Sunday morning I was sharing with Jeff a dream I’d had the previous night. I can only remember bits and pieces of it, but basically I had discovered a way to travel among parallel universes. I had reached an alternate Earth, and found myself captured and imprisoned in what seemed to be a cross between a jail, a mental institution, a spaceport and a military base. I discovered that on this world the scientific-military leadership also had discovered a way to move long spatial distances in a split second by travelling interdimensionally. However, the people they sent on these trips, though arriving near-instaneously, experienced in their minds the full amount of time it would take at light-speed to travel the real distance; for example, a person sent to Alpha Centauri and back would appear to the observer to flicker in and out, yet would experience eight subjective years of travel in a featureless void, all alone. These travelers were all returning with various degrees of mental anguish, hysteria and, in the severest cases, complete catatonia.
My interdimensional arrival had been detected, and upon discovery that unlike them I did not experience this subjective travel time I was captured and I presumed that I was going to be experimented on to discover why. One of the orderlies in the institute, though, gave me an ID badge that had been hacked to make me appear invisible, or at least other than my real identity, to the automatic scanners throughout the facility. He offered to help me escape if I would help him with something first. It turned out that his sister was being kept in a secure isolated ward; she had been one of the first travelers, and had been sent tens of thousands of light-years in a single jump. My new friend wanted me to try to get his sister out of the facility, and he had me pose as her husband, carrying a bundle that looked sometimes like a bouquet of roses and other times like a baby wrapped in blankets.
I made it through the checkpoints, and had finally reached her bedside when a troup of humanoid robots, metallic and featureless but for a facial slit and two sensors that looked like eyes made out of buttons (thanks, Neil Gaiman, for that image from Coraline), surrounded me.
And that’s when I woke up.
This morning I remembered a bit of a dream from last night in which I was able to polymorph both myself and others. At one point, I came across a fox who started following me around. In this erotic dream, I remember first turning myself into a vixen and then later turning him into a male human (gorgeously red-headed, lithe and energetic).