Craziest Dream I've Ever Had

This was what I dreamt before my alarm went off at 4:45 this morning, prodding me out of bed to go open the coffee shop. Before hopping in the shower, I jotted down some key elements so I wouldn't forget this one. And no, it doesn't mean anything, haha. What's interesting to me is looking back at the dream, and thinking about how many things made perfect sense as I was dreaming them, but make very little sense in the retelling. I also feel like this would make an excellent movie. And, of course, I promise this is exactly what I dreamt, with no embellishment. No kidding.

I'm in a spaceship with one other person. We're going to a space station, having just launched from the surface of a planet. We're going up there to do maintenance on the cryogenic systems. For some reason, my fellow repairman instantly gets into his cryogenic unit upon arriving at the space station. This is one of those things that I accepted without question at the time.

The freezer room is about the size of a small coffee shop, with waist-high freezers filling the room, sort of like the ice cream freezers you see in convenient stores; they're roughly that shape and size. The interior of the space station is dark blue and black, with plenty of enormous screens in the walls and lots of red lights all over the place.

I can't recall what specifically I was trying to fix, but I needed an allen key (or hex key) to do so. Yes. We're far in the future, and still using those types of tools, apparently. Anyhow, there's a door in the space station that leads, naturally, to the garage in my house in Erie. Once in my garage, I rummage around in my personal tool box (which doesn't exist in real life), and find something like three sets of allen keys all dumped helter-skelter into the box. I grab 4 different sizes, because I'm not sure which key will fit the nut in the cryogenic chamber, and I don't want to have to come back out to the garage.

I leave my garage and go back inside the space station. (I love that that's a perfectly reasonable thing to have happen in a dream.)

So. Once inside, I realize it would be cool if my friend Kristina would like to come visit while I'm fixing the freezers. I give her a call, and she says she'll be on her way shortly. I guess she has her own space ship.

But there's a problem. One of the enormous screens on the walls has started counting down. I realize that even though I'm not actually inside a cryogenic chamber, I'm about to be frozen anyway. I am running out of time to do my repairs. In the dream, I recall feeling like I had forgotten that this happens, that the entire room of the space station freezes, and I quick need to finish my task before I'm frozen solid. Already I can feel my hands turning into blocks of ice, so I move quickly into an adjoining room to take care of an unspecific task that requires the computer terminal. I have no clue what happened to the whole allen key project between the point at which I left the garage, and the point at which the freeze timer started counting down.

Then I realize there's an alarm going off, in addition to the alarm that's already sounding and warning of imminent freeze in the cryogenic room. The second alarm denotes the arrival of an intruder in the space station. I wasn't afraid at this point, it wasn't really a nightmare, but I did feel an overwhelming sense of urgency. There was some piece of information in the computer terminals, and also in my own body (because, although I didn't know it until this point in the dream, I am actually a cyborg), and this intruder is going to try to steal the info.

The intruder breaks into the computer room. It is a four-limbed robot, built rather like a small car with a face shaped like a triangular wedge of cheese, though of course not colored yellow. I try to fight it, but the freezing process has progressed really far by now, and my limbs are nearly entirely frozen solid. I'm moving quite slowly. I try to batter the intruder alien robot with my frozen arm, which achieves nothing, and the robot paralyzes me somehow. I fall to the ground, and watch as it hacks me. Yes, "hacks" my own internal programming.

First, I watch as it scrolls through a complete list of every test question I have ever answered in my life. This takes something like four seconds in the dream. Don't get me wrong, I don't actually think I saw every question, but in the dream that's what was happening.

The robot realizes that this isn't the info it's looking for, and continues hacking, finally finding what it wants. All I see is a huge brown expanse with trees in the background, though mostly grey stone in the foreground. I have failed someone/something in not protecting this image, somehow. I feel sad. The robot leaves me there, paralyzed, but not before implanting me with a virus.

Now things get really strange.

As I watched the robot's actions while it hacked me, I'm now watching what's happening inside me as the virus does its work. My internal components are all made of oak wood, a tangle of branches and green leaves. The virus changes all of my oak into birch with yellow leaves, and I'm helpless to stop this from happening. The change travels along each branch, changing me into a birch tree instead of an oak tree. This is really distressing in the dream.

Suddenly, Kristina arrives in the computer room. She managed to avoid getting caught by the robot, and reverse hacks me. The original oak inside me is gone, but she manages to reverse the "internal birching" process by switching to a willow tree (her own internal set up, apparently). This saves me from the virus. My relief was immense. I still remember the image of willow tree material rushing down the branches and replaces the birch material.

As she's finishing the "curing" process, she says to me, and I quote (because I made sure to definitely write this down), "this only worked because Obama messed up and gave me the wrong kind of birth control."

I nod. "Thank goodness," I say. And then we get up to go hunt down this freaking robot that's broken into the space station, and then...

Then my alarm went off.

I hopped out of bed and instantly wrote down as much as I could remember.