A Dream About Enemy Base Infiltration

600 words.

Blaugust Day 3

Besiege Dream Gizmo

It’s Sunday morning as I write this. I had the strangest dream last night. That’s not unusual because, honestly, a lot of my dreams are strange. I think the scientific explanation of dreaming* involves your subconscious re-processing things you’ve experienced, but that doesn’t explain a lot of my dreams. Quite often I see things in my dreams that I have no memory of ever seeing, hearing, or experiencing before. Sometimes I’ve heard complete songs with melodies and lyrics. Sometimes I’ve seen stories with plots and dialog. Of course the next morning they are completely gone, which makes me wonder if those songs really had melodies and lyrics, or if I just thought they had melodies and lyrics.

Anyway, last night’s dream was a story that would be completely gone too if I hadn’t spent some time writing it down as soon as I woke up. I thought it was interesting enough that I should try to record in case I ever need some material. (Not that I don’t have a backlog of 50,000 other stories already that I’ll never write.) The funny thing about dreams, though, is that when I go to start writing them down, I don’t seem to have words to describe anything. See, there was this thing, and it was doing something, and it was somewhere. During the dream, everything seemed perfectly clear, but writing it down is an exercise in frustration.

This dream took place in an enemy base or stronghold or deployment area or somewhere. It sort of vaguely reminded me of the Rebel Base on Yavin’s moon or perhaps the hangers from Hunger Games. The base was a staging area where things were deployed for greater purposes, probably nefarious purposes since they were “the enemy” after all. I don’t know who “the enemy” was or why there was a battle going on. Maybe it’s just my gaming background. Maybe I was just dreaming about a game. But it wasn’t like I was observing a game being played, it was like I was seeing actual events in some weird alternate world.

The enemy was in trouble because someone or something had infiltrated this enemy base with a tiny autonomous drone or robot or android or biomechanical device or thing. It was small and easily overlooked and could slip inside the enemy base unnoticed. It had its own form of locomotion like wheels. It reminded me of the contraptions you can build in Besiege. It had some form of ranged attack that was something like spitting acid or shooting water. It worked its way inside the base to a set of wall-mounted batteries or power cells or things and destroyed them one by one. Once it was finished attacking, it snuck** away and hid somewhere, because it had depleted all of its resources.

That is just scratching the surface of this dream, and that was only one part of it. There was also something like a protective sheet of aluminum foil but I can’t even begin to describe what that was about.

Happy work week everyone!

* I honestly have no idea where I learned that “scientific explanation of dreaming,” and indeed a quick look at Wikipedia shows that there doesn’t appear to be a scientific explanation of dreaming yet.

** I originally wrote “it snuck away” but the spellchecker didn’t think “snuck” was a word, so I changed it to “it sneaked away.” But “snuck” is a real word isn’t it? Or have I been wrong all these years? Turns out I’m not wrong. So I changed it back. Screw you, spellchecker.

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