Let's do this once and for all

One time I had this dream. For the one out of ten readers who didn't check out at that preceding sentence, here's a story.

I was fifteen years old, a lonely little egg. I had just learned of the concept of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen and, failing to understand anything about the energy involved in that process, pictured myself solving the world's fossil fuel problem, possibly after running and hiding from the big oil lobby's death squad and unexpectedly publish my theories in Rolling Stone Magazine. (1990s kids will know exactly what Stephen King book I had just read.)

But anyway, with this background in mind, it's not very surprising I dreamed I got drafted to Earth's cake baking team the first time we were invited to the Interstellar Olympics.

Somebody got sick, they tell me, so you're the best choice we have left. It doesn't matter you don't know a thing about baking, you're just there to fill the seats, we don't really need you.

I don't care. I leave the team to their warm-up batter after a half-hearted attempt at stirring that leaves my arms feeling like noodles and just walk around. I'm in space, walking around in a vast space ship. The steel walls of the corridors are artless, utilitarian, giving a reliable impression. And the windows are large and I can't get enough of looking at space.

Then there is a girl standing next to me, looking at a potted tree in a corner shedding a heavy rain of green leaves. I don't know how she got there. She's a thief, she says, representing Alpha Centauri. She does a little run over the walls with a sword in her hand to show off. I'm not sure what it has to do with competitive thieving, but it's a stunning display of physical skill. She looks human, though very pale, with long black hair. Probably two or ten years older than me. I can never tell these things. She says her name is Stella and I feel like I'm in a bad sci-fi movie. Yeah, it would sound that way to someone from Earth, she says, laughing. It turns out her parents are massive Earth nerds.

For some reason this inspires me to invite her to visit my planet. To begin with I have no idea how that would work. We're borrowing some cheap ferries to get here and back, and I'm under the impression the trip still costs a lot. Indeed she says it's probably impossible even if she should bring in a bunch of prize money. But she still appreciates the thought. Says she does have some inherited interest, and it would be cool to be the first alien to visit Earth.

Through some chain of events so unlikely I'm not going to be able to remember it clearly, Stella and I become friends. We seem to spend days and days drifting around the stadium-ship, staying away from people, talking idly, just enjoying each others' company. I have no idea when or if she's competing until at one point she tells me she lost. Her final score is one of the lowest ever seen on the IO stage. She just laughs it off. It feels to me we have something in common being the biggest losers on this ship. Being unwanted.

It does seem to bring us closer together. I wonder if I want to kiss her, if she wants to kiss me. It's possible we're both equally clueless about these things. Most of the time I don't even think about it. I'm just happy to have a friend.

And then it gets strange. Someone in the Earth delegation has won a grand prize, a blueprint for - who would have guessed it - a combustion engine that runs on water. This is all very secret. I only find out when I'm taken to a room filled with spies who tell me they want me to take this paper scroll home in secret, to present to the recipient - some government-sponsored research group who can put it in action - under great publicity. That way the oil companies won't have a chance to stop it, which they will certainly turn over Heaven and Earth to do. They won't see it coming because I'm the least remarkable person here, you see.

Stella can come with me, that'll work out nicely for everyone and it won't hurt to have someone akin to a bodyguard of considerable skill on the job, just in case. Especially since nobody will care about her either. I can't argue with that logic so off we go on the next shuttle to Earth.

And well, somebody screws up and it's not me or Stella. When we enter Earth's atmosphere a couple of cruise missiles are headed our way and the shuttle blows up. Things get chaotic at this point, but it's clear Stella and her thief tricks is the only reason this priceless treasure gets down to Earth. She puts up some kind of force field that protects the two of us from the explosion, she pulls some kind of rocket-powered parachutes out of her pocket - Stella's "pocket" is a portable pocket dimension that looks like a steel armband, containing the blueprint and who knows what else - and she takes my hand and pulls me away from any panic, as hundreds of people without parachutes fall screaming into the clouds below us.

We're mentally preparing to fight our way to the press conference as soon as we land, taking aim for the streets of Stockholm, but then I wake up.

Getting slow wave up in here

I had the strangest dream.

It must have been 1995. Last day of eight grade. Sometimes I dream of going back and realizing I've missed twenty years of classes, but it must be ten years or more since I dreamed of really being back there. We were in a building way away from the rest of the school buildings, on the other end of a soccer field and a parking lot, not because eight graders were generally kept away from civil society but because the school kept building more buildings and we somehow ended up at the edge of that expansion, which was much nicer than the rented construction barracks in which we had spent most of grade seven. It was a small building with just our classroom and the woodshop, which was often empty, so it was really a bit like we were in a world of our own. The classroom had a kitchen where one guy put together a pancake out of pancake mix and every chemical he could steal from the chem lab, and he kept it in the silverware drawer.

(So now you know where Scrubs got that joke from.)

It never went bad or anything, and no one wanted to eat it. (That had more to do with him having his hands on it than the obviously deadly chemicals in it.) But it stayed with us all year and nobody had anything to say. When we had a cooking class with our biology teacher she put a coleslaw salad in the oven to keep it out of the way and everyone forgot it. Our classroom became infamous for the weird smell over the following months until I remembered. It was anarchy.

And we had such a good time, on that last day we all stayed at our desks shooting the shit until it got dark outside. (That should  have been a hint, because it doesn't get fully dark around here until about late September.)

And then the UFO showed up. This is the part I can remember clearly, you know, in the way the part of a dream that wakes you up seems to override everything that went before. The guy on the desk next to me watched out the window and gave directions that I, not being able to name a lot of stars and especially not watching the night sky through a window, followed poorly enough that I tried to look out the wrong window. I told him I couldn't see anything, and he explained my mistake and I joined the other twelve boys and girls watching this flashing light glide over the sky. I wasn't the only one remarking it was the shape and color of the aliens in The Simpsons, with the comically large green head in a tube sticking out of a classic icecream-jar-lid flying saucer. But that was just a coincidence with the arrangement of its lights.

We saw that when it got closer. It was tiny, like a wasp, and it slid through the window with almost no resistance and buzzed through the room while we sat frozen, afraid of scaring or hurting it. I'm pretty sure it went through my right shoulder, though it felt like it just bumped against it. The room was so dark you couldn't see what was going on, the ship was just these spots of colored light and all of this was not enough to wake me up. I only woke up because of the force of the insight that hit me as I began to figure out something about how the world was put together, based on the way this stranger was apparently only intersecting with what we'd call physical substance.

I wish I could have been there forever, with that strange light that made everything else dark, with my friends who were all bold enough to meet this strangeness with curiosity instead of antipathy, with that moment that was going to change everything. We were fifteen. We were free and we were immortal. I cannot say if, in my dream, anyone thought I was Emil or Amelie; I was just one of the class, one of us.

I don't know if there's a point to this, except just when I was going to sleep I was thinking through a plot I probably won't write. A plot where a character's dreams reveal repressed memories.

Optic Drugs Attack Waffles #4

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So I just started thinking about how a post-death society would have to think in order to believe itself more "advanced" than its ancestors, and before I knew it I was composing a philosophical little one-tweet fiction, and then I remembered Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and its beautiful sentiment that I'm paraphrasing in the narration here, and by then I was already composing a comic in my head, and I thought it deserved a little more than stick figures, and here we are.