Shriek Elegance

Jake Gyllenhaal, appearing as his character Homer Hickam (from October Sky) was standing in the middle of a small, destroyed township that looked nothing like the one from the movie – it consisted of maybe four houses and a very large barn. The tops of all the houses were burned/blown off, there were spot fires everywhere, and a giant rocket sat across the top of the semi-destroyed barn. Despite his apparent success with rocketry, Jake was still dressed in his high school garb (i.e. plaid shirt and jeans). He looked rather bewildered with the destruction until his father, John Hickam (played by Chris Cooper), ran up behind him in order to offer emotional support (which is the complete opposite of his character). Jake remains rather inconsolable as his father says that it’s alright that he blew up the town and killed everyone he ever knew and that he should keep chasing his dreams. Jake, dispirited, runs out to the main road leading out of town (a long, long dirt road) and started trudging on in one direction.

The scene then cuts to another group, where I am present, as well as Jude Law, who is still Jude, but is also an ex-marine of sorts, Ryan, a man with whom I am apparently in a romantic relationship (though I’ve never seen this person before), some black guy that might’ve looked similar to Ice Cube (cultural diversity!) and the typical, snivelling coward that wore glasses. The sky was dark with heavy rainclouds as far as the eye could see in every direction (no mountains, just flat land). The ground was wet and soggy. Since the road was dirt, it had become a muddy deathtrap. On top of that, constant driving on the road in this state caused extremely deep tire traffic depressions to develop, making the road more of an extremely raised path with ditches on either side. We travelled by foot along the raised part of the road looking for a safehouse in which we could spend the night. Just then, we heard an engine speeding up from behind and looked back to see a junker, piece of shit, faded yellow truck speeding toward us. We quickly dove off the road and into the ditches on either side to avoid being run over. As it passed, we heard the joyful woops of two young men joy riding the rough road. We scrambled back onto the road and continued on to the next township.

We came upon the next town shortly. It, too, was destroyed; although, the damage didn’t appear to be done by a simple rocket and there were survivors wandering around. Most of them were older people, a few middle aged interspersed here and there. Partway through the town, on the same road (since it ran through the town- I assume it was a country bumkin highway of sorts), there was a barricade. It was almost like someone took the land and lifted it up to make a cliff right at that spot. A small crowd had gathered there, trying to figure out how to get up. Just then, a tank shell came flying over the edge of the cliff and down behind us. The crowd scattered except for our group who stayed close and hugged the cliff wall. Jude took a grenade out of his pack (I don’t know how, but we’re all fully armed) and hurled it over the edge of the cliff. We heard an explosion and the sound of metal clanging to the ground. My love interest hoisted me up to have a look over the edge and the tank was, indeed, destroyed. I pulled myself over the edge and proceed to help pull up my group. Jude, somehow, found things to salvage from the tank to use as weapons. I don’t know what. Or how. He just did. We continued along the road, which resumed its raised-middle, double-ditch trend.

By nightfall, we reached our goal, which was apparently the headquarters of who/whatever was trying to kill us. It was a giant dome of sorts and inside, there was a labyrinth of technology, all contained within mazing cubes. We snuck into the front entrance (I don’t know how you can sneak into a front entrance). Immediately to the left was a little room, which was perfect for us to stay in because it had a big mattress and a couple tables. Convenient. We decided to ignore this room for now and continue down the main path. The path was a road, which led to a drop off (lots of drop offs and cliffs in this dream). We jumped down (it was short enough that we would be able to climb up on our own). We followed the road again, which led us to yet another cliff barricade. Again, there was a tank atop the cliff. However, this one appeared to contain a man (unlike the other one, which appeared to be purely robotic). The man inside was a former friend of Ryan and I and appeared to have some sort of intense vendetta. His tank was unrealistically good at aiming and less destructive than most, seeming to focus more on pinpoint accuracy and individual killing. His tank could only move forward and back, however, because there wasn’t enough room to turn around or anything. Jude used his same technique, throwing a grenade over the edge and waiting for the explosion. Unfortunately, Mark, the guy in the tank, was smarter than the previous robot tank and pushed the grenade over the edge of the barricade. We screamed at Jude while all scrambling away from the wall before the grenade exploded. We regrouped after the explosion, again right next to the barricade where Jude threw three more grenades. They didn’t come down again this time, but instead exploded. However, the tank seemed to be constructed much better than the first and was still perfectly intact. It proceeded to come up right to the edge and point the gun straight down where we were. We all rolled out of the way in time. Although, for some reason, I thought that the best place to go was up over the wall where the tank was. While I was there, Mark started talking to me and asking me to join him and that he controls the robots and it would be okay and safe with him. Another explosion caused me to fall over the edge, back down to where the others were, and roll a bit. I got up and fell back to the previous cliff that we jumped down in order to get to this part of the road to recuperate. I climbed up the cliff and looked back at the group trying to dispatch the tank. When I had turned around, I saw that, starting from where the tank and the others were, the road was flashing red, up until a certain point a few feet before the cliff I was on. Then I heard a voice in my head, which I recognized as Mark’s, telling me that anything standing on the flashing part of the road would be annihilated and that if I wanted to save my friends, I had to act fast. So I jumped off the cliff, ran over to the others and pulled at them frantically to fall back. Just as we finished climbing back up the cliff, the part of the road that was flashing exploded.

After the dust had cleared and settled, we found ourselves surrounded by robots of sorts. I agreed to go with them and the rest were put in that room by the entrance with the mattress and such (though they were prevented from leaving). After following the robots for a while, I ended up in what looked like a laboratory. There were some other people there, in addition to Mark. Mark said that he wanted me to stay with him and to have co-control over the robots with him. I agreed in exchange for the safety of my friends, thinking that I could use this opportunity to bring him down and out of power over the robot hivemind (LOL). Mark was not too pleased over my desire that Ryan especially stay safe (LOVE TRIANGLE? Wtf). I was sat down in a chair where one of the scientist ladies (I remember her precisely, she kind of looked like ScarJo only not as pretty- blond hair up in a bun, crimson lipstick, all white pants and lab coat) where she proceeded to stick pins in the underside of my right arm; she attempted to work with four pins, arranging them like the fourth side of a d6 (a normal die). Two of the pins had to go into the arm from the top, two up into the arm from the bottom- YET, even though it is not physically possible, the pins went in loosely from both ends. All pins were the same size, so the concept is not even physically possible because my arm would have had to have been flat and… made of plastic, but whatever, that’s what happened in the dream and I’m sticking to it. Anyway, it was super painful, apparently, and they had a lot of trouble getting the pins to stay (like, an unreasonable amount of trouble. I remember feeling like that part of the dream dragged on forever). These four pins were supposed to give me the capability to hold control over the robotic hivemind (the center of which looked exactly like HAL 9000, it was so awesome). They were kind of finicky and I wasn’t sure they were taking, but Mark told me to leave them alone since ScarJo scientist lady had finally gotten them to stay in my skin, so I did. I asked Mark if I could look around the dome and he let me since we were partners or whatever.

I met Ryan back in the mattress room and we lay on the bed talking for a while (I think we may have fell asleep for a little while too. JUST SLEEPING, THOUGH. I don’t have dirty dreams. Gawd, you pervs). I remember that when I woke up, I freaked out because the pins in my arms were gone. I thought they might have fallen out in my sleep, but it turned out that my skin somehow sucked them in and they were inside my arm. After that, we decided to look around the dome and eventually went into a garden-y greenhouse-y type place. The walls were some sort of limestone or something. There was a bench made of limestone jutting out from the wall in the form of just a giant block (this isn’t relevant, it’s just I remember so many details from dreams, it seems a shame not to mention them). Ryan and I stood near the entrance to the little alcove that housed the bench and spoke in hushed voices about how exactly we were going to overthrow Mark and save humanity from his tyranny. We decided that, since I had equal control over HAL 9000 – I MEAN… the robotic hivemind – that I could order it to not take orders from Mark anymore. Just at the tail end of our scheming, Mark came in looking rather suspicious. We hush hushed as quickly as we could and all shared a few extremely awkward moments. Then Mark flipped out for some reason, saying that Ryan wasn’t allowed to stay in the dome anymore and that he had to leave and live outside with all the rest of the people. I disagreed with this furiously and walked away, with Ryan following after me and Mark close behind him, yelling and ranting back at me. We eventually made it out to the entrance labyrinth-y area where the hivemind’s main… entity… was (aka HAL 9000). The second Mark and I both saw it, we simultaneously yelled for it not to listen to the other. When we realized that we both said it at the same time, we started yelling at it frantically, hoping that it didn’t choose to listen to the other person. After a moment of silence, HAL (What the hell, I’ve given up. The hivemind wasn’t actually HAL, but I have nothing else to call it and it looked just like him. Maybe I should’ve calledit SkyNet) said that he wouldn’t stop following orders from either of us. We asked him why he would continue to follow both of us, to which HAL replied that he would not stop taking orders from both of us, because both of us giving orders together made the most logical sense. I have no fricking clue how it was logical. Mark, for some reason, had an epiphany of some sort at that very moment, renounced his claim to the robotic hivemind, even though HAL wouldn’t let him give up the ability, and left the dome, never to be seen again. Ryan and I took over, inviting any living people left into the dome to live and recuperate.

The dream ended with a group of teenagers nervously approaching a large robot whose sole purpose  was to stop basketballs from straying outside of the court so that people didn’t have to run to go get them. I was trying to convince the kids that it was alright and it would be safe from then on.

Then I woke up.

It was like some weirdass sci-fi adventure romance movie.