you play NES games on a sega genesis. Weird detail. I got upstairs to find my cousin Stephen playing the old school game and my cousin David making hilarious commentary with him on it among other things. Basically, a page directly out of my childhood. I said "hey guys can I play" in a silly childlike voice and they welcomed me in.

They knew everything there was to know about video games, including Stephen knowing that the President of Nintendo just died (he actually did) and pointing out that the computer downstairs had several game ROMS downloaded onto it - a fact that I took with a sort of "I'm around that computer all the time and never knew that" kind of awe. Pretty soon David started showing off this "game" on his phone that was sort of maybe illegal but very cool. It controlled a can of what looked like canned air and the temperature of the flame that it could spit out. He burned things, melted things, etc. with it before the real game started (it gets weird). A sheep was wandering through the house and it was an understood part of the game to burn the sheep until you took its health bar down and it died. The sheep would occasionally shoot fireballs at you from its mouth but it had terrible aim. Eventually he overwhelmed the sheep.

At this point I started showing off all of this cool stuff to my immediate family and Craig. They weren't that impressed and worried about how dangerous it was, dad feigned being impressed, as he is so good at doing, and even called mom over to "look at this" as I burned something on the ground. I had to explain to the fam why the sheep was bad and why I was burning it. "No really, if you wait long enough it will shoot fireballs out of its mouth!"

Somewhere mixed in with all of this we did some basement exploration of grandma's house and found the "old" back porch that predated her actual back porch buried under the house. It was made of old wooden planks.

Here the dream takes another odd and frightening turn,  Aliens come down and basically start off a body snatcher type situation. Without seeing the aliens but in the middle of the night, myself and my sister Melissa are basically visited and told that we needed to adopt new bodies in order to search the wooded area around grandma's house for remains of an ancient alien civilization. They didn't say it, but I was under the impression that if we just helped dig up their ancestors, then they'd leave us alone. As a part of the "help" process we had to enter some sort of pod and get transferred to new bodies. I remember when Melissa was in the pod bumping the pod to reassure her that we were still outside. She did the same when I was in my pod. When we emerged we looked mostly like we did before, with bumpy grotesque skull tops. There were two other people who were podded that we were close with.

When we decided we would help them we when into grandma's yard, which was suddenly a high school parking lot, and found four cars used for drivers ed in the back. They had instructor stickers on the front, I said that was how we'd know our vehicles, I took an instructor card out of the car and held it up for the UFO in the sky to see and aknowledge that we were going to cooperate with their plan. They came down closer, the UFO was poorly disguised as a helicopter when it was close, like a bad drawing of a helicopter, and it showed that it understood we were agreeing, then took off. We took some kind of pill that was supposed to serve as a type of insurance against the aliens. Our old bodies were covered by a white sheet in the bed. I was under the impression that when we were done with our mission, we would get to go back to our old bodies. We had the aliens mobile number and would call them to get instructions. One time, before the mission, I met with them. They had the bumpy heads and were very pale and had remarkably featureless faces. They went over the details of the mission and how and where we should dig, etc.

After the mission they met with us again, this time, they had done a much better job of looking like humans, like hispanics, actually, and they wanted us to do more. I started realizing this wasn't going to be a one-off gig. We also noted that our original bodies were gone and I began to wonder if the whole thing was a ruse to get us in new bodies and steal our old ones for experiments or something. I was angry, but at that point, you have no choice but to keep playing along.

There was a big party outside in grandma's yard and a lot of our friends were out there. We went and hung out with them but they could tell something was different about us. By this point, we all thought we looked pretty normal with not unusual heads and everything, but everyone could just tell something was a little off. We got together to meet about people acting strangely toward us and realized that we did all have creepy smiling expressions, something that went previously unnoticed, and that we were all acting uncharacteristically similar - a floaty pleasantness to each. At some point grandmas' house got cut in two or broke in two, exposing the old porch floorboards to daylight and dad made the comment that it was the old lollypop shop porch. We gazed in awe. For this portion of the mission we had to make our way though tunnels in the ground that were now exposed to air back underneath the woods behind grandma's house. This is about the time that I woke up, more or less.

Influences: 
This is a little difficult to pull influences for at first but I think I have a few. The Video Games are from the new xbox one that I just got. Before purchasing I consulted Stephen on it, and my respect for his video game knowledge goes way back to childhood and these sorts of gameplay situations. David always has something cool or funny to show off, thus he had the goat burning game? I don't know, but it made sense in the dream. The inaccuracy of the goat with the fireballs probably comes from playing Call of Duty with bots (computer controlled players) at John's place just before bed. He made the comment that they fire at you but have terrible aim. Maybe grandmothers house represents those earlier video games sessions in my life with my older cousins and that would explain why it was the setting (with elements of David's home place mixed in). I recently discussed a family vacation that would include Craig and Elizabeth, so there they are. Aliens? I mean, I watched a tv doc about Area 51 a couple weeks ago and read something about the Roswell incident being a part of Project Mogul on Reddit yesterday, but beyond that, nothing really fresh. I have seen invasion of the body snatchers but it was back in college several years ago. The Caswell people and social environment is easy to explain, I live in that every day. Grandmas house splitting at the end? Read a New Yorker article about a big earthquake that is due in Seattle just before bed.

Overall Mood:
Nostalgia, Fear, Acceptance of doomed fate.