upset stomach + fandom = strange dream
Is my cooking that bad? I had hoped not, but I had a tummy ache about halfway through my sleep and then my brain produced a Stargate Atlantis-related dream. I don't usually have fannish dreams, I swear! The last vivid fannish dream I remember having is The X-Files back in the day.
In my dream, I was a scientist who'd recently left Atlantis permanently for some reason or other. I was taking a holiday soon after my return to Earth and was at a large outdoor shopping center/market. It must've been on a high-security military base (hey, I've heard that the Pentagon has a giant underground shopping mall for their employees and families) because I got the impression that everyone there had classified knowledge. The market was just a convenient place for people to go without having to worry about security. I have no idea why it was outdoors, but the weather was nice and dreams don't have to make sense. Maybe it was a place to pick up the essentials before shipping off, or returning home as the case may be.
And then, I ran into the one and only Dr. Rodney McKay. This part doesn't make any sense because he was SO out of character...as in we actually hugged in greeting and he seemed pleasantly surprised to see me in that slightly twitchy, fast-talking way of his. I can think of very, very few people he could possibly act that way around, and some random scientist isn't on that list. It turned out he was on a brief Earthside leave. We chatted a bit about the city and I pulled out a packet of photographs I'd just developed. (Because a secret military base would have its own darkroom/photo-processing facility.) They were pictures of Atlantis, the planet it resides on, and various people around the city. As we looked at a photo of Atlantis, I expressed remorse at having to leave, something like, "I can't belive I'm giving that up...an Ancient city in another galaxy." That moment almost felt like I'd been cast out of the Garden of Eden -- except for the stuff about vast knowledge, life-sucking aliens, and nanobots gone amok, of course.
I offered to give him copies of some of the nicer photos. Rodney accepted and said he'd have extras made of some photos of his to give to me. Then we parted ways because he was going back to Atlantis and had to board a chopper to get back to the base. I felt so sad because he was returning to the city and I couldn't. A little later I received his photos from a courier and looked wistfully at them.
I never did figure out why I had to leave Atlantis because at that point the dream diverged into something completely different...something about a newly renovated shopping mall, ambitious young business executive wannabes, workshop program for said executive wannabes, and then me getting trapped in a boutique because the whole mall automatically locks down at closing time. Pretty bizarre, but at least none of my dreams were disturbing or scary. Perhaps I could parlay the SGA dream into a fanfic about Weir and the consequences of the end of season 3 based on spoilers I've read.