Best dreams that I have had in a while

[3rdragon]

We were an exploratory group, perhaps an armada, living in caverns under the surface of the planet. It was a bit like underground grand canyon with walkways and stairs added.
One of the junior science officers was explaining what her probes had discovered about the weirdness we had noticed off on one edge of our territory, aided by a 3-D hologram sort of thing. As she talked, it got more and more distressing; space objects, planets, even stars seemed to be pressing towards each other at one end of the star cluster, as if giant hands were flattening them into a sheet - and the effect was moving. The farthest stars were already, so far as we could tell, a thin plane, and the stars closer to us were beginning to move. And she showed us footage of one of her probes trying to escape the flattening area; the cause wasn't clear, but something started a chain of explosions until the footage ended in a flash of light.

I looked at the second in command. I could see the decision process in her face; there were things that you could fight, and things that you could run away from. This was definitely in the latter category. "All right," she called, "We're leaving. Total evacuation, no personnel left behind."

The command staff scattered in various directions, and minions started swarming like ants. We ran into the commander, and the second-in-command brought him up to speed. He nodded, and added his own orders, "Take everything portable, but don't waste time dissembling anything. If it can't come as-is, we're leaving it." He turned back to the second and said, "I'll be back before we leave; there's something I need to look into." With that, he headed for the nearest stair down, following it out of the frequently used passages, onto darker and darker levels until the stairs were more of a ladder. At last he reached the bottom. The air was heavy, damp, and rank, the only illumination provided by a few flickering bulbs. It was clear to me that whatever he was doing, it was one of those Crazy Captain Things.

The dream changed. My field of view remained the same, but the darkness seemed, somehow, a little more wholesome, and I was now a person rather than just a viewer. I looked down a long black passage, aware that the captain had explored it already, and wondering why he had brought me here. He told me to stay where I was, then wandered down the passage a bit to the nearest lightbulb, which he removed and brought back with him. He went down a different passage, putting the bulb into an empty light-socket on his way by. He passed through a tunnel in the rock, then emerged into open air on the other side. I could see him, almost, in what little illumination there was. There was a chasm between the two of us, and he was heading back in the direction that we had come, only on the other side of the chasm. He told me to follow on my side. I could barely see, but I felt my way cautiously, judging by the crunch of rock under my feet and the occasional branches to either side. My eyes gradually adjusted to the dark, and I could see that we were in a valley - a crater, really; I knew that we were at high elevation. Giant trees, Metasequoias at least, ringed the edge, making the sky a paler place almost impossibly high up. Small winged things floated in circles on a breeze I could not feel, their translucent wings catching what little light there was and condensing and diffracting it into tiny rainbows. I knew that I was standing in a place that had been untouched by humans - by any sentient beings - until we had arrived here.

And did I mention the cast list?
The captain was Malcolm Reynolds. The second in command was Susan Ivanova. And me? I was space-Bridget.



I remember fewer plot details of the second dream; we were in a courtyard, a bunch of teenaged humans and a dragon in human form. And then we were flying, each riding the back of some winged creature, writing poetry in the air, my best friend (the dragon-boy) and I. We flew far, and high, and flew over dream-plot significant location, and discovered something that I (the dreamer) knew but I (the dream-character) did not, and were nearly caught my the old lady who was a minion of the insert-enemy-here before we escaped into the air again.

That's the first dream I can remember in which I flew.