h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

You had 7 dreams and you didn't die once? Nothing tried to kill you? You didn't have to kill anything? That's just freaky. Here's a couple of dreams I had and wrote down a while ago. I generally can't be bothered writing them down, but I have these.


Dream 1 – 2000/2001

I was working as an archeoligist in a team of three, and we were excavating Sick Bob's (a real life friend and H2G2 member) front garden. It was possibly early evening at the start of the dream, and we were finding a number of artefacts - broken pottery, trinkets, that sort of thing. As the evening wore on, we discovered a grave that had been covered over with concrete beams (yes, I know they didn't have concrete in the iron age, but this is a dream, okay?). Anyway, I made enough of an opening in the grave/tomb to see in, and there was the usual array of bones and burial ornaments. At this point, it was getting dark, so we decided to leave the grave until the morning. One of the guys I was working with left and went home, but the other followed me into Sick Bob's house. When we got into the house, it had suddenly become my house (don't ask). For some reason, I looked out the window into the front garden (which was still Sick Bob's garden) and saw a number of zombies approaching from the street and coming through the gate. I then went into frantic 'close all the doors and windows mode'. I told the other guy to shut the front door, and I went into the kitchen to close the back door (which looked out onto my back garden). As I closed the back door, I saw even more zombies lumbering towards me (just for completeness, they were the naked, highly decomposed, 'I've been dead for a year and I'm not going to take it anymore' type, rather than the fresh, clothed 'I've just died! Look at me!' type.) When I'd closed the door (an act which seemed to take a very long time), I looked over to the front door and saw that the guy (let's call him Tony, for convenience. He looked like a Tony.) had failed to shut the door, and was right now being eaten alive by the zombies. I then had to struggle for a while, since the zombies were opening the back door and I had to fight them off. It was at this point that I realised that the zombies were made of Heinz Spagghetti in tomato sauce. When I grabbed at the arm of one of them to remove it from the door, I ended up with a clump of spaghetti in my hands. The spaghetti was alive and writhed about as I held it. Only with vigorous shaking was I able to remove it from my hand, and I then watched it as it crawled through a small hole in the floorboards. I then found out that 'Tony' was still alive, completely free from tomato/spaghetti/zombie stains and had even managed to close the front door. There was then some sort of an incident where the zombies were coming through the back door again, because I found myself standing in the doorway, facing into my back garden with b****r-loads of zombies lumbering towards me while staring up into the face of a 2 story high cyborg zombie thing with rocket launchers for arms (actually, it was the final boss from Duke Nukem 3D, but with Dream Knowldge TM, I knew that it was a cyborg zombie.) I then fought a couple of zombies (geting an entire armful of spaghetti this time) and ran upstairs to the bathroom. I shook the spaghetti/zombie stuff off my arm and flushed it down the plug hole in the bath by turning on the taps. I then found myself wearing a hands free comms kit, and recieving instructions via the comms kit from General Munro from the 5th Element (another don't ask unless you're really interested) on how to kill the zombie/spaghetti stuff that was down the plug hole. He suggested using bleach, disenfectant etc, so I ran down to the kitchen, got some from under the sink, ran upstairs again and poured it down the plughole. As I was pouring it, 'Tony' appeared behind me. He was absoloutely wasted and slurred "Use BEEEEEER!!!" as he handed me a 6-pack, which I poured down the plughole as well. 'Tony' then made himself inconspicuously 'absent' as I looked out the bathroom window (in real life it's misted, but in the dream it was clear) and saw the 2 story tall cyborg zombie raise its arms towards me. I dived into the hall as the entire wall was blown away by a barrage of rockets. At this stage the ever useful 'Dream Knowledge TM' kicked in again and I suddenly knew that I was a special forces military guy and that my house had a self-destruct mechanism and a secret underground bunker. I returned to the downstairs scene and spent a while futiley battling the zombies as they streamed through the front and back doors ('Tony' had dissapeared completely from the dream.) before I concluded that I had lost the house to the enemy. I ran back upstairs and went into the back bedroom, where I activated the self destruct mechanism. A computer voice message announced "BFB activated". I assumed the 'escape' position, which was meant to take me down to the underground bunker via a lift. Unfortunately, the 'escape' position consisted of lying flat on the floor of the back bedroom. There was no lift, since it would have to have cut through the middle of the kitchen on its way down. A while passed as I waited to be lowered into the bunker, and the dream switched to some fancy cinematics. The view panned out to take in the house and the zombies from a side on perspective (for some reason, my neighbours house wasn't there, and the gable end of my house was just bare brick with no paint. Usually my house is a semi-detatched.) With the brilliant new 'fly anywhere' camera, I watched as the house filled with zombies, the cyborg zombie crashed through the kitchen and saw myself being mysteriously transported through 10 feet of solid brick/concrete and 30ft of thin air to the floor of a huge cavernous area (the actual transition looked a lot like the bit in Fight Club at the beginning, where the camera decends through the floors of the tower block from the main character to the explosives in the basement.) I then found myself back in my body, looking up at a ceiling composed of bricks and girder supports. The ceiling cracked and caved in a bit as the house exploded above with a deep rumble. I then got up and started wandering around the cavernous space. It was basically a huge square underground room, but there were some old disused escalators leading upwards on one side. There were a lot of other people there - drug users, homeless people, punks etc. Eventually, I found an old object that looked like the deformed child of a vacum cleaner and a car exauhst pipe. I picked it up and said "This is my fear. I have my fear." I then started walking about the place, showing people 'my fear' and saying "Look at my fear. This is my fear." Even the really bizzarre, insane people avoided eye contact and walked away briskly when they saw me.

Well... that's pretty much where I woke up. There was a bit where I saw the cyborg/zombie on it's way to my house, but that sort of turned into a completely unrelated dream after a while.

*Note* The last part of the dream, the bit with the underground space, was bloody scary! It was pervaded by the terrible fear that the zombies would come after me if I ever left the underground place, and that I was doomed to spend the rest of my life there. That's much scarier than any mere 2 story tall cyborg zombie with rocket launchers for arms.

Dream 2 – 20/07/01


No zombies this time. These were worse.

It started off with me wondering around all these corridors (suitably fitted out with steming pipes, cables and metal grill floors) in a big facility thing. After doing this for a while, I suddenly found myself in a control room, looking at a computer screen. The screen displayed 2 small icons which I could control and move around the corridors. The camera then switched a few times between the computer screen and the actual things (you know those robots that you plug in to a BBC computer and type instructions into? They kinda look like a tortoise with no legs? That's what they were). The dream quickly turned into a running battle, where I had to guide the robots out of the facility while fending off attacks from aliens (as in the acid dripping, chitin armoured H.I Giger aliens). This was actually quite easy, since the robots were equipped with machine guns and auto-targeting systems, and the dream provided some really dramatic views of the aliens being torn appart by the hail of bullets. After that, I found myself in a sort of industrial cage lift. It wasn't in a lift shaft or anything, it was just a lift, sitting there all by itself. There were a number of other people in the lift with me (one of them was Morpheus, from The Matrix), and there was a sort of heavy tarpaulin forming the ceiling of the lift. You know how the aliens are different depending on what species they burst out of? Well, we all came under attack from this bat winged alien, and 'Morpheous' got killed. I pulled out a pistol and fired 4 or 5 rounds through the tarpaulin, then I ran out the door and checked the roof to make sure it was dead (It was. Very dead in fact.) There then came a bit where I hijaked a car and went driving about some city or other for a while (with the occasional appearence of an alien or two). After that, I was suddenly in my room, packing all my walking gear for the Nvigation and mountain skills course that I'm booked on. After a bit of packing, I went to the train station, waited a bit, looked at the train tickets and found myself at Glenmore lodge training centre (note that I hadn't actually got on a train). I then found out from the staff at the lodge that I'd have to hurry up or I'd be late. I looked at the train tickets again and realised that I was already an hour late, and that I'd have to drive back home so that I could get the train here (I know it's confusing, but it's a dream, ok?). On top of that, there was a penalty for being late, and I found out about a whole, bizzarre monetary system that was running at the lodge. Apparently, being an hour late meant that I owed them 6 buttons (the type you use to button up your shirt. I don't know what happened to using coins and notes.) It was at this point that it occured to me that driving back home just so I could get a train to where I already was was a bit silly. This seemed to trigger another sudden change in the dream, and I found myself trimming a hedge because some park ranger guy had arrested me. I spent quite a while trimming the hedge and formulating an escape plan before... (nah, I won't tell you that bit.) Anyway, just a minute or so after the hedge bit, I woke up.

Dream 3 03/08/01

I was looking across a dirt track thing, and Kirk from Star Trek was standing at the other side. Through Dream Knowledge TM I knew that I was Captain Picard, and I even looked like him, right down to the red uniform and bald head. (I was able to see myself with Dream Vision TM). A dune buggy (one of the lightweight things you see racing around beaches and deserts) pulled up in front of me and Luke Skywalker leaned out of the window. I remember thinking to myself ‘Is that really Luke Skywalker?’ at which point Dream Vision ™ kicked in, and I was presented with an image of Luke somersaulting with his lightsaber and stuff, and I thought ‘Yep, that’s Luke Skywalker’. I then flicked to another location (it looked a little like a section of my back garden at one of my old houses, only bigger and deserty and with lots of medium sized armoured buildings and stuff. Also, I was now Captain Kirk.) There was a sort of limo jeep thing (it looked a little like the APC from Aliens) on the dirt road, and I got into it. There were 2 other guys in there, and I suddenly knew (Through Dream Knowledge TM) that I had been sent by the federation to save the outpost from a siege. I started talking about strategies, and one of the guys said how they had been using level 7 bombardment defence strategies. I responded by saying "Level 7?!? You should be using level 9!" I then went on to say how the most important thing to remember about level 9 was that you had to keep on the move all the time. There was then a very brief driving scene before I got out and wandered across the courtyard of the armoured buildings (which in real life was a small lawn surrounded by trees, a hedge and a tree house) before the dream abruptly flicked to a view of a jug of whipped salmon, where it lingered for several seconds before I woke up.