Waking after a particularly vivid dream is not so uncommon. And forgetting that dream soon after waking up is even less common. Every now and then a particular dream will make such an impression that you will not forget it.
This thread is a repository for those interesting and amusing dreams you may have had, Steampunk or not. So without further delay, let me start with today's dream of mine...
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DREAM 1. A Nursery in Utah
by
John W. Dunn
I woke up in the middle of the night. I still had half an hour to sleep, and I had not dreamt anything yet (as is most often the case for me). But this time as I fell asleep I found myself in some sort of public centre in a desertic location. Confused, I turned my head to scope my surroundings. People were passing by me. Tourists with cameras and whole families strolled around the pavement. I tried to ask a couple passing by, but when I tried to introduce myself, I could not remember my name. Panic set in.
As I tried desperately to remember how I found myself in that place, I noticed that I was in the middle of an orange coloured valley, mostly made of solid rock formations, big and small, some as tall as a building, and some just a few inches high. A mix of sedimentary formations forming the canyon walls was complimented by strange outcrops of razor sharp quartz-looking crystals along the bottom of the canyon. This was a tourist centre in a national park, I reasoned. This looks like America, I thought. The only thing that looked out of place were those smoky quartz crystal outcrops at the bottom of the canyon. "Perhaps they had been exposed over time by the action of erosion, and this was a recently discovered valley," I thought. I had never seen anything like that before.
In any case, clearly this public venue was at the bottom of the canyon. And the sparse vegetation I could see toward the horizon betrayed its geographical location. This had to be the Western United States, sufficiently far from the Pacific coast and well east from the Midwestern planes. The sky was a deep blue and there was not a single cloud in the sky. And it was probably Spring or Fall. I know, because the temperature was well below 45 Celcius, the norm for that part of America in Summer. The temperature was rather mild, I'd say. A lovely day, in the middle of wherever I was.
Toward the horizon, I could see large rock columns, semi geometric in shape. A visual nature spectacle with enough gravitas to belong to a biblical scene. It looked to me like one of those national parks in the state of Utah or Arizona. I'd even venture that it was something like Bryce Canyon National park or Zion National Park, both of which I had visited when I was a child. I felt a sense of calm.
At least I knew more or less where I was, I thought. This was familiar territory; and even if I could be wrong on my specific location, I could at least place myself geographically within a radius of, say, 500 miles. Even if I could not remember my identity, I knew the people in this part of the world, and I spoke their language, as a listened in to the people passing by, so there was no need to panic. Maybe I hit my head and I had a case of amnesia, and I simply didn't remember how I drove to this place, I reasoned.
All along the bottom of the canyon you had these walkways and stairs, like a maze spreading in all directions along the bottom of the canyon. Some of the pavement seemed to lead nowhere, and some stairs would climb up to the top of the larger rock formations. All the walkways had solid hand rails made of adobe, perhaps a good 45 inches high. It made sense, as there were a lot of children in the park, and some of those rock formations at the bottom of the valley seemed very sharp. A fall from one of those staircases would be fatal as one person could easily be skewered by the needle like crystal formations at the bottom of the canyon.
Coming down to a plaza, lined with tourist shops, I found myself in front of some sort of apartment residential area carved into the mountain. The orange walls of the canyon were apparently carved to make room for the shops and the apartments. It looks to me like a 1970s version of the ancient "Pueblo Indian" Native sites I knew from my childhood, except this was a modern setting.
A large wooden door on one of those apartments opened. A figure emerged. A medium build youngish man in his early 40's with long blond hair and a light beard. He called to me, "John! I see you made it! I was regaining my memory. It was one of my roommates! "Why are you standing there! Come on in!
Walking into the apartment I could see that the rooms were carved in the canyon's rock. It reminded me of the city of Petra in Jordan. He led me to one of the rooms with a window facing the tourist center. As people walked by he asked me "how do you like my new office?" he smiled. "This is my new business! We are reviving extint animal species, and thanks to the state legislature our labs received permission to start cloning.
"But what are you cloning from?" I asked innocently. I still couldn't even remember how I got there. The whole conversation was surreal.
"Adult stem cells," he replied. The only part of an adult body which contains stem cells are the roots of nails and claws of animals. And with Global Warming hitting Antarctica hard, we have found an incredible number of viable frozen specimens buried underneath the snow and tundra. We looked for, and we found," he emphasized, "live claws and nail roots for a number of extinct mammals and some late transitional birds." Some of the cells we found frozen were viable," he gestured, as if explaining to a child.
"You know what that means, right? Do you remember those guys with the cloned mammoth in Wyoming two years ago? They cloned cells from with intact DNA from claw keratinizing stem cells. Well, we did better than that. We had the whole viable cells with the RNA intact,. We did not have to use a hybrid RNA donor, and thanks to that method, we now have a legitimate sabre toothed tiger" he smiled."Not an elephant-mastodon-mammoth chimera like the other team got."
"Why don't we go out and I'll show you some of our cloned animals?" He asked, and then he led me through the apartment to a set of French doors opening to a patio. Apparently there was an inner break in the canyon wall allowing for an open patio to be hidden from the view of the tourists.
The jagged canyon walls provided shade from the sun. At some distance I could see cages and to my amazement I saw a full grown sabre toothed cat. A Smilodon.
"That's incredible!" I said.
"Yep! She's a beauty, isn't she?"
"How many do you have?" I asked as if really mattered.
"Of those? We got the pair." He muttered as he lit a cigarette. "The male was making too much noise and I had to separate him to another cage. They're going to San Diego Zoo next week!"
"So is that how you're making money now?"
"Well among other things. Naturally we can charge a very large amount of money for a live pair of Smilondons, but there are other things that can make us much more money."
"Like what?" I asked.
"Like crops. Remember the near extinction of the European Bee? We need replacements urgently to make up what was lost during the plague. We can't pollinate our food plants! The genetic engineers are working on a replacement for the European Bee, but they're not fast enough. That is going to take some time, and people all around the globe need the bees right now if we want to avoid a collapse in our crop supply in 10 years. We got ancient species of bees that we can clone right now, and these species are resistant to present day pathogens. We'll make them by the millions. Industrial scale. Governments are willing to pay anything for them. Anything. We are going to make a killing! He smiled.
After looking at the cages with animals I followed the walls of a crevice on the canyon with my eyes. I could look up and see the edge of the canyon a hundred feet upward. "The walls provide much needed privacy," he said. "In this business we have to be careful not to let people spy in."
"But you are in the middle of a tourist center," I replied. "How can you not attract attention in the middle of a national park?"
Ah. No. We're not at risk. This is the perfect cover! We're hiding behind the tourists. The Brigham Young National Monument is just the right cover for our operations," he said. "We need the open space to keep our clones, and a farm will just not do. This is federal land and we can keep the prying eyes of the local sheriff from looking into our operations. In the national interest, the Department of Agriculture backs our operations."
"But in Utah??" "And why Brigham Young? Why here? What's with that name?" I asked while frowning.
"Ah!" He said, laughing, "its so perfect isn't it? It's my idea of vengeance. I wanted to rub it in the face of those Christians! What better place to make my point! I want to give those Mormons a heart attack! In their face!" He said, smiling while gesturing with his hand. I remembered my room mate had always been the militant atheist type...
As I turned past a jagged wall in the deep crevice, I heard voices. "What is back there?" I asked.
"Uh uh! Don't go there!" He shouted."
"What do you mean? You just showed me all your animals" I retorted.
"No, John, I haven't shown you everything." He rolled his eyes" "There is one project I'm working on. And it's not time yet. I need to secure permission from the government before I start showing people. Trust me. I'm going to ask you to take a rain check on this one for now. I'll tell you later, I promise, when the time is right."
But by the time he haid said that I had already stolen a peek from behind the rocky wall. I could not see everything as I was being told not to look, but I thought I had seen the edge of a kidney shaped pool in the garden. I could hear laughter which seemed to come from children playing in the pool, though I could not see the children. I also heard some grunts. I wondered what was back there. Shockingly I caught a glimpse of a human form. No. Make that two people. These people looked somewhat barrel shaped. Ugly. Rolls of fat barely covered with colorful swimsuit cloth. And long black desheveled hair. When one of them turned my way I froze. Their face was squat and full of hair. I gasped.
It took me a while to realise it, but as my friend escorted me back to the apartment, it dawned on me those were not human faces. At least not modern human. "Those are not hippies," I thought to myself. I slowly realized that I had seen a family of early humans! And the children? Could it be? Was that a Neanderthal family that I saw?
As I walked back into the office, I kept quiet. I was thinking and I could not understand how there could be such a wide age range among a cloned group of hominids. A couple of hominids could not have been cloned and have procreated so quickly. Has it been that many years since I last saw my roommate? I pondered. No. Something besides the fact I had seen Neanderthals was not right.
"Oh well," I said to myself. "Some people breed and raise reptiles and exotic birds. This guy raises Neanderthals!"
It had not been a minute since we sat in the office, when an alarm sounded. It was a loud high pitch, similar to a fire alarm.
"John, you have to go" my room mate shouted over the alarm.
"Why what's going on? Is there a fire?" I asked.
"It's better if I don't tell you. It means that my request sent to the White House cabinet was rejected. The son of a bitch betrayed me. You need to go now. I'll handle the rest from here," he said while he pushed me out the door into the plaza. He produced a handgun seemingly out of nowhere. "Go!" he said as he shut the door. As I looked around, the tourists were all gone. I saw a large number of armed men wearing black suits and running down the stairs and the walkways. "Oh, shit!" I thought.
These people did not look like federal officers. No one of them was wearing the mandatory black vest emblazoned with federal agency acronyms such as "FBI," or "ATF." Not knowing what was happening, I decided those were not government employees and I'd better let my legs do the thinking. I started running away from the horde of suited men. I was trying desperately to remember where I had parked my car, but my memory had not come back yet. Was there a car even? In one last ditch effort, I wasted some time and I climbed up one of the stairs leading to the top of a rock formation. I could see the entire valley lined with smoky quartz. The staircases and walkways looked like a spider web, but there was no indication of a parking lot.
I had to get away, I came down the far side of the rock formation, away from the line of sight of the armed men. I saw that I could probably climb a few hundred feet of that cliff to the nearest plateau above the tourist visitor center. But I had to skip over one of those handrails and step over the very sharp quartz outcrops. "This is going to be painful, " I thought. I was was wearing boots. Hoping they'd be strong enough and not tear on contact, I jumped over the handrail and landed awkwardly on top of an outcrop of crystals. I did not want to turn back to look at the armed men. "Perhaps," I hoped, "they did not see me." I climbed the steep walls of the canyon past the quartz outcrop.
No one had fired at me yet. I was still alive. The weather was now changing. The mid spring sun was terrible, in spite of the cool air. I started to perspire heavily under the effect of the adrenaline. I looked above, and I could see the edge of the cliff. "Just a little longer," I thought.
Then everything went blank. The dream was over and I was awake in my bed. Luckily not a bullet hole in me. It was all a dream...
