Coffee Cup Half Moons

So I have been enthralled lately with a revival–a jolt–of interest in our solar system (and the universe outside of earth) lately thanks to the [wiki]Wonders of the Solar System[/wiki] series recently airing on BBC (I watched it on YouTube of course).  This of course provides the setting for this dream I had last night.

The dream:

So somehow I found myself on [wiki]Europa[/wiki] with a group of people — a handful, but as yet I have no idea who any of them are.  The surface is sort of pebbly/rocky like a coarse beach, and very dry (Of course Europa is nothing like that, but this was my dream).  Our point?  To search for life on Europa.

I wandered around a bit, and noticed I was next to this concrete “base” … looking back I’m going to assume it was our ship.  We look and look, and suddenly I noticed my car parked next to it.  Careful examination illuminated a spider crawling near the fender well, so I said jovially ‘Well if there wasn’t life here before, there is now.’

Someone who was with me was standing over next to what seemed like a “woods line,” but I have no idea what it actually was, because it didn’t strike me that there was plant life already.  We continued to wander, and somehow ended up in a very grassy area.  Again, it did not occur to me that the grass was life!  We happened across this grave site/memorial with 9 tombs, with some kind of inscription on it.  I don’t think I could read it, but I somehow knew that it meant something to the effect of “in honor of the 9 fallen brave ones.” (or something like that.)

Who was in the tombs? Well it alternated from the [wiki]Farscape[/wiki] crew members to the [wiki]Firefly[/wiki] crew members, and it never was clear — space travellers of some sort. Firefly and Farscape like to work their way into my space dreams (go figure.)

So I continued looking around, and we found a temple.  My brother climbed partially up the side and found affirmative proof of insect life.  I stepped up as well, and on the louvres of a vent was an inchworm, which, looking back, is not an insect, but somehow I knew it was proof of Europan insects.  At any rate, right next to the inchworm were all kinds of ants.  They reminded me a lot of the cactus guys from Mario — like insects that walked upright, but of course their body parts swayed to and fro just like the cactus guys.

At this point, we were just blown away by our discovery, complete proof there was life on Europa, so we just kind of awed a bit, then wandered some more.  I know I emphatically decried something about how the only other celestial object humans ever walked on was the moon (Luna, Earth’s moon — mentioning only because Europa is, of course, also a moon).

I started to think, ok now I wonder when Jupiter is going to appear in the sky (seriously that would be awesome).  Lo and behold, I looked up, and there was this orangy-red object.  It was a dust cloud, and, at this point, I began to realize I was in a dream.  (You would think all the previous clues would have been sufficient.)  I realized Jupiter probably wouldn’t appear in the sky, but I still wanted it to, so my brain decided to put earth there.  I guess it figured it might as well f*k with me a little.

I saw right through that, however, and the earth’s image (which was quite large in the sky — at least 30 times the size our moon appears in our sky) burned away.  As it turns out, however, I was walking around and a tree got between me and the Earth in the sky, and the tree was burning.  Then we heard some craft making noise overhead, then saw it fly over, hover nearly directly above us, and start to descend.  (That’s it with the Earth-in-the-sky bit … no idea what that was all about.)

So this craft was a very large robot — probably 40ft tall, and personality-wise very transformer like, but its head was a large TV.  Apparently, the robot shot the tree?  It would appear as though it were an attack, but as it played out, it definitely wasn’t.  Who knows … this was Europa, and honestly, it was nothing like Europa, so anything goes.  😀

As the robot landed, one of our helper bots rolled over in front of it and started making this clicking noise — some kind of radar thing, and apparently its purpose was to either befriend the large robot or render it docile.  The robot kneeled down and kind of chuckled and kind of asked the little guy (to himself) ‘How did you?’ ‘We removed that programming millions of years ago …’ then the robot started to notice that there were unrecognized creatures there (our crew), and the little bot continued its clicking.

That is when I woke up … but I still heard the clicking.  One of our ceiling fans is off balance and makes this very regular sound.