My Time-Traveling Spaceship Dream

So, as you may or may not know, I regularly have really weird dreams.

Yeah, I know, everybody has really weird dreams. Big deal. But, I'm convinced that mine are a little weird in their own way because frequently my dreams consist most prominently of emotional textures, with images, plot, characters, etc. playing secondary roles. Mostly I just feel lots of things really intensely in dreams, and then I wake up (insert obligatory Midwesterner-feelings-repression joke here).

Here's an example of what I'm talking about, which is my slightly shitty memory of a dream I had last night:

I don't remember how we got there, because my dreams frequently start in medias res, and this one was no different. "We" were, at least as far as we knew, the very last remaining humans. We were inside of a spaceship, it was cold, we were tired, and somehow the dream captured precisely the feeling of knowing that you and a few others were all that remained of your kind in the entirety of existence. Despite the fact, of course, that I've never felt this way in real life. It was a panicked, but oddly empty feeling, but the panic didn't go away after a few minutes. It persisted for hours, days, months. I think a lot of this time passed quickly during the dream (this happens to me a lot, too).

Then, suddenly, there was hope, after a fashion. A few of the remaining, science-educated geniuses, who we had brought along on our spaceship-ark in the tradition of these things, had a plan. This plan was to send us ten years into the future. I think, though I can't remember for sure, the idea behind this plan is that it would bring a lot of the children on the ship up to childbearing age before too many of the rest of us died off and were unable to help reproduce. This was talked about in an immensely logical, detached way, while we all watched with empty eyes. I remember being hungry, and having no better ideas.

Soon enough, then, time-travel day came. At this point, I was oddly fixated on two things. One, I was really concerned that time-travel was going to hurt, physically. It felt like the first time you go to the doctor with the simultaneous awareness that it is going to hurt a lot immediately but ultimately be better for you overall. Two, I was desperately obsessed with trying to impress one of the women on the spaceship, in hopes that somehow that would convince her to fall in love with me.

In this dream, darkly enough, Lindsey had already died a long time ago (fulfilling her own dream, I suppose, of dying off at the beginning of any dystopian scenario), but there was this woman on the spaceship who was oddly similar to her, and I was absolutely sure that, somehow, being with her would make sad, starving space-life bearable. In my mind, this wasn't going to be a "hook up and make babies to save the world" scenario. No, we were going to live together in a house, have a family, and do all of the things that we absolutely could in no way ever actually do again. It was hopelessly saccharine and I knew that, somehow, while still also fully needing to believe it was possible anyway (another weirdly intense dream-emotion). To her, I basically didn't exist, because the only thing that really mattered was staying warm and not failing humanity by succumbing to death. Throughout the course of the dream, her ignorance of me somehow became more depressing than the extermination of the human race. I guess 20 year old me was making a comeback subconsciously.

Eventually, we all sat on the floor in the main bay of the spaceship, cross-legged, like a huge, spacesuited yoga class, while the scientists activated the time machine. The last two things I did before we fast-forwarded ten years was pet my dog (who was the exact, eleven-week-old puppy I own currently in real life) and then put my head on the shoulder of an elderly woman I'd never spoken to before and fall asleep. I found this oddly warm and comforting. There was no pain, after all.

When I woke up, the first thing I saw was my puppy again, fully intact, but still puppy-sized. This is when things took a turn for the horror-movie-esque. Despite being the same size as he'd been before, my dog was frail, shaky, and looked back at me with the rheumy eyes of a much older dog. It was then I realized what everyone else around me was simultaneously realizing: that we had aged in a cellular sense, but not actually changed at all in a physical sense. We had children in ten-year-old-sized bodies with twenty years of wear and tear, and people who had been sixty before the time-travel who were now just laying there dead.

It hadn't really gone as planned, but in the end it felt like one in a long litany of disappointments and failed contingency plans, deus ex machinas who neglected to show up when scheduled. The dream ended with me and the Mystery Woman exchanging pained, uncertain looks. It was the first time that it felt to me that we had something in common, in an odd way. It felt hopeful in the way the littlest things provide a disproportionate amount of solace in the face of a huge disappointment. Then I woke up.

What stuck with me wasn't so much the plot, but the clarity of the feelings that accompanied the things that happened. Generally speaking, I've never actually felt any of these specific feelings (or at least these feelings with these specific motivators) in my actual life, yet I did in the dream. Sort of like how some people dream about flying or being a fish...I guess I just dream about having really bizarre and extreme emotions. I think I'd rather be a fish.