Posts tagged “The Moon”

Begaa Crystal Meteorite NWA 4910 LL3.1 – Photo by Jeff Barton

Last weekend I had an awesome sci-fi movie dream. I haven’t head a good, memorable dream in quite a while (almost exactly a year ago as it turns out) so this was very exciting. This dream movie starred:

• Me
• My Wife
• My Daughter (non-featured role)
• An unknown, middle-aged actress with very short gray hair. She seemed very familiar, but I can’t quite place who she is. I bet I’d recognize her if I saw a photo of her.
• Chris Pratt as “Chris Pratt.”
• At least one other character, possibly an African-American male (non-featured role)

“No way. I’m in this movie? No way!”

The premise of this dream movie was that many years ago a lunar expedition (my brain thought it was probably robot-only, but that was never actually mentioned in the dream by any of the characters) set up a permanent structure on the dark side of the lunar surface with the goal of Terraforming the moon to have a breathable atmosphere and Earth-normal gravity at the surface. The six (or more) characters in the movie were all on a transport shuttle/spaceship of some sort (no idea where we were coming from or going to) that had a major malfunction and was forced to land on the lunar surface near this structure.

Whatever the malfunction, it completely wrecked the ship’s propulsion and communications. We were stranded on the moon with no way to get back to Earth or a way to communicate with Earth to let them know where we were. We setup residence in the fully-stocked structure.

This situation was rather depressing for some, especially the character played by the middle-aged actress, who sported a uniform very similar to Ripley’s outfit from the original Alien, leading me to believe she was the pilot of the ship. The dream started in earnest from that point:

Sitting forlornly in a 1960s-style spherical chair and gazing out the window, the Pilot mused about how we were stuck there. My wife, holding my bundled-up daughter (my daughter’s only actual appearance in the dream) more optimistically pointed out that the base was fully-stocked with more food than we could ever eat, and the view was lovely.

I looked out the large, circular window just in time to see a brilliant meteorite tumble down and strike the lunar surface some miles away. It was a very unusual meteorite in that it sparkled brilliantly with a rainbow of colors, and when it smashed into the lunar surface it didn’t so much explode as it set off a miniature pyrotechnic display of beautiful, prismatic colors that seemed to reflect off the ground around it like thousands of mini jewels.

“Wow!” I shouted. “Did you see that?”

The Pilot nodded, but seemed unimpressed. My wife agreed it was very pretty, but seemed more interested in making sure the moonbase was livable.

Chris Pratt came to talk to me some time later and informed me that he thought he’d figured out how to get the terraforming to actually work, but he needed my help.

Apparently in this dream I was some kind of engineer, because Chris Pratt and I got the terraforming process to successfully start, but it took weeks of work. During that time the sparkly meteorites continued to fall in the distance. It seemed like the frequency might be increasing, and sometimes now there were two that fell at the same time in close proximity to each other. Around this time I realized how bizarre it was that these meteorites would be so bright seeing as how there was no atmosphere on the moon (yet) to ignite them as would happen to a meteorite on the way to Earth.

Eventually the terraforming process took hold, and a long while (weeks? months? years?) later the moon had a lush, cloudless, blue sky, and we could all walk around outside without spacesuits. It was a bit chilly (probably in the mid-40s), but otherwise it was very breathable. And it had Earth-normal gravity at the surface. Much progress had also been made in repairing the ship; a bridge had even been constructed between the second floor of the moonbase and the main hatch of the spaceship. Meteorites continued to periodically fall, but falling through the atmosphere only made them sparkle even more brightly, with a blinding, glittery, white light instead of an intense rainbow of colors. They also seemed to fall very slowly, almost gliding down to the ground. They only ever impacted beyond the horizon, though.

It was when I was cranking a wrench in an open hatch on the ground level of the ship that a meteorite crashed to the ground right in between the moonbase and the ship, barely missing the bridge between them. I immediately ran around the spaceship, and though I missed the actual impact I saw its immediate aftermath.

The meter-wide meteorite had smashed open. It was, in fact, a very thin shell with a rocky interior but an interior like a brightly-polished mussel shell. It had shattered into thousands of inch-wide triangular shards that littered the ground for a few meters around the impact site. It was this site, though, that really grabbed my attention.

Around the center of the impact site a ring of emerald crystals had formed, maybe a meter in diameter. And from the center of this ring came sprouting a most fantastic crystalline structure. It grew upwards (think of Elsa’s castle from Frozen) in all the brilliant gemstone colors, with offshoots reaching out from a central ruby stem like brittle glass petals in fantastic emerald, sapphire, tourmaline, and clear colors. At the head of the stem was a bright crystalline structure that seemed to be lit from within. It looked remarkably like the classic illustration of the head of a virus:

Virus structure. Source

As I watched it rapidly grew to about four or five feet high, then began to list over to one side and slow. Soon the internal light died out and it stopped growing completely. I stared at this fantastical structure for several seconds, then excitedly yelled for Chris Pratt to come take a look at this! He poked his head out of the spaceship’s main hatch, then quickly scrambled down to join me in gawking at this marvelous thing.

Cut to: Chris Pratt and I in a classic moon buggy, racing across the lunar surface under a bright blue sky. We skid to a halt at the site of another meteorite impact miles away from the moonbase and get out. The ground around the impact site is completely littered with those thin, triangular shards that were rocky on one side and highly-polished on the other. Thinking back to the first meteorite that we saw, I remembered how the ground around the impact seemed to glitter brightly and realized that the ground had already been littered with these reflective shards before that meteorite struck. But unlike the recent strike near the moonbase, this impact site had no evidence of a virus-looking crystalline structure.

We got back in the moon buggy and drove to several other impact sites. In a handful of them we found similar-looking, leaning-over structures like the one near the base. But most of them were empty. The further out we got from the moonbase, the more the entire lunar surface seemed to be covered in those weird, triangular shards.

Eventually we headed back. Chris Pratt said that the ship was almost fixed, and that the best thing to do was concentrate on getting us all home, then we could come back with some actual scientists and study whatever-the-heck was going on.

A few days (?) later is when I made my discovery. I was walking around the moonbase, when I discovered something in a cranny in the exterior of the structure. I didn’t notice it at first, because it almost looked like just a natural grouping of rocks nestled up against the building. But the sun caught them in just such a way that they sparkled, and I veered over to take a closer look. It wasn’t a pile of rocks; it was a pile of what looked to be random glass things. About two to three inches long each, there were a variety of shapes that were all vaguely sea-shell or crustacean looking. It looked kind of like one of those places that makes tiny glass baubles in the shapes of animals had just dumped a bunch of rejects into a pile.

I leaned closer, wondering where they could have come from. I picked one up that looked kinda like an unrolled pill bug (aka potato bug). It fit neatly into the palm of my hand, and looking closer at it I saw that it looked like a solid, crystal shell filled with a clear liquid.

I bent to put it down and pick up another one, but before I could even let go of the first one they all scattered like cockroaches from the light, dozens of little glass baubles skittering off in every direction! The one still in my hand sprouted several pointy legs and grabbed onto my hand with them. It didn’t hurt, but to say I was startled would be an understatement. I instinctively shook my hand to dislodge it and it flung up into the air. I watched, and the movie went into a slow-motion closeup of the crystalline entity. As it flew though the air it transformed from a crystal into a glob of clear liquid, that splashed when it hit the ground. I looked around and noticed a handful of the other scattering glass creatures were randomly splashing against rocks like that.

My hand was uninjured; no puncture wounds or anything. So I squatted down to look at the minuscule puddle on the ground near my feet. It slowly started to condense, and a tiny, virus-looking crystalline structure rose out of the liquid until there was no liquid left; just a crystal lying on the ground. Looking around I saw the skittering had mostly stopped; a couple of the creatures were just randomly ambling around. I walked over to another little puddle as a crystal started to rise out of it. I put my finger out and touched the crystal, and watched as two little “legs” formed out of the liquid and lightly grabbed the tip of my finger. Looking more closely at the liquid I could see that there was a tiny dark spot floating in it. Maybe a nucleus? I slowly lifted my finger upwards, and the crystal hung on, coming upwards with it and pulling the glob of liquid off the ground below it. It was dangling from my finger, half crystal and half liquid. I carefully moved it over and put it right into another little puddle and watched as it shifted entirely back into liquid and merged with the puddle on the ground. Now I was looking at a puddle with two dark spots in it. It formed more crystal legs that grabbed back onto my finger, and as I lifted it up it formed into a delicate, jellyfish-looking solid structure. But peering through the surface I could see the interior was still liquid, and the two dark spots seemed to look out at me like two expressionless eyes.

It crawled up into my hand, and as it moved I realized that it didn’t really have joints or anything. The parts that moved turned into liquid and then re-formed as crystal. I realized that this was a creature that could control its own phase-shift between liquid and solid. It could crystallize itself at will, into presumably any shape.

The way they moved didn’t seem to imply any great intelligence; they moved across the ground like your run-of-the-mill insects. It was obvious that they’d come from the meteorites. I remembered that many of the impact sites Chris Pratt and I had visited didn’t have a big, crystalline structure sticking up out of them and I wondered if the huge, unmoving structure that I saw rise out of the impact site was indicative of a failed landing. The meteorite had died when it hit, unsuccessful at releasing its living contents for whatever reason; a stillbirth. The sites missing the big structure had successfully formed these little crystal creatures, which I presume had randomly scampered off.

Needless to say, this was all terrifically exciting.

I ran off to show Chris Pratt. I saw him walking across the bridge between the moonbase and the rocket and shouted up to him. He looked down at me, then seemed to notice something out of the corner of his eye. He looked up and shouted, “Oh sh–”

I followed his gaze upwards and saw a meteorite—the biggest one yet—screaming down out of the sky, straight for Chris Pratt. It smashed through the bridge just inches away from Pratt, smashing the bridge to splinters and slamming into the ground with such force that I was knocked onto my back. I looked up just in time to see Chris Pratt flying backwards off the shattered bridge… and straight down onto my head.

The screen was black for several seconds, then I could hear muffled voices (my wife and someone else), and could feel hands trying to simultaneously drag Chris Pratt off my face and drag me out from under him. I assume I’d been knocked unconscious. I vaguely heard someone say, “Lazer Blast is dead!” but I didn’t know to whom that referred. Was that the Pilot’s nickname? It had never before been said before about anyone in the dream. I wasn’t sure if Chris Pratt was dead or not, but his limp body was eventually removed from my face and I saw my wife asking if I was okay, and there was someone else there (possibly an African-American male in the same Alien-style uniform as the Pilot had been wearing earlier) looking down at me.

Beyond them I saw a massive crystalline structure rising up between the ship and the moonbase, already taller than the shattered bridge had been, and part of it was scraping against the moonbase and tearing it pretty much to shreds. It slowed and stopped as I watched, its interior glow dying completely out when it was almost as tall as our spaceship.

“We gotta go,” my wife hissed at me as she tried to haul me to my feet. “Chris Pratt fixed the spaceship, we gotta get outta here.” The sky was beginning to fill with brilliant streaks as more meteorites entered the moon’s atmosphere.

The movie kinda puttered out from here. We somehow successfully blasted off in the spaceship (though it never showed us getting into it nor taking off) and got back into space. Chris Pratt wasn’t actually dead, but he was knocked out pretty badly by the fall. Again, the dream movie didn’t actually show me that; I just kinda “knew.” We weren’t on the lunar surface anymore, so I guess we’d essentially “won” the dream, and I woke up shortly thereafter.

THE END

I want to give a big thanks to the dream people in my head for crafting such an excellent dream. Bravo, folks.