Sleep deprivation
Oct. 10th, 2011 11:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
farlaI'm having unusually involved dreams.
The most recent one was where there were guns on mobile poles with motion sensors. It was a post-apocalyptic setting, so they'd been repurposed as capital punishment by people who had no idea why they were there. If someone did anything wrong, they'd have to walk toward it until it shot them. (It'd flash a red light and make warning sounds in advance.) The guy in charge was a jerk about to execute someone for taking food, and I was pissed off by this so I threw batter in his face and managed to get the sentence shifted to me.
Of course, I was some sort of biological robot thing who knew what the guns actually were for, so I just ran toward it really fast and the motion sensor registered me as a friend. (It was unclear if it was running itself or if you had to run at a certain high speed humans couldn't usually hit - it seemed to settle on "relatively fast, so don't do it unless you want to risk getting shot." Which you might, because...)
I actually wanted to get over to the gun because its behavior (delaying shots to give multiple warnings) meant it was on the wrong setting, and because at the control panel I could find where the other, presumably disabled ones were.
They needed to be turned on or repaired because the zombies would be getting there soon.
A couple stumbled into camp and were taken out by the couple guns, but most of the towers I found were just alarm towers. I was pretty upset by this, because the alarm towers were no damn good without the rest of their defenses. I ran around until I found a phone to call out. I got a phone tree, which irritated me but I already knew the sequence so I just went through the press one press five thing. Then I pressed two because I was better in Spanish. I was trying to talk directly to the computer in charge of another area, but it turned out there wasn't a direct connection, so I got thirty seconds into a detailed machine code warning that this place couldn't hold out and needed help when some guy on the other end spoke up to say he didn't have any idea what I wanted. I told him to shut up, I wasn't talking to him and to go put the phone by the computer microphone.
It was then the train arrived.
It was an automated train, which would automatically stop and automatically open its doors. Since zombies were already tumbling out of its open windows, this was not really good. It had been packed with people and someone had zombified while transported a long time ago. The computer and I managed to connect with the train just long enough to close the doors again and send it further on. I was hoping the bridge might have broken and they'd all fall into the water, although I wasn't sure if that'd actually stop the zombies or just delay them a bit while they crawled out.
Meanwhile, the place was in an uproar, barely able to fend off the tiny number of zombies who fell off the train. I started explaining that they needed to get fencing up as soon as possible to close the gaps. They wanted to kill the zombies first, and I explained that the zombies had been leaking off the train the entire way, and the current handful was just the first wave. I was also worried about why the train had come, and suspected that there was probably a zombie area that had been locked down and was now open. The train was from the height of the zombie infection a long time ago. I was relatively sure there would be more trains coming, and the noise had attracted more wild zombies as well. They had to wall off the platform area before they were overrun.
And then the dream decided that coherency wasn't quite such an issue and flipped to me on the train. There were secure doors between each section but I guessed what would happen was whenever someone zombified, other people would investigate the sound and open the door, because they were solid metal and you couldn't see anything through them. The group in the car behind me was a number of elderly, but they were remarking on how unhealthy a couple of men looked. Their skin was papery and grey and their torsos were weird. It was because their internal organs were no longer held in place right, I muttered, but everyone believed the zombie plague was contained, so I didn't say anything, knowing this would make them less willing to believe me. (The people knew they were zombified - they were evil.) Instead, I stood right by the door. When the weird moaning started and everyone suggested we look, I opened it just long enough for them to see, then forced it shut before the zombies could push through. Since I hadn't been shouting they were zombies earlier, no one thought I was the sort of person to jump to unwarranted conclusions regarding the zombie plague, so they weren't skeptical and asking for another look.
The dream had the usual repetition I get in dreams, where something happens and then it happens again differently, but this time it was incorporated into the narrative itself better than usual. Instead of it just repeating, or even that I had the power to reset backward, it was more a predictive thing - it would play out one way, then I'd say that was a terrible outcome so I'd be sure to avoid it.
The most recent one was where there were guns on mobile poles with motion sensors. It was a post-apocalyptic setting, so they'd been repurposed as capital punishment by people who had no idea why they were there. If someone did anything wrong, they'd have to walk toward it until it shot them. (It'd flash a red light and make warning sounds in advance.) The guy in charge was a jerk about to execute someone for taking food, and I was pissed off by this so I threw batter in his face and managed to get the sentence shifted to me.
Of course, I was some sort of biological robot thing who knew what the guns actually were for, so I just ran toward it really fast and the motion sensor registered me as a friend. (It was unclear if it was running itself or if you had to run at a certain high speed humans couldn't usually hit - it seemed to settle on "relatively fast, so don't do it unless you want to risk getting shot." Which you might, because...)
I actually wanted to get over to the gun because its behavior (delaying shots to give multiple warnings) meant it was on the wrong setting, and because at the control panel I could find where the other, presumably disabled ones were.
They needed to be turned on or repaired because the zombies would be getting there soon.
A couple stumbled into camp and were taken out by the couple guns, but most of the towers I found were just alarm towers. I was pretty upset by this, because the alarm towers were no damn good without the rest of their defenses. I ran around until I found a phone to call out. I got a phone tree, which irritated me but I already knew the sequence so I just went through the press one press five thing. Then I pressed two because I was better in Spanish. I was trying to talk directly to the computer in charge of another area, but it turned out there wasn't a direct connection, so I got thirty seconds into a detailed machine code warning that this place couldn't hold out and needed help when some guy on the other end spoke up to say he didn't have any idea what I wanted. I told him to shut up, I wasn't talking to him and to go put the phone by the computer microphone.
It was then the train arrived.
It was an automated train, which would automatically stop and automatically open its doors. Since zombies were already tumbling out of its open windows, this was not really good. It had been packed with people and someone had zombified while transported a long time ago. The computer and I managed to connect with the train just long enough to close the doors again and send it further on. I was hoping the bridge might have broken and they'd all fall into the water, although I wasn't sure if that'd actually stop the zombies or just delay them a bit while they crawled out.
Meanwhile, the place was in an uproar, barely able to fend off the tiny number of zombies who fell off the train. I started explaining that they needed to get fencing up as soon as possible to close the gaps. They wanted to kill the zombies first, and I explained that the zombies had been leaking off the train the entire way, and the current handful was just the first wave. I was also worried about why the train had come, and suspected that there was probably a zombie area that had been locked down and was now open. The train was from the height of the zombie infection a long time ago. I was relatively sure there would be more trains coming, and the noise had attracted more wild zombies as well. They had to wall off the platform area before they were overrun.
And then the dream decided that coherency wasn't quite such an issue and flipped to me on the train. There were secure doors between each section but I guessed what would happen was whenever someone zombified, other people would investigate the sound and open the door, because they were solid metal and you couldn't see anything through them. The group in the car behind me was a number of elderly, but they were remarking on how unhealthy a couple of men looked. Their skin was papery and grey and their torsos were weird. It was because their internal organs were no longer held in place right, I muttered, but everyone believed the zombie plague was contained, so I didn't say anything, knowing this would make them less willing to believe me. (The people knew they were zombified - they were evil.) Instead, I stood right by the door. When the weird moaning started and everyone suggested we look, I opened it just long enough for them to see, then forced it shut before the zombies could push through. Since I hadn't been shouting they were zombies earlier, no one thought I was the sort of person to jump to unwarranted conclusions regarding the zombie plague, so they weren't skeptical and asking for another look.
The dream had the usual repetition I get in dreams, where something happens and then it happens again differently, but this time it was incorporated into the narrative itself better than usual. Instead of it just repeating, or even that I had the power to reset backward, it was more a predictive thing - it would play out one way, then I'd say that was a terrible outcome so I'd be sure to avoid it.
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no subject
Date: 2011-10-11 05:49 am (UTC)And there my response was sort of :/ really dream? Zombies don't get me because zombies never get me in dreams, it's always just the running, so I know I'll get to the top. And don't try to tell me it's not a dream why else am I moving like unusually lazy molasses.
I've always been confused by the myth that if you die in a dream you die in real life because I die in my dreams all the time and I just respawn.
One of the weirdest things about how we talk about dreams is how everyone's working off our shared pop culture version, even though it's something we all have firsthand experience with. And for some reason the shared pop culture version is nonsense, despite again the firsthand experience.
So you have people talking about "I was naked and everyone noticed and laughed" when those dreams don't normally have any resolution, they're just the person running around trying to hide so no one will notice and laugh. You have people talking as if it's easy to move around in dreams, when trouble with that is really common thanks to hitting interference signals with the part of our brain trying to keep us from actually moving. And they usually try to get across the weirdness of a dreams by having things change around suddenly and shift to new things all the time at random, when there's almost always obvious links between the things. If not to everyone, than at least to yourself. Plus the whole idea that all dreams take place in first person viewpoint that ends a split second before any death. The closest I've ever got to death related weirdness in dreams is being able to do incredibly risky stunts with the world rearranging itself so I didn't quite die. That would tip me off if I was ever in some lotus eater type dream thing.
(I used to respawn all the time but these days I usually I don't die except when I suicide. I tried avoiding the repeat loops by sitting and just letting the monsters get me, and so now the resets are narrative, which is even more noticeable and I'm in sort of an escort mission where I'm invulnerable myself.
(Except dreams where the house is possessed, for some reason I usually still fall for those.)
no subject
Date: 2011-10-11 07:07 pm (UTC)...oh, wow, that isn't too scary? Even when I'm aware that I'm dreaming I still get scared, and my best response to really awful things like being surrounded by monsters or captured by bad guys who are going to kill me is to wake myself up.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-12 05:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-12 12:40 am (UTC)I tried avoiding the repeat loops by sitting and just letting the monsters get me
Wow, I agree with Ember, you have nerves of steel. o_O I would be terrified if that every happened to me in a dream.
Lucid dreaming sounds fun, I should try it sometime. I very rarely dream, and when I do, it's usually very disjointed and hard to remember.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-12 12:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-12 05:29 pm (UTC)And like I said, I'm really not! If I'm terrified I prefer to stick my head in the sand.
I'm not sure lucid dreaming is really the best term for it...I'm not exactly in control all the time or even always aware it's a dream, but my dreams tend very much toward a sort of genre-awareness and viewing stuff as an ongoing story, which makes it easier to notice I can mess with it.