A Science Fiction Dream

A photo I took of the Orion Nebula last year through a 6 inch Celestron telescope.

I had a strange dream last night that was a continuation of a previous dream from a couple of nights ago. I was in a reality TV show that constructed a ridiculously small rocket to launch our 3 man team into orbit. The capsule was so tight we are all going to be stacked into a pyramid shape with no space to move around. I was going to be on the top of the pyramid with a little pedestal barely big enough for me to lay on with my feet propped up above my head. There were vague plans to rendezvous in orbit with another mission and go on to Mars or somewhere, the dream wasn't specific about that.

All of this was interrupted when we were approaching our launch date at a remote site in an open field with no one else there (which is senseless of course, as dreams often are). It was night and we started seeing strange lights in the sky. It looked like moving beams of rainbow and later clouds of rainbow appearing, shimmering with color, changing into wine-colored mist, and disappearing. We also saw lots of "fast movers." If you have ever looked at the night sky in clear weather,  you can see satellites orbiting the earth. They appear as fast moving stars. There are a surprising lot of them. This was amplified in the dream. They were brighter than any I had seen and the night sky teamed with them, and the numbers grew. Some were in trains like SpaceX's Starlink satellites.

We started to argue. The leader, whose name I think was Peter, still wanted to launch. I said to him, "We can't launch up into that. Why did I ever let you talk me into this?" Soon things in the sky got out of hand and we started to see giant, dark silhouettes crossing the sky, seemingly lower to the ground. I had this thought that it must be some type of alien invasion and then one of the giant dark silhouettes came close enough that I could see it was a huge mass of fish, like from the ocean. There were sharks, whales, dolphins, giant sea bass, swordfish, and many other fish silhouettes, all in fast moving clouds, close to the ground. It was at this time that I noticed our launch site was near the sea. I imagined that aliens were stealing our sea life.

The dream pretty much ended at that point and I know I went off into other dreams later but can't remember them. I have no idea of the meaning of the dream, if it has a meaning, but there were a few things from the weekend. I had seen a YouTube video title "Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind," though I did not watch it. I frequent astronomy sites on all of my social media and there is much discussion and photography of SpaceX's Starlink trains, and I watch videos that discuss the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) somewhat regularly.

Weird night.

I took the day off today as a morale booster. I had a great mountain bike ride from my house up onto Observatory Mesa and out onto a huge prairie with views of the core of the San Francisco Peaks and A1 Mountain. My legs are dead but there was plenty of solitude. I guess this post has gotten a little long.

Don't worry, I had a helmet, I just took it off for a couple of minutes.

After coming back down from the mesa I took urban trail out to Route 66 past this abandoned ranch. I love these native stone masonry structures that are found around the region. They remind me somewhat of similar construction in the Pennsylvania Amish communities, although the rock looks different.