Original photo by Andy Magee. 
I have to tell you about this dream I had last night. Okay? Okay!
It started off as a standard Alien Invasion type of movie (yes, movie; it had camera angles and edits and was in 3rd person perspective). There were UFO sightings all over the world, but only at night. The UFOs were pretty standard flying-saucer types, but with a lot of blue and green neon accents. Very cool visuals. Each one was only about as long as a city bus.
Pretty soon they started showing up en masse, descending on cities all over the world. Everyone started to panic and run around. A family of which I my character was a member—a teenaged son I believe (yes, in the dream I was not playing myself, and the family had no real-world counterpart; they were just made up for this dream)—piled into a van and there was a really cool action scene of us trying to escape the pursuit of a couple of these Flying Saucers. The van would screech down city streets, the water on the nighttime roads throwing off crazy reflections of the neon Flying Saucers darting overhead, dodging other vehicles and panicking pedestrians.
The van skidded around a corner, across a small bridge over a canal, and down an alley that turned out to be completely congested with vehicles and fleeing people, fleeing in the opposite direction we were going. We screeched to a stop. Three more Flying Saucers were chasing everyone towards us down the alley as the two pursing us popped around the corner behind us and started closing in.
That’s when the Flying Saucers started shooting.
Bright green bursts appeared on the bottom of the Flying Saucers, and everything below them suddenly shuddered as if struck by a giant, invisible blanket. Then quickly gravity started to dissolve and everything underneath the Saucers became weirdly weightless and floated away from the ground, helpless people and vehicles alike, with drops of water sparkling all around and pebbles and stones rising up amongst them.
Then a dark blue blast shot down from the center bottom of the Saucer and struck a vehicle. It instantly collapsed in on itself for a moment like a black hole had been placed inside it, then a white sphere of light shot out of it for just a moment, then there was nothing but a quickly-falling amount of dust. The vehicle was just gone.
The Saucers started steadily advancing towards our van, picking off the helpless, floating people and vehicles with ease, each time a flash of dark blue light, a split-second sense that the object or person was collapsing inward, then a bright sphere of light and a pile of dust.
Seeing that there was no way that we could drive forward any more, and noticing that the Saucers were only attacking things on the street, I noticed an open door on the building to our left and ordered my family out of the van and inside. As we clambered out of the van towards the building, a terrified person nearby crouched down next to his car and clung onto the wheel for dear life. I remember thinking, “Those Saucers can make cars levitate. Does he really think that grabbing onto one is going to make him safe?”
Sure enough, bing-zap-poof, he had been levitated and reduced to dust.
We hid in the abandoned building as the Saucers efficiently went about their work outside, flashes of green and blue and white light peeking through the slats in the boarded-up windows. The noise and screams got steadily less and less, and soon the Saucers seemed to move on.
That’s when I noticed some movement in the darkness of the building. It was an alien in a space suit. It looked a lot like the classic “gray” alien: big head, almond-shaped black eyes. But it had the skeletal grin of the Mars Attacks aliens.
The dream jumped around quite a bit at this point. We escaped from the alien somehow. I realized that he was a ground spotter: he was part of a vast crew of aliens who directed the Saucers from the ground to make sure they didn’t miss any people, and also who went through the building themselves to clean them out. They had guns that did the same collapse-flash-dust special effect on any organic matter they shot (but only organic matter).
The dream jumped to much later in the story when all the cities had been abandoned. I’m not sure what happened to my family, but I was with a wild-eyed, ex-military guy. We were holed up in a small house somewhere in a wooded area. I had a gun. We were playing cat-and-mouse with an armed alien. The military guy lured the alien towards me and I got the drop on him and leaped out, firing my gun and shouting a mighty battle cry. The bullets *tinked* off the alien’s suit as it staggered backwards, until the 4th of 5th bullet managed to puncture something and it slumped forward to the ground.
Apparently this part of the dream was so intense that I actually did my battle cry out loud, in my sleep, in the real world, waking my wife (but thankfully not my baby). She shook me awake. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“…Aliens,” I mumbled.
I was quickly back to sleep. Much more time had passed in the dream. Most of the entire surface of the planet had been reduced to dust. I and a group of people (I think my family was in there) were fleeing through corn fields because for some reason the aliens didn’t zap corn. And they were only about four feet tall, so it seemed an easy feat to lose them in the corn.
As our group exited the far end of the cornfield, though, we were confronted by a dark, dust-covered world. All organic matter was gone. And a massive Flying Saucer, easily 100 yards wide, descended down towards us. Its underside flashed green and we all started to lose our grip on the ground and float upwards. There was a dark-blue flash and a bright white flash in our eyes and then…
We were all standing, disoriented, in a room of some sort, brightly illuminated with pure white walls. Standing in front of us, smiling, were all the people we’d known who earlier in the movie had been zapped by the aliens. They weren’t dead at all, they explained. Those beams didn’t disintegrate things; they were teleportation beams! The aliens were trying to remove as much of the Earth’s population of plants, animals, and humans because their advanced sensors had discovered that our sun was about to jettison out a massive solar flare that would overwhelm the Earth’s magnetic field and completely immolate the entire planet, killing everyone and everything.
The aliens weren’t killing off humanity; they were saving it!
A giant monitor appeared on one of the walls, and a woman exclaimed, “Look! It’s about to happen!” On the screen the Earth appeared, and towards it rushed an enormous jet of flame, many times larger than the puny planet. It slammed into and engulfed the Earth. The magnetic field parted it for just a moment before the flames punched straight through and consumed the entire surface of the planet, transforming it into a glowing ember, like a dying piece of charcoal in the night.
A woman explained that the alien’s methods of communicating were so different from humans that they could not figure out a way to tell us their intentions, so they just went ahead and tried to save us anyway. I felt really bad about killing that one alien, but someone reassured me that the aliens knew that there would be casualties but that it was worth it to save an entire planet.
“But where are we?” I asked.
“Our new home,” someone said. A massive door opened up in the far side of the room and revealed a distinctly Earth-like vista: a field and a forest and mountains in the background, with Earth birds flying through the sky. “They managed to teleport almost everything directly to this new planet.”
Then I woke up.
THE END.
Anyways, I’m off now to see the Hellfyre Club perform their musics at The Crocodile.
Categories: Dreams.
A couple of notes: there were a couple of aborted parts of this dream, parts that my subconscious considered but then discarded and didn’t use, but because I was asleep I still knew about them even though they didn’t happen. You know how it goes.
First off, my brain tried to come up with a reason why the aliens didn’t teleport any corn. The best they could come up with was that the aliens figured that corn syrup was SO bad for humans that it would be better off being burned than teleported to the new planet. My brain was never fully satisfied with this explanation (though I think it is hilarious), so it wasn’t actually incorporated into the dream.
Secondly, there was an original draft where after the Earth got burned up, the Aliens were going to teleport-swap the burned-up earth with the new planet we were on, so it would be exactly where old Earth was. But I realized that if they could do that, they could just teleport Earth out of the way of the solar flare and then the whole premise of the movie would have been kaput. So that was never actually incorporated into the dream either.