Dream stories
Feb. 23rd, 2012 03:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
farlaBeen having some involved dreams lately. One was zombies, because most of my clearer nightmares feature those. They seem to be a good midpoint on the scale. I had a dream right before it involving something about confinement, bones being reshaped and horrible death, but I spent the dream trying not to know about what was going on and then woke up and did my best to forget the little I had figured out during the dream.
Compared to that, the zombie dream was pretty reasonable. There’d been a zombie outbreak and I was some alien or dimensional traveler or something trying to help, but mostly, I was trying to help by telling people they had to stop listening to Kyubey because it was behind the outbreak. It wasn’t creating magical girls to help clean out the zombie infestation, it had created zombies so that there’d be an excuse for the magical girls. And he was doing everything he could to subtly sabotage the surviving people so there would be periodic containment failures and constant fear.
For some reason, a lot of zombies were being funneled into this river, and as long as it was moving they couldn’t get out, so they built a big multi leveled canal to give it more length, then at the bottom they would let it out in waves, let the zombies stumble up, and try to kill them all. Since Kyubey was involved, the design had been screwed up so it was too narrow, making the water speed up to the point it was splashing things out and eroding the sides so it’d all fall apart, and if they tried to cut the flow the zombies would start trying to climb out and tear it down completely. They were shoring it up with rubber sheets so I had to slide along on the outer edge and try to push things back into position, because the zombies weren’t interested in me. But they were still constantly trying to claw their way out and over me. The river was mostly just blood, guts and zombies by that point, and there were all these people at the bottom where it drained fighting zombies, so if the thing failed, they’d get tons of zombies falling on top of them and die. Also, there were no people on the surface by this point beyond the remaining magical girls trying to kill off the hordes, so the people in the bunker with the river were some of the only ones left.
By this point people were running low on ammo. One of the surviving governments was Japan and they were in charge of one section where they just tried to hack the zombies up with swords, which meant they had a lot of trouble with getting overrun. Sometimes the zombies would come up at weird angles as well, and so they had whose job was to face away from the main batch and shoot anything that tried to flank the main group, but of course they were the first to get torn apart when the zombies got too close. One guy had already had the side of his face bitten off, so he only had one eye and couldn’t see anything coming toward him at all.
He ended up losing his other eye and so he was going to make a deal with Kyubey to get his vision back, and Kyubey said sure but it’ll burn out most of your life and you’ll die in a few days :D So I suggested fixing only one eye, and giving the spell the remains of his other eye to make up the difference. People were kind of crazy by then, they were willing to sacrifice anything to stop the zombies, so I said he’d do more good if he didn’t die in a few days to convince him. So Kyubey, angry I interfered, said he had an even better idea – he could bind him to the dark to be eyeless and immortal, and stay down here forever to protect people from monsters.
I kept trying to convince him that this was almost over, and if he did this he’d be trapped for eternity, but Kyubey just kept going on about how didn’t he want to protect people, isn’t that worth any sacrifice. He created two contracts, one to given him powers in return for turning him into an undead monster and the other the immortality, and the way it worked involved that he’d be frozen as he was, incapable of ever changing. I was horrified but the guy didn’t understand what that would do. Then Kyubey added his name to that part of the contract so if it was signed he’d get the same effect, making it so he could never be stopped either. Since Kyubey didn’t change or grow over time, it was just a straight powerup without him losing anything. I realized he must have been piggybacking on contracts and that’s how he’d gotten as powerful as he was, he couldn’t enter them himself but when a contract would have some advantage to him he could apply it to himself as well.
Then Kyubey made me carry out the contract, but right before he agreed, I told him that if this was really about doing the right thing, he couldn’t rely on a contract to force it, it had to be a choice, and being unable to leave by his nature wasn’t one. I convinced him that instead, it should be that the power would only work so long as he remained willingly, and if he ever came up into the sunlight he’d be destroyed – if he was right, he’d never want to leave, but this way it would mean something. I just wanted something that could kill him so he wouldn’t be trapped forever. He agreed and before Kyubey could take his name off, the contract went into effect, making it so Kyubey would be destroyed if he ever encountered sunlight. Considering his abilities that would barely slow him down but it did mean people would be less willing to trust him the next time.
It was an oddly good ending. My dreams usually just get steadily worse, and you can see the usual progression from zombies to a zombie-filled river about to collapse on everyone to people getting their eyes torn out to people agreeing to die to people agreeing to something even worse.
I made the mistake of sleeping again and had a dream where I was in another world and this guy was talking about how he knew things were hard and people were losing their jobs, and I realized there was something wrong with the clock on the wall, first it wasn’t moving then it started moving backward, and what was going on was that the whole concept of clocks just didn't work, they wouldn't count time or agree with each other, so people were having all sorts of problems coordinating, which was why there were the job problems. Scientists were trying to make a new sort of clock but having no luck. I found I was a couple and kept jumping back and forth between which one, and we left the building where the guy was and went to the store to try to stock up on food. As we walked there was this distortion effect and I realized it wasn’t the clocks, it was time, so we grabbed each other so we wouldn’t get separated.
The store was mostly bare, in part because people were stocking up but also because no one was able to coordinate enough to ship food. It was hard to even navigate because the warping kept making it take longer or shorter to walk anywhere. I realized that also, it wasn’t going to be easy to harvest crops because there was no way of telling how far along they were. They didn’t have potatoes so I bought up onions, explaining that you can pull them up early so if we planted them we’d be able to eat without it aligning to a particular date, and also they store well, and I was worried food might age irregularly. We met someone else there, alone, and I suggested that to her too, figuring the more people were growing food the more of a buffer we’d have when supplies ran out.
We tried to go home. We were walking along next to the train tracks and there was a huge accident at one of the stations where three trains had piled into each other – one had pulled in, another struck it, and then a third in the opposite direction had run into it because the derailed train cars had been thrown across that track. The cars were all burning and there was no one alive. I realized transportation had completely failed, and tried to figure out if there was any way to make it work at all in the new world.
I figured out that the problem was the people in charge of the trains couldn’t communicate, and the trains were out of sync with each other until they got close. Then I realized we would be killed in the next accident. We got to an empty station that was where we could leave when two trains piled into each other, and the smashed cars kept almost missing each us, then trying to avoid them we ran onto the other track where the third train was coming, and I wondered if maybe the world was just warped to be malicious, and the time things was an extension of that. We managed to climb out but I didn’t think we’d last long, and the dream ended.
It jumped to another dream where I was telling a supercomputer to delete my memories of what I’d just been doing and all its files on my mission from itself. The computer wanted to know why and I said it was the only way to contain the infection. It did so and then the screen jumped to a boy standing in a room, but it was really a program contained in the computer’s memory. The boy said I hadn’t been fast enough.
It was this reality warping thing that would be spread by knowledge about itself. If you knew about it, it would gradually take you over, but you wouldn’t realize it was there to stop if you didn’t know about it, and in short order it would manifest itself directly, which then infected everyone who saw it. I figured out some of that because I knew I’d just had my memory deleted about an infection, and here was something taking over the computer in charge of everything. I couldn’t eliminate it, though, because by the time it’d be deleted the seed of it would be growing somewhere else, and if I stopped it’d gain more and more power over reality. Finally it was reduced enough that the computer was completely in control of itself and sequestering the parts that contained it, and I quickly ordered it to send me to right before the thing appeared to try to kill it then. The computer said there was something wrong and it wouldn’t go, and if we tried to force it, we’d do a lot of damage. I said that we had to.
There was the sensation of resistance giving way and then I was in the world where time had just stopped working.
Compared to that, the zombie dream was pretty reasonable. There’d been a zombie outbreak and I was some alien or dimensional traveler or something trying to help, but mostly, I was trying to help by telling people they had to stop listening to Kyubey because it was behind the outbreak. It wasn’t creating magical girls to help clean out the zombie infestation, it had created zombies so that there’d be an excuse for the magical girls. And he was doing everything he could to subtly sabotage the surviving people so there would be periodic containment failures and constant fear.
For some reason, a lot of zombies were being funneled into this river, and as long as it was moving they couldn’t get out, so they built a big multi leveled canal to give it more length, then at the bottom they would let it out in waves, let the zombies stumble up, and try to kill them all. Since Kyubey was involved, the design had been screwed up so it was too narrow, making the water speed up to the point it was splashing things out and eroding the sides so it’d all fall apart, and if they tried to cut the flow the zombies would start trying to climb out and tear it down completely. They were shoring it up with rubber sheets so I had to slide along on the outer edge and try to push things back into position, because the zombies weren’t interested in me. But they were still constantly trying to claw their way out and over me. The river was mostly just blood, guts and zombies by that point, and there were all these people at the bottom where it drained fighting zombies, so if the thing failed, they’d get tons of zombies falling on top of them and die. Also, there were no people on the surface by this point beyond the remaining magical girls trying to kill off the hordes, so the people in the bunker with the river were some of the only ones left.
By this point people were running low on ammo. One of the surviving governments was Japan and they were in charge of one section where they just tried to hack the zombies up with swords, which meant they had a lot of trouble with getting overrun. Sometimes the zombies would come up at weird angles as well, and so they had whose job was to face away from the main batch and shoot anything that tried to flank the main group, but of course they were the first to get torn apart when the zombies got too close. One guy had already had the side of his face bitten off, so he only had one eye and couldn’t see anything coming toward him at all.
He ended up losing his other eye and so he was going to make a deal with Kyubey to get his vision back, and Kyubey said sure but it’ll burn out most of your life and you’ll die in a few days :D So I suggested fixing only one eye, and giving the spell the remains of his other eye to make up the difference. People were kind of crazy by then, they were willing to sacrifice anything to stop the zombies, so I said he’d do more good if he didn’t die in a few days to convince him. So Kyubey, angry I interfered, said he had an even better idea – he could bind him to the dark to be eyeless and immortal, and stay down here forever to protect people from monsters.
I kept trying to convince him that this was almost over, and if he did this he’d be trapped for eternity, but Kyubey just kept going on about how didn’t he want to protect people, isn’t that worth any sacrifice. He created two contracts, one to given him powers in return for turning him into an undead monster and the other the immortality, and the way it worked involved that he’d be frozen as he was, incapable of ever changing. I was horrified but the guy didn’t understand what that would do. Then Kyubey added his name to that part of the contract so if it was signed he’d get the same effect, making it so he could never be stopped either. Since Kyubey didn’t change or grow over time, it was just a straight powerup without him losing anything. I realized he must have been piggybacking on contracts and that’s how he’d gotten as powerful as he was, he couldn’t enter them himself but when a contract would have some advantage to him he could apply it to himself as well.
Then Kyubey made me carry out the contract, but right before he agreed, I told him that if this was really about doing the right thing, he couldn’t rely on a contract to force it, it had to be a choice, and being unable to leave by his nature wasn’t one. I convinced him that instead, it should be that the power would only work so long as he remained willingly, and if he ever came up into the sunlight he’d be destroyed – if he was right, he’d never want to leave, but this way it would mean something. I just wanted something that could kill him so he wouldn’t be trapped forever. He agreed and before Kyubey could take his name off, the contract went into effect, making it so Kyubey would be destroyed if he ever encountered sunlight. Considering his abilities that would barely slow him down but it did mean people would be less willing to trust him the next time.
It was an oddly good ending. My dreams usually just get steadily worse, and you can see the usual progression from zombies to a zombie-filled river about to collapse on everyone to people getting their eyes torn out to people agreeing to die to people agreeing to something even worse.
I made the mistake of sleeping again and had a dream where I was in another world and this guy was talking about how he knew things were hard and people were losing their jobs, and I realized there was something wrong with the clock on the wall, first it wasn’t moving then it started moving backward, and what was going on was that the whole concept of clocks just didn't work, they wouldn't count time or agree with each other, so people were having all sorts of problems coordinating, which was why there were the job problems. Scientists were trying to make a new sort of clock but having no luck. I found I was a couple and kept jumping back and forth between which one, and we left the building where the guy was and went to the store to try to stock up on food. As we walked there was this distortion effect and I realized it wasn’t the clocks, it was time, so we grabbed each other so we wouldn’t get separated.
The store was mostly bare, in part because people were stocking up but also because no one was able to coordinate enough to ship food. It was hard to even navigate because the warping kept making it take longer or shorter to walk anywhere. I realized that also, it wasn’t going to be easy to harvest crops because there was no way of telling how far along they were. They didn’t have potatoes so I bought up onions, explaining that you can pull them up early so if we planted them we’d be able to eat without it aligning to a particular date, and also they store well, and I was worried food might age irregularly. We met someone else there, alone, and I suggested that to her too, figuring the more people were growing food the more of a buffer we’d have when supplies ran out.
We tried to go home. We were walking along next to the train tracks and there was a huge accident at one of the stations where three trains had piled into each other – one had pulled in, another struck it, and then a third in the opposite direction had run into it because the derailed train cars had been thrown across that track. The cars were all burning and there was no one alive. I realized transportation had completely failed, and tried to figure out if there was any way to make it work at all in the new world.
I figured out that the problem was the people in charge of the trains couldn’t communicate, and the trains were out of sync with each other until they got close. Then I realized we would be killed in the next accident. We got to an empty station that was where we could leave when two trains piled into each other, and the smashed cars kept almost missing each us, then trying to avoid them we ran onto the other track where the third train was coming, and I wondered if maybe the world was just warped to be malicious, and the time things was an extension of that. We managed to climb out but I didn’t think we’d last long, and the dream ended.
It jumped to another dream where I was telling a supercomputer to delete my memories of what I’d just been doing and all its files on my mission from itself. The computer wanted to know why and I said it was the only way to contain the infection. It did so and then the screen jumped to a boy standing in a room, but it was really a program contained in the computer’s memory. The boy said I hadn’t been fast enough.
It was this reality warping thing that would be spread by knowledge about itself. If you knew about it, it would gradually take you over, but you wouldn’t realize it was there to stop if you didn’t know about it, and in short order it would manifest itself directly, which then infected everyone who saw it. I figured out some of that because I knew I’d just had my memory deleted about an infection, and here was something taking over the computer in charge of everything. I couldn’t eliminate it, though, because by the time it’d be deleted the seed of it would be growing somewhere else, and if I stopped it’d gain more and more power over reality. Finally it was reduced enough that the computer was completely in control of itself and sequestering the parts that contained it, and I quickly ordered it to send me to right before the thing appeared to try to kill it then. The computer said there was something wrong and it wouldn’t go, and if we tried to force it, we’d do a lot of damage. I said that we had to.
There was the sensation of resistance giving way and then I was in the world where time had just stopped working.
