Dream Dream Dream Dream Dream Dream

I dreamed I was an android in a world where androids were being purged, for whatever reason. I was still the me from real life, still had the same family... but they'd adopted me when I was a small android, and I'd grown from there.

I was such a well-made android that, for all intents and purposes, I was the only one who knew I wasn't human. This was quite a privilege considering the circumstances, and I was trying to use my ostensibly human status to assist my fellow androids in their attempts to escape eradication.

One rather shocking moment sticks out in my memory: a group of androids were hiding in a secret room behind a wall, with two of them unfortunately still out in the open, when an extermination squad of robots rounded the corner and absolutely annihilated them with flamethrowers and gunfire. The flamethrowers were apparently a new thing, firing gouts of plasma so powerful that they could simply melt an android into nothing. The robots, apparently feeling no need to save ammunition, kept firing on the already-dead androids until there was hardly anything left, and also fired some shots at random, with some going into the secret room where the hidden androids were watching in horror and fear.

I was watching all of this as though incorporeal, positioned outside the secret room and in the direct path of the flamethrowers, but simply observing. I couldn't see the androids inside the secret room, and feared that they'd been hit by the gunfire. And I remember being afraid of the pain the flamethrowers would cause if they were used on me, wondering what it would be like to feel myself melting and burning the way the androids were right in front of me.

The robot troop marched away without discovering the androids behind the wall. We carried on without the two androids we'd lost, despite the primary character status they'd had (I think they'd actually had names, and one of them had been a source of good humor for the rest of the group).

The dream restarted a bit, but this time it was Christians that were being eradicated rather than androids. I was still helping them, though I remember wondering why I was putting myself in danger of death when I wasn't a Christian myself. Or maybe it was something like, I'd been raised Christian without it ever quite rubbing off on me, and now, although privately I didn't share the belief, publicly I was going to be killed for it.

At any rate, the things hunting us were now single androids who would look human right up until the moment they had decided to kill you. When that happened, their face would warp like a Picasso painting, one eye vanishing and being replaced by a migrating, malformed nose, while the other eye shrank to a dot.

There was also a variety of prisons and exterminators, one of which was called The Dove (I think?). The Dove was really only a prison in the sense that you'd be imprisoned in it for the 60 seconds it took for you to move along a hanging conveyor belt into a furnace, whose fires could not actually be seen until you were inside them. This was where I was certain to head if I were captured: knowing this I let myself be captured anyway.

There were two forbidden books we had on hand: Mere Christianity by C S Lewis, and another one that my brain invented and whose name I can't quite remember... Door, perhaps? These were the books I had on hand when an android spotted me, and I didn't really feel like trying to survive anymore. I let it spot me, let it recognize me and watched its face mutate. It hit me with some sort of poison attack that left me propped against the wall, dying. Or at least, I thought I was dying, thought I was going to die soon (and the dream end? there was no sense that dying might have Real Consequences... more that the story would be over), but the dream continued for long enough that perhaps I began to think I would still be headed to The Dove after all.

The dream stopped making sense after that. Phooey.