Dear Imagination: please stop. Really.
I had another one of my oddly-science-fiction-flavored dreams ("oddly" because it's been years since I've actively read sci-fi), and this one was pretty damn traumatic. I can try to blame it on the bit of "Alice in Wonderland" that I saw the other night, and a fairly gruesome Steampunk story from an anthology I am trying to read (more on that later), but honestly, I don't really know where it came from. However, I would like to request my imagination to put it back.
It was kind of a throwback to my teenage years in that the dream protagonist wasn't quite "me"--I haven't had those in a while. She--whoever she was--was thrown into some sort of fictional snow-covered world/universe, which for some reason I felt was in Utah. She/I were just outside the walls of an entirely white, glacier-like city, with a high smooth sabertooth-like tower rising from the side. Even though it was in "Utah," the city inhabitants spoke a patois of unidentifiable origin, mixing English with French and something else. I remember picking up several words of their slang that I can't recall now, something about running being "remmy," but I do remember that the tower was called the Eine.
I climbed over the walls and found an opening in the tower, through which I jumped, landing in a basement chamber, and found myself in the midst of cloth-covered debris which turned out to be clammy body parts. And there was a slimy bald man-thing chained up on the far end of the room, who explained that people occasionally fell through the trapdoor above, and he would tear them to pieces. He was both grotesque and miserable, and refused to explain why he dismembered the unfortunates who came across him except that he felt they were somehow responsible for his own miserable entrapped state. (He wasn't very verbally adept.)
There was a door just behind me, just outside the reach of the monster-man's chains, and I clambered out of the chamber. I passed by other rooms, these with glass doors and bright lights and white walls, and saw people strapped down to tables, vivisected and submitted to what looked like torture.
Another level up, and I was in a cafeteria setting, also all white. People in white coats were walking past tables, and I sucked in my breath in fear and pressed to the wall as I saw the slime monster-man pass by, but he was normal-looking and normal-sized, and didn't give me a second glance. I realized that many of the faces in the cafeteria seemed familiar, that I just saw them either strapped down to gurneys and screaming, or in cold dismembered chunks on the basement floor. But these people were calm, content, and they strode through the room with an air of untouchability and confidence.
Wondering what this all meant, I went up another level, and found myself in a perfectly normal doctor's office, with a comfortably appointed reception room, and private screening rooms that were for once not all-white. I walked into a room that turned out to be a young nurse's office. She was cheery and sweet and seemed to have no idea of anything in the levels below, but brightly praised the practice as having access to the most advanced technology and research facilities around.
Then a tall, handsome white-haired man with elegantly kindly features came into her office, and requested that I follow him. Instinctively, I trusted him, and asked him about the place. He knew I'd seen the manthing in the lower level, and the vivisection rooms. Then we had the following conversation:
Me: How can this be? Those people...
Him: They're not quite people, not really. They're clones. It's entirely an in-house operation: our doctors and researchers use clones of themselves for medical testing, so you see...
Me: But even if they're clones, it's still experimenting on humans! And it's torture!
Him: Well, our scientists have concluded that the invaluable research potential surmounts the less sanguine aspects of the situation. And they are clones of themselves, after all.
Me: Can't they at least make them insensible then? They seem self-aware--can't the clones be made dumb enough not to know or feel what is being done to them?
Him: Well that is the doctors' own decision, but they are all kept highly intelligent. Intelligent enough to be aware of all that is going on, and most importantly, of the choice they themselves have made...
...and at that point, it got too creepy for me and I woke up.
Dear brain: WHAT. I do not want to dream about doctors using clones of themselves for horrible creepy medical testing, and punishing themselves for the bargain they've agreed to make by keeping the clones entirely aware and with full memory of everything up to the moment of cloning. (I think one of the creepier ramifications of the dream was that it was finally unclear whether the clones or the "originals" were the ones actually used for the experiments--but then again, since the clones duplicate the original's memory, it pretty much seems that one is equivalent to the other.)
WHY. I don't even understand why so many of my dreams are so creepy. This seems to have nothing to do with either my daily life, or even the type of entertainment/fiction I currently consume--and yet on a regular basis, I dream of aliens, medical horror testing labs, and so on.
It was kind of a throwback to my teenage years in that the dream protagonist wasn't quite "me"--I haven't had those in a while. She--whoever she was--was thrown into some sort of fictional snow-covered world/universe, which for some reason I felt was in Utah. She/I were just outside the walls of an entirely white, glacier-like city, with a high smooth sabertooth-like tower rising from the side. Even though it was in "Utah," the city inhabitants spoke a patois of unidentifiable origin, mixing English with French and something else. I remember picking up several words of their slang that I can't recall now, something about running being "remmy," but I do remember that the tower was called the Eine.
I climbed over the walls and found an opening in the tower, through which I jumped, landing in a basement chamber, and found myself in the midst of cloth-covered debris which turned out to be clammy body parts. And there was a slimy bald man-thing chained up on the far end of the room, who explained that people occasionally fell through the trapdoor above, and he would tear them to pieces. He was both grotesque and miserable, and refused to explain why he dismembered the unfortunates who came across him except that he felt they were somehow responsible for his own miserable entrapped state. (He wasn't very verbally adept.)
There was a door just behind me, just outside the reach of the monster-man's chains, and I clambered out of the chamber. I passed by other rooms, these with glass doors and bright lights and white walls, and saw people strapped down to tables, vivisected and submitted to what looked like torture.
Another level up, and I was in a cafeteria setting, also all white. People in white coats were walking past tables, and I sucked in my breath in fear and pressed to the wall as I saw the slime monster-man pass by, but he was normal-looking and normal-sized, and didn't give me a second glance. I realized that many of the faces in the cafeteria seemed familiar, that I just saw them either strapped down to gurneys and screaming, or in cold dismembered chunks on the basement floor. But these people were calm, content, and they strode through the room with an air of untouchability and confidence.
Wondering what this all meant, I went up another level, and found myself in a perfectly normal doctor's office, with a comfortably appointed reception room, and private screening rooms that were for once not all-white. I walked into a room that turned out to be a young nurse's office. She was cheery and sweet and seemed to have no idea of anything in the levels below, but brightly praised the practice as having access to the most advanced technology and research facilities around.
Then a tall, handsome white-haired man with elegantly kindly features came into her office, and requested that I follow him. Instinctively, I trusted him, and asked him about the place. He knew I'd seen the manthing in the lower level, and the vivisection rooms. Then we had the following conversation:
Me: How can this be? Those people...
Him: They're not quite people, not really. They're clones. It's entirely an in-house operation: our doctors and researchers use clones of themselves for medical testing, so you see...
Me: But even if they're clones, it's still experimenting on humans! And it's torture!
Him: Well, our scientists have concluded that the invaluable research potential surmounts the less sanguine aspects of the situation. And they are clones of themselves, after all.
Me: Can't they at least make them insensible then? They seem self-aware--can't the clones be made dumb enough not to know or feel what is being done to them?
Him: Well that is the doctors' own decision, but they are all kept highly intelligent. Intelligent enough to be aware of all that is going on, and most importantly, of the choice they themselves have made...
...and at that point, it got too creepy for me and I woke up.
Dear brain: WHAT. I do not want to dream about doctors using clones of themselves for horrible creepy medical testing, and punishing themselves for the bargain they've agreed to make by keeping the clones entirely aware and with full memory of everything up to the moment of cloning. (I think one of the creepier ramifications of the dream was that it was finally unclear whether the clones or the "originals" were the ones actually used for the experiments--but then again, since the clones duplicate the original's memory, it pretty much seems that one is equivalent to the other.)
WHY. I don't even understand why so many of my dreams are so creepy. This seems to have nothing to do with either my daily life, or even the type of entertainment/fiction I currently consume--and yet on a regular basis, I dream of aliens, medical horror testing labs, and so on.