Not very restful

[beccaelizabeth]

I appear to be awake. That's like six hours sleep with an awake in the middle. Sleep is tricky.

Last dream featured a space colony with a competing intelligent race, as played by a Cardassian. It was a well established colony in some ways, it had a city with a city centre and a rush hour and multiple churches and graveyards with stones that went back centuries because somebody brought the family. But it was seriously short on plants.

There was a lovely yellow flower, and the Cardassians wanted it. But there were precisely two of those plants left in existence. And they belonged to the family of just one guy.

You know it might have been Plantagenet? Planta genista, common broom. I checked on wiki and it was the same nice yellow.

Two plants. So the Cardassians decide, hey, one for us, and they pick it and start sectioning the stem, probably trying to grow a whole lot more.

And the ancestors kick off.

Like, here the people are on a nice new planet, but they brought their families because of some kind of ancestor veneration thing, which the new alien neighbours can dig... until they find out they are being entirely literal about the ghosts thing.

Your colonisation plan probably has a section about competition. Probably does not have a section for poltergeists.

But it's okay, this is an easy one: plant belongs to one family, you're going to make many of the plant, yes? Okay, so you've got to be family.

So one particularly representative guy is chosen and arrangements start being made.

But they keep working on the plant.
So I assume it's urgent medical stuff because otherwise you would put the plant down for a whole day while you make nice with the active poltergeist ancestor neighbours.

And then the poltergeists start slinging grave stones around, and the problem gets
bigger.

So there's banging and crashing and multiple families of ghosts up and around, and the people living near the graveyard are having marital problems, and there's a crying baby, and basically every family ghost that wakes up finds enough reason to at least nudge a vase off a stand, and it all is just a big mess. Plenty bad. Ghost riot.

So there was this one guy trying to get through the rush hour crowd to the graveyard. And it's the kind of walking crowd I've only seen in movies and rush hour on the London Underground which I try not to think about, where you move at the speed of the crowd because there's nowhere else to move. Big block of people. Shoulder to shoulder and then some. Just... trying to get home.

So this guy starts yelling he's SHIELD and they try and get out the way, but it's like the police getting through a traffic jam, someone has to find an out the way to go and they have to be in hearing range of the police and it's just not happening real fast. He's moving but it's not fast enough.

So he starts to yell lots of technical words about how the ghosts feel about him. Can't remember the words, very specific words, belong with the ancestor veneration and the actual ghosts, couldn't happen between alive humans. But he's yelling them and the crowd just whoosh out the way. Because when it's the law to move, you move, but only lawful. When there might be pissed off ghost from above? People are pushing open doors they don't own, maybe breaking in, definitely climbing lamp posts - suddenly there's places to be and there's a big spreading oval around this guy. Which, yaay, he can get moving, so he leaves that variety of chaos behind him and moves.

At the graveyard we can see things are going seriously ghosty. Big heavy stones are moved, and one seems to have smashed. People have tried to replace it with cardboard and crayons, because a small child's best efforts might get grandma to back off and they can't get a new stone any faster, but even if that particular ghost is calmed, a whole lot of others are not. You can't quite see them, but there's shadows where there should be none, and things move. Walking down the rows of graves, the grass shifts underfoot in disturbing ways, like empty when there should be only full.

Got to a point in the middle with a view of the whole problem, grave plant and all...


... and woke up.




So.



That's an awesome bunny though. You've got space, you've got aliens, you've got competing needs, and you've probably got arranged marriage, though in this case adoption could be almost as fun, because now everyone needs to sort out everyone's lives to the satisfaction of the ancestors, and since the entire point is to count as family as many aliens as possible, that's a whole lot of new lives to sort out. And two cultures that have to work together to do it.

Plus if they've got active ghosts and all you've got an excuse for mostly mystic space travel. Like the horror movies where hyperspace turns out to be literal hell. But more ancestor-y.

Like, you can go visit your family and come back somewhere else, but you have to make sure the ancestors are cool with it before they'll let you go.

And then a well stocked graveyard would be like a Stargate...




I don't know, genre mixing might annoy, but it gives you an excuse to bring centuries of attitudes to first contact and then just make it so they all have to live together
because killing anyone is going to make it so much worse.



So that was a neat dream.

Comments

[anne_d]

With excitement like that, it's no wonder you wake up tired. [hugs] and more rest to you.