Dream, 11 March 2001

Science-fiction-type dreams this morning. I wish I could remember the whole thing--it was quite fascinating. I forget if it was just Derek with me at the beginning of the dream; perhaps Jude was there, as I have a strong impression of there being at least three of us.

So we were in some kind of spacecraft and we were on a mission, though now I can't recall exactly what it was. But we found ourselves suddenly presented with some kind of large space station where we hadn't noticed one before. It didn't appear to be in use. Out of curiosity, we found some way of docking inside it.

We disembarked our own craft and started to walk around. The station appeared deserted, but inside, past the docking bay, we could see that the interior was absolutely huge. More, there were streets and buildings inside! "It's a city!" I exclaimed excitedly. The station was indeed big enough that it was possible to simulate being on a planet's surface, with buildings, earth beneath our feet, diurnal cycles, and more.

And then, almost in a blink, there were people! Going about their business, they swirled around us as if the place hadn't seemed deserted a few seconds before. We began to wander around, trying to get a feel for the place, and eventually we were walking down some sort of catwalk in one of the few areas that actually looked as if it was inside a space station.

We stopped briefly in front of what might have been a library, and a woman greeted us. It was clear to her that we were strangers, but she wasn't hostile at all. She offered to tell us more about the station and said we could feel free to explore it at will. This excited us greatly, since we'd never seen the like of it before.

She also led us to some temporary quarters. We rested a bit, then went out to explore. I remember us buying a large stash of food to try. And we ran into Ann Thomas -- at least, a person who looked very much like her -- who offered to show us around some.

Ann also took us to meet her brother, who had a dwelling in the side of a hill along some kind of roadway because he said he couldn't afford a "real" house. He drove us along the road and pulled over by some small aperture in the side of the hill. The entrance was so small that we had to lie down and sort of wiggle through, but it opened up to a rather extensive apartment inside. And it wasn't simply a big, dank cave -- it had real walls, a real floor, furniture, decor, power, and everything.

He showed us around through many, many rooms, and we couldn't believe that this place existed in a hillside by a road. The only part of it that seemed odd was that his bedroom was a level down, and it was tiny. Not only that, the ceiling of it was slanted so heavily that one could only stand up straight in one end of the room. I wondered why his bedroom was so inconveniently designed when the rest of the place was so spacious, but I didn't ask him about it.

At some point, I can't remember when, we were shown the operations center of the station, where we could look out the window into space (the rest of the station maintained the feeling of being on a planet's surface, so there was noplace to view the outside). As it turned out, the station was very much like Brigadoon. It existed in a kind of hidey-hole, a pocket of space that was somehow camouflaged so that almost no one would notice its existence. Through the window we could see some kind of machinery in the distance; there were four such devices that worked together to create this pocket of space. Obviously, the technology involved in maintaining it was extremely complex. They couldn't explain how we'd managed to stumble upon them despite their system, but they didn't mind because we were clearly without hostile intent.

After a few days, we reluctantly left to resume our original course. I remember going through all the leftover foodstuffs, trying to decide which was worth it to take along and which to discard. When we'd packed up our ship, we said goodbye and went on our way.