![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Saturday, September 3rd.
Sep. 3rd, 2011 08:48 amNews For Today
Well, my first night of an enforced bedtime was a pretty resounding success. I did lay down before midnight. I wasn't able to get off to sleep immediately, so I read until my arbitrary lights-off period of one, by which point I was very ready to fall asleep.
I had my alarm set for 10, but I was pretty much wide awake by 8, and feeling pretty good.
State of the Me
Too early to judge what kind of shape my knee might be in, but pretty good overall.
Dreams From Last Night
It was a pretty cool and involved one. The setting was post-apocalyptic in the truest sense; the end was over and everyone was just trying to get on with their lives. The earth had been invaded by technologically advanced aliens at some point in the past, there had been a mutually destructive set of battles and eventually the invasion fleet had withdrawn, but they'd left behind a ton of troops. No one knew if they'd been abandoned or if the invasion was simply ongoing, but their more limited resources made it possible to resist them, at a high cost.
The aliens were called "the giants", not because they were huge but because their attacks relied on giant armored vehicles, tanks and hovercraft and mecha. All in this shade of orangish-brown, without any windows or insignia or anything. Just blocky and bulky and utilitarian. Any downed or even badly cornered "giant" would self-destruct.
Humanity had been beaten back to the "points of light in the darkness" stage, where individual settlements of survivors were on their own. Not quite the dark ages or a full technological regression, but things that required heavy industry and long-distance transportation of materials were gone if not forgotten. Government was at the city-state level.
The story of the dream involved me and some friends (courtesy of central casting) finding a crashed and abandoned giant in the woods. It was a hovership that I later learned how to turn into a walker to save on its limited power. Something had gone wrong with its self-destruct, obviously, which had only gotten as far as incinerating the previous pilot. The remainder of the dreams (I went through a whole cycle on this subject throughout the night, including after one interruption of wakefulness) involved using the giant to protect the city where we lived. There were a few advantages I had over the actual alien-piloted giants... apparently this one was a more advanced model than the abandoned ground troops had been given, and they also didn't have much individual initiative or imagination when it came to how they used their vehicles.
I eventually figured out how to activate different weapons, and use a "dimensional matrix" to shrink the apparent size of the vehicle and alter its shape/appearance. By the time I woke up this morning, I was walking it around town in my place while I basically lived inside it, to protect against attacks from people who were jealous of the influence they thought it lent me or who wanted to use its firepower for themselves.
The aliens themselves bore some resemblance to the ones of the Predator franchise, or the "spider-aliens" of the old (pre-Acclaim) X-O Manowar comics. They weren't the only nasty things left over from the invasion... there were some zombies of the alien-parasite-infected types waiting for people to stumble into them. Very like Half-Life zombies... there were also some elements of Combine tech inside the giant, including "high energy pellet" sockets and columns.
I don't think I have it in me to write this whole thing out as a full-fledged story, but elements of it might find its way into In Later Days.
Well, my first night of an enforced bedtime was a pretty resounding success. I did lay down before midnight. I wasn't able to get off to sleep immediately, so I read until my arbitrary lights-off period of one, by which point I was very ready to fall asleep.
I had my alarm set for 10, but I was pretty much wide awake by 8, and feeling pretty good.
State of the Me
Too early to judge what kind of shape my knee might be in, but pretty good overall.
Dreams From Last Night
It was a pretty cool and involved one. The setting was post-apocalyptic in the truest sense; the end was over and everyone was just trying to get on with their lives. The earth had been invaded by technologically advanced aliens at some point in the past, there had been a mutually destructive set of battles and eventually the invasion fleet had withdrawn, but they'd left behind a ton of troops. No one knew if they'd been abandoned or if the invasion was simply ongoing, but their more limited resources made it possible to resist them, at a high cost.
The aliens were called "the giants", not because they were huge but because their attacks relied on giant armored vehicles, tanks and hovercraft and mecha. All in this shade of orangish-brown, without any windows or insignia or anything. Just blocky and bulky and utilitarian. Any downed or even badly cornered "giant" would self-destruct.
Humanity had been beaten back to the "points of light in the darkness" stage, where individual settlements of survivors were on their own. Not quite the dark ages or a full technological regression, but things that required heavy industry and long-distance transportation of materials were gone if not forgotten. Government was at the city-state level.
The story of the dream involved me and some friends (courtesy of central casting) finding a crashed and abandoned giant in the woods. It was a hovership that I later learned how to turn into a walker to save on its limited power. Something had gone wrong with its self-destruct, obviously, which had only gotten as far as incinerating the previous pilot. The remainder of the dreams (I went through a whole cycle on this subject throughout the night, including after one interruption of wakefulness) involved using the giant to protect the city where we lived. There were a few advantages I had over the actual alien-piloted giants... apparently this one was a more advanced model than the abandoned ground troops had been given, and they also didn't have much individual initiative or imagination when it came to how they used their vehicles.
I eventually figured out how to activate different weapons, and use a "dimensional matrix" to shrink the apparent size of the vehicle and alter its shape/appearance. By the time I woke up this morning, I was walking it around town in my place while I basically lived inside it, to protect against attacks from people who were jealous of the influence they thought it lent me or who wanted to use its firepower for themselves.
The aliens themselves bore some resemblance to the ones of the Predator franchise, or the "spider-aliens" of the old (pre-Acclaim) X-O Manowar comics. They weren't the only nasty things left over from the invasion... there were some zombies of the alien-parasite-infected types waiting for people to stumble into them. Very like Half-Life zombies... there were also some elements of Combine tech inside the giant, including "high energy pellet" sockets and columns.
I don't think I have it in me to write this whole thing out as a full-fledged story, but elements of it might find its way into In Later Days.