Hieracosphinx

Comet Visit

I was on a space shuttle bound to visit a comet. This was mostly a white surface, probably inspired by concrete more than ice. I don't remember any sky or starscape, since I was mostly looking at the ground. I came across some small red plants (similar to seaweed) growing in a patch. Finding plants growing on a comet would be an important discovery! Unfortunately, upon getting back in the space shuttle, it turned out that the plants had been put there previously as part of an experiment 'by a PhD student'. (I don't think anyone told me this - as often happens in dreams, I just knew.) Later I went out in deep space and ended up floating out there, somewhat worried about by prospects for getting back. I had a HUD which allowed me to scroll through possible targets, and upon selecting a target, my thrusters would slowly take me there. I managed to select the space shuttle quickly enough to get back before it got too far away, but only after hurriedly scrolling through many irrelevant targets.

I remember hearing some radio chatter between the pilot (a woman), and ground control (male voices), and peering forward into the cockpit. Skip forward to re-entry, and everything seemed to be going well. While we landed, though, I realised the wheels were beginning to smoulder and might catch fire. Suddenly, all of the crew of the space shuttle (including me) were outside sprinting away in fear that it would catch fire and explode. I saw a person or two I recognised from my memories in the crowd. The end of this scene seemed to be inside a very large warehouse where the spacecraft were stored; in the end the space shuttle was fine.

Note: Lately I'd been reading about astrobiology and speculation on alien life. Can't remember any other space dreams off the top of my head.

University Life

A senior member of a student society or 'panel' had resigned in order to make way for a new member, since they thought it would help the new member's career opportunities. They were mostly female and drawn from my memories. After watching this being explained, I went into a side corridor, and I knew that everyone had a small extra room here for 'emergency purposes'. My room was to the left, the first door off another side corridor, containing only a bed. A man came in to repair something, and watching this for a while, a man opens the door of the side corridor. For some reason I get it into my head that the second man thinks I'm in a gay relationship with the maintenance man, to my irritation. Later, everyone gathered outside on a lawn to watch a building's roof (a glass dome) explode. An announcer explained that this is due to its composition of silicon dioxide, which is said to be unstable in our atmosphere.

Note: I've had the odd dream set in a school or university, normally involving very different buildings or outdoors areas each time.

Awful Pixelated Game

I'm walking in the road in a random real-life location, with a skip on my right-hand side (and a lack of cars on the road) as the only changes. Someone is talking to me about a game. It's set with a light blue background, and I may have somehow seen the game by looking into the skip. I think the game may have involved bears or polar bears, and it had these weird low-resolution pixelated graphics, where one of the characters was a sort of blobby snowman marked by one-pixel borders and a face made of a few black pixels. There was nothing particularly good or special about the game (probably better than Flappy Bird), except that a sixteen-year old teenager had designed it. I didn't get why people were talking about it.