Plutocrazy

I had a peculiar dream last week, especially notable for two reasons. First, I woke up in the middle of the dream, but almost immediately went back to sleep and resumed the dream where I left off. Two, that brief interruption completely altered the trajectory of the dream.

I was an astronaut on the first manned space flight being sent to land on Pluto. I was with something like four or five other people (I'm not certain exactly how many), only one of whom had ever been on any manned space flight before. It took us a long time to reach Pluto, of course, but in movie-like fashion, the dream skipped over the "boring parts."

Our ship landed on the surface of Pluto, and we began our first EVA out on the surface. But then there was some kind of horrible calamity. I don't really know exactly what it was, so frenetic was the pace of the dream. But I know it was some sort of fire/explosion sort of thing that disabled much of our vehicle, and killed the one experienced astronaut on our mission. The rest of us frantically scrambled back into the vehicle and rushed to launch back into orbit -- which somehow was going to mitigate the damage and at least allow us a chance of getting back home.

So intense was this part of the dream that I snapped awake in bed, kind of doing one of those cliche gasp-and-sit-up sort of things. Just a dream, I told myself. And actually, kind of a stupid dream, now that I thought about it. Why the hell would anybody plan a manned space flight to Pluto of all places? I laid back down and went back to sleep so quickly that my dream continued.

But the fun part was that that momentary intrusion of real world logic somehow pierced the haze that normally allows nonsense to go unquestioned in a dream. When the dream resumes, I'm suddenly questioning everything about this supposed mission. How could everything go so catastrophically wrong so quickly? And in what seemed like such a specific way as to kill our one experienced astronaut? How did we really get all way to Pluto so fast anyway?

In a short period of time, I've figured out that this entire mission was a hoax meant to fool the world, and even we the "astronauts" on the mission. Our leader, the experienced astronaut, had figured it out first, and so he was murdered as part of an elaborate cover up! We haven't really gone to Pluto, which explains how we got there so quickly, and how a fire was somehow able to spread so horribly in a place that should have no atmosphere! The gravity was all wrong, the time delay of our communications with Earth was all wrong! Actually, if this was meant to be a world-deceiving hoax, they did a really poor job of setting it up. But maybe they meant for it to be exposed?! Why else would they recruit someone like me to be an astronaut? Who would believe that?

And that's more or less where I woke up again, this time to start my day. This strangely cinematic dream, possibly inspired my recent viewing of Europa Report (but actually more like Capricorn One) would go without an ending.