What dreams may come

Most times, dreams of the sleep just drift into the ether, consigned to oblivion.  Fragments may survive in recollection for a few minutes after waking but these soon fade, like early morning mist as the coruscating sun bears down on it through the latter's ascent.  One dream which was incredibly complex involved a fairytale castle not dissimilar to Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, yet these are the only two details that remain in the memory for that particular rumination.  A more memorable dream springs from when I was between five and seven years old and I was being chased around my primary school by miniature tornadoes until they cornered me and I awoke from the nightmare.  As a teenager, I formulated a mafiosi attack on the CIA at an American airport.

The start of this dream (as far back as I can recall) involved a church outing for the Men's Group where went abroad, though oddly we were being picked up from Gillingham Park, where a Cessna Piper Alpha (or whatever that light aircraft is called) was landing.  Maybe the affront to the council meant that we had to conduct this departure in secret or maybe when things are under the radar they are more important and more personal to the people who know - dreams aren't meant to make sense but this enterprise was all very cloak-and-dagger for some reason, possibly to make it more exciting.  So there was a lot of preparation and even a flip chart book of artful pictures of the enterprise.  It got down to the morning when we were meant to leave and things starting going wrong as other groups kept turning up unexpectedly and then a reason about it being summer why this particular group had appeared although that detail is hazy.

That was the end of this narrative strand but not the dream as it, because of the secretive aspects, segued into a portmanteau scene from James Bond where we were chasing a Cessna Piper Alpha (again whatever) from the Licence to Kill part where Bond escapes from divers by harpooning the plane. This aircraft contains Max Zorin from a View to a Kill and Roger Moore’s Bond is chasing him in the submersible version of Little Nelly from You Only Live Twice, but he has Stacey Sutton (with pink scuba gear) as companion, instead of Barbara Bach from The Spy Who Loved Me. 

Maybe had the mini-submarine caught up with the plane, it would have launched a missile as in the last movie mentioned.  But my mind was distracted and my perspective was from a Daniel Craig/Sean Connery Bond taking a French Citroen with an elderly passenger inside.  The Bond persona was shed and I pootled around the streets of Leicestershire agreeing to convey her as she was on the way to see my grandfather who lives there.

I fail to link up with my grandfather but I still go to a church service where I meet Richard, a friend from the Gillingham church operating the sound system (an activity he has performed in his life at St Mary’s), present with his girlfriend, Sarah.  He says he has emailed about that builder request and I have yet to add him to Facebook (I only found out he was on Facebook last week – some people still eschew Facebook and I don’t delve, but this reminded me to do so when awake).  I say he has emailed my oldest email account which I never use now, whereupon Sarah chips in to say she told Richard this was the most likely thing to have happened.

Anyway, then the whole flow jacknifes back to the throes of the foreign adventure, I am in a Spanish self-catering apartment and we are discussing about naming my sons Harold and William (I have no sons yet) and I didn’t want my son to a name close to that of Prince Harry.  But then we are in a maternity ward and there are babies there.  As it is a hospital, there are people with injuries and deformities.  In the popular imagination , deformities can arise from radiation poisoning.  Suddenly we are in this Chernobyl-alike nuclear facility about to sealed off for hundreds in a sarcophagus locked by super-powerful electro magnets.  There are two of us guys trying to escape the Alien (Alien) - obviously here, I am recalling reading about the new survival computer game Alien: Isolation.  Also in this facility are Michael Fassbender from Prometheus as a Terminator (ultimate mash-up!), determined to kill both the humans but primarily the Alien (Skynet I guess not having a need for the animal unpredictability of the creature).  There are some Nutcracker-style (drawing on the Slavic theme?) psychotic androids (or at least that the closest description that still remains with me) trying to kill the humans but these are comparatively easy to elude.  The perspective keeps switching from the humans to the Alien to Fassbender’s cyborg.  Eventually, Fassbender launches two missiles at the Alien who is chasing the humans down this long turbine chamber, destroying the xenomorph’s hindquarters.  The humans escape in a jeep as the lockdown swings into operation, a final android destroyed by the lowering of a concrete beam as its top part hit the post and wrenched it clear of the integrated wheels it was on.  So the complex is sealed for the best part of a millennia.  Inside, the Alien has recovered and has genetically altered itself with one of the humans it has killed -  it now has a human head and other human aspects but on an Alien’s limbs and back.  This hybrid sets itself up as leader of the deformed, diminutive humans left inside and talks to one of the babies (these corporations are ruthless in who they leave behind) but is told it is asleep.  Even in a dream logic interferes and it couldn’t possibly be the alien genetically changing itself so radically like the Dalek in the Dr Who episodes Daleks in Manhattan and The Human Dalek – it must have been Fassbender’s cyborg.  It was here that the semi-incoherent narrative (well there was a flow of sorts) ended.  I had a massive sleep to incorporate this.  Leo Tolstoy believed that dreams come in the split-second before consciousness but I defy such a theory with such a complex story/stories.  In the past, I’ve also briefly woken up before falling asleep and resuming the dream.

Anyway, there’s a franchise in the making - Alien vs Predator vs Terminator.  Though Arnie has faced off against the Predator in a pyrrhic victory (the first film’s tagline that Earth has seen nothing like this before undermined by subsequent Predator films), the Alien is completely another matter and as the T-800 he would have extra advantages.