Disturbing dreams

[unixronin]

I've occasionally had a kind of recurring dream involving a library that's mostly very modern-looking and efficient, but appears to have a few cramped little garret rooms stuffed into odd corners purely for the purpose of having crampled little book/curio shops tucked away in them that belong in a forgotten corner of some really old town, or maybe the back end of Diagon Alley.  I wander around this library accomplishing not much of anything, but apparently with some very definite purpose in mind if I could just figure out what it was.

Sometime this morning the library dream started out pretty much as it ever does, but rapidly turned at first odd, then very nasty.  The oddness began with some strange plants appearing around the library, plants that reached out tendrils and grabbed onto people and had sort of biting insectlike things around them.  Then some guy's 7-year-old son disappeared, and I wondered if he was in among the strange plants.  He had a sort of shifty, ratfaced henchman who went and got a pump shotgun from his car for him, then he started wandering around the outside of the library where I and several other people were looking for his son, shooting wildly and blindly into every cark corner, shadow or pool of water, and paying not the least attention who he fanned with the muzzle.  I took it away from him and read him the safe-gunhandling riot act in by best drill-sergeant parade-ground bellow, which he regarded with great offence and had his flunky fetch him a large, ported semiauto pistol instead that looked like a Grizzly LAR.  The henchman also brought out a very battered small-bore, single-shot break-action rifle for himself.  Somewhere along about this time, the plants developed lamprey-like mouths on their tendrils, which by now were thick creepers, and people started getting grabbed and bitten.  We retreated inside the library to regroup, but almost immediately people were showing up with plantlike features growing on them.  Along about this time I figured out that these weren't any kind of Earthly plant, they were some kind of alien lifeform that we'd been intentionally seeded with.

We continued to right off the plants for a while, something at which most of the people (including Mr. Arrogant But Clueless and his rat-faced henchman) were basically useless at and more liability than asset, as more and more people started showing up with their limbs or faces deformed by alien growths.  I got grabbed several times but managed to break free each time.  Someone asked me after a while, "Can you defeat them?" to which I answered, "Not with these weapons."  I explained that I had much more potent weapons at home, but I needed some people to go with me to get them.  So I and a group of about eight other people set out on foot to go and get my weapons, whatever they were, from wherever they were.  By this time the ordinary clothes I was wearing when the dream began had changed to battledress and combat boots; I discovered while taking my sneakers off and putting my boots on (no explanation of where I got them) that there was a large alien growth in the bottom of my left foot.  (I wonder if this was my brain insisting that it hardly seems like it's my own foot any more.)

The weapon run went OK to start with, though we discovered pretty early on that any patch of vegetation now had alien plants in it, and that they could pop out with little warning and could reach a pretty long way with their tentacles.  We made good progress until we were passing the city dump, at which point alien life started boiling out of the dump.  About half the people in the party were overwhelmed immediately, while the rest of us made for apparent safety in the center of a large tree-lined square.  Then alien plants started boiling out of the trees, to the extent that it seemed all the trees suddenly expanded to five or ten times their size and burst.  The streets were totally clogged from one side to the other by alien life, and the square was rapidly closing.  The other four people with me were grabbed and dragged into the foliage within seconds, and as the plants closed in I apparently activated some kind of flight capability within my battledress (or maybe it was just your basic dreamstate "Hey, suddenly I can fly" schtick).  I tried to take off and outrun the plants in the air, but I'd left it too late, and didn't quite manage to get out of reach before being grabbed myself.  The last thing I saw in the dream, from an altitude of three hundred feet or so, slashing at grabbing tendrils with my Ka-Bar and about to be engulfed, was a sort of dark blue-green wave of alien plants rising from the city and rolling in from the surrounding countryside, boiling up as far as the eye could see, as the alien life reached some kind of critical mass and just overran everything.  All that was still visible of the city was a cluster of high-rise buildings downtown, and the blue-green wave was climbing those at several floors a second.  The last thing I was aware of before I woke up was one of the insectlike things flying/crawling into my right ear canal, and when I woke up I could still "feel" it crawling in there so clearly that I had to physically make sure there wasn't actually anything in my ear.

 

Hell of a bioweapon ... I came away from the dream with the conviction that the entire planet had just been overrun in a single day.  Oh, I'm sure we fought back, probably even used a few nukes; and I'm equally sure that it didn't do the damnedest bit of good.