I have PTSD so unfortunately at least 50% of my dreams involve past abuse and trauma, but here are some thankfully normal ones I found interesting:
[spoiler]In just a few days, the sea level had somehow risen drastically across the globe, killing millions of people. Most nations saw their infrastructure destroyed, but for some reason France's was intact, so the French government organized a rescue operation, sending out self-piloting SAR boats to all locations within reach. In order to afford this, the operation was to employ a risky but cost-effective new science called dreambending; that is, all of the rescue crafts were manufactured from dream fabric, and the only way to reach or use them was to become dream fabric yourself. This meant that, like memories of dreams, the boats had a half-life and would decay after a certain time, along with any dream entities still aboard.
When the flood hit home I had no idea any of this was happening. My family was killed and I ran for higher ground. For some reason my house was gone, and in place of it was a giant stone wall approximately twice the height of it, stretching as far as I could see in both directions. A massive, majestic oak door with rusty knockers sat on the far right of it, which I immediately entered out of panic. Behind it was a similar door, and behind that yet another. The last one spat me out on a rescue craft half-way across the Atlantic ocean, heading for France. Somehow all the other passengers were orphans who'd lost their families in the flood too, and had reached the craft in similar fashion. I spoke to some of them, and learned of the great flood and France's rescue campaign. So many of them were sick, and the only first aid aboard was dream serum, a substance which--while a complete cure-all--was in short supply. Syringes were limited as well, which got several people sick from sharing needles.
At several points during the trip across the Atlantic, we had to hop between boats to prevent ourselves from decaying into nonexistence. Quite a few orphans were either too scared or unable to make the swim across, and chose to die peacefully on the boat. When what remained of us finally arrived on the coast of France, we were disheartened to find that the country was in ruin. Violence, arson, and looting had broken out among hungry orphans. Many people again chose to disappear peacefully by staying on the boats, but me and two others ventured out into the coastal chaos.[/spoiler]
[spoiler]The dream started in a weird, run-down movie theater that got very little business and was staffed only by electronic vendor machines. My sister and her boyfriend were with me, and we all sat down in one of the only two functioning cinemas, only I wasn't there to see a movie. I was there to see the place itself because it fascinated me. 80% of the building was in such a state of disrepair that it was completely unusable. The place had been in unkempt operation for years and yet had no staff, had never been robbed, and was somehow paying its own bills. Perhaps it was owned by a lone parvenu who'd inherited the business and decided he'd rather just make as much money as he could while letting the place go to ruins.
The theater we went to was supposed to be playing a dated Pixar film called The Incredibles (why my sister and her boyfriend would want to see this for the billionth time escapes me) but about halfway through the film, it started playing some creepy documentary on this flooded ghost town I'd never heard of. I exclaimed, but my sister and her boyfriend ignored me and watched unflinchingly, as if the movie was still playing. The audio and film's speed varied slightly at points and skipped often, like a broken record. My first thought was "Who switched the reel? Isn't this place operated by automation?" I couldn't shake the feeling that we were being watched, but for whatever reason, I could barely tear my eyes from the screen. The video was mesmerising, the narrator's voice pulling me in with the story of a buried tragedy:
A pro--A project funded by Lexus… America's pride in the 21st century… A high-tech city, home to the most prestigious school in the world… Now, a recondite Atlantis of the modern world. The brain-child of a rich philanthropist, the town of [static] was constructed in the year two-thousand-[static], right on top of an area ma-marked for des-t-r-u-c-t-i-o-n by climate change. A plot of land [unintelligible] miles wide and [static] meters below sea lev--[white noise] Th-the-they k-n-e-w this would happen. How.... c-o-u-l-d t--h--e--y......... [static]
Aircraft footage of the town being flooded played for the remaining duration of the documentary. The sea rolled in green and terrifying beneath a stormy sky, consuming an entire legacy in jaws of undertow. By the end of the reel, the other group had already left, presumably miffed at the disappointing rip-off (unlike me, who was pleasantly surprised). I exited the movie theater with my sister and her boyfriend, excited and still unsure of what I'd just seen, or if anyone else had seen it at all--that is, until we stepped out of the building into a drowned wasteland under a dark, green and cloudy sky.
The rest of the dream consisted of exploring the intact parts of the city and taking as many pictures as I could. It was full of very unique and aquatic-themed architecture that seemed to sadistically foreshadow the fate its creators knew would befall it. Why, exactly, is beyond me. Many parts, despite remaining standing, were flooded beyond reach, so I only got to explore 3 or 4 buildings. The most memorable of which was a large, tall-ceiling and mostly empty building with one floor. What made it interesting, however, was this messy network of catwalks above the main room. These walkways were littered with assorted objects that seemed wildly out of place, most of them ripped apart. I remember seeing an old desk covered in graffiti, some scattered pieces of broken toys, and most peculiarly, some shreds of a metal sign (or perhaps several) with fragments of cryptic quotes on it:
[missing/shredded] WALK THE RUSTED WORLD
I recognize the last line from a game called .flow, but the rest of it (and for that matter the meaning) escapes me.[/spoiler]
[spoiler]The dream began on an isolated 2 square mile tract of green woodland suspended in the sky. The foliage was lush in some areas and rather sparse in others, giving it a distinctively divided appearance. But despite this, the edges of the platform couldn’t be seen in any direction from any point, and I wouldn’t know until later that I was airborne at all. It was relatively chilly, and the sun rarely pierced the constant, viscous cloud cover, and yet the entire place bloomed with uncanny vigor; exotic flowers, towering trees, deep green saplings and large extravagantly-detailed ferns populated the ground beneath my feet. I was excited.
There among the vegetation, as if to dazzle me more, were strewn a couple dozen softball-sized spheres of some heavy, smooth dark grey material. Though I did not know what they were, upon seeing them I was overcome with the sudden notion that they were very important. I or someone else needed them. They belonged somewhere else and had to be returned. No… They needed to become something? Perhaps it was only their unseemliness in such a lieu that gave me the impression, but for one reason or another, I picked one up and cradled it in my hands, a mother with her first and only egg. When I began walking around this lonely forest in the sky, absently stroking my egg (yes, I was already becoming attached to it), something very strange happened. When I looked down at the sphere, it was gradually changing its color, and very very slowly–if my eyes were not fooling me–also its shape. I felt nothing in my hands as it did this, but eventually it had turned into something else entirely. I’m not sure what, but the next thing I remember, I was transported to a different floating forest, with the same peculiar spheres but in a different (still ill-suited) location. I picked one up and the same thing happened again once my mind began to wander. And once the sphere transformed, I was taken to yet another island in the clouds.
This kept going until I landed in what looked like the attic of a small rustic town home. Shelves full of boxes lined the walls, some of them toppled, their contents spilled and mildewing on the exhausted floorboards. A narrow wooden door led outside to a kind of balcony or roof access, so I stepped out for a moment. The building was unexpectedly tall, and for the first time in the dream, I got a clear view of almost the entire dreamscape. The sky was filled with dozens of flying landmasses hovering at different altitudes, different shapes and sizes, some miles off in the distance, and some comparatively close. Only at that moment did I connect the dots and realize I had been airborne this entire time. I also somehow deduced then, the function of the grey spheres that kept teleporting me around this maze of cloud forests. And I thought, if I could just find and “solve” enough of them, that I would be transported somewhere familiar. I went back inside and scoured the boxes in the attic until I found another one. It was nested in a plastic crate filled with red apples–oddly fresh, pristine apples, considering that the attic and everything else in it looked to be at least a lifetime old, and completely undisturbed. I plucked the sphere from it and, by this time knowing exactly what to do, I began picturing an apple in my mind as I held it. As it began to change, I squeezed it gently according to shape, helping it along.
The moment the sphere became a fully-fledged apple, the entire building shuddered, as if an explosion had rattled the island from far away–but I remained in place. Naturally, having thought I’d figured it all out, this took me by surprise. I tried putting the apple back in the bin with its family, but no luck. I decided to peek outside to see if anything had changed, and was shocked at what I found: a rather sinister-looking middle-aged woman in a purple dress, standing by a small tea table. I looked around for any way she could’ve gotten up there without passing through the attic, but nothing existed to suggest she hadn’t literally materialized while I was busy squishing fruit into existence with my mind. I figured for a brief moment that maybe she was trapped in the island maze too–that is, until she began lecturing me.
She told me this fractured land was an unfinished storyverse, and that the spheres were composed of pure imagination. They were the manifestation of yet-to-be-defined details of some cosmic authorship–the dream fabric, or stem cells of fictional worlds. This fascinated me, and I thought for a moment that that implied I’d been helping shape the world. But then she went on to explain: these spheres were a precious and finite resource, and that I was wasting them on conjuring tiny little objects like eggs and apples, when in fact, in a large enough quantity, they could be used to make this patchwork universe whole. My warm feelings of importance and helpfulness were crushed, swept away, and replaced with pure guilt and self-loathing. I could almost feel the weight of it in my stomach.[/spoiler]