senix
Dreamscape and Clouds
A desert, but not as isolated as it looks; it was only a block or two south of where I live (in reality this would be a light industrial zone with some strip malls, not at all desolate. Only the rail line is correctly placed (i.e. actually there), but it's at grade, not with an overpass. Anyway: it was a very bright day, sunny but not hot due to a brisk breeze. I was walking somewhere, I forget where, when I stopped atop the overpass and looked up, and was surprised to see a bunch of odd clouds clustered in a small part of the otherwise perfectly empty and blue sky. The clouds (between one and two dozen) were all perfectly spherical and relatively sharp-edged, with the exception of between one and three small protrusions each - these were very regular as well, bumps, spikes, truncated cones. On clouds that had two or three they were distributed symmetrically, too, on opposite ends. The clouds were being buffeted by the wind, but they weren't breaking up or altering shape; neither were they moving from that one quadrant of the sky, either singly or all together. They were moving relative to each other, though: they dipped, rose, rotated (it was hard to tell because of their featureless regularity, but you could see the protrusions moving), bumped into one another, tangled and separated, but all the while never straying very far from the group, as though they were in an invisible plastic bag or something.
I stood there and watched for a minute or two; then I though to go home and point them out to someone. But by the time I got down off the overpass, the spherical clouds had disintegrated and merged into one large, more conventionally cloudlike cloud, ragged-edged and randomly-shaped (though it did look vaguely like an enormous bird, but I think that was just a coincidence, even in a dream.) So I shrugged and reversed course (the overpass had while my back was turned sunk into the landscape and become a level crossing, with the railway behind a set of lights and gates, which were down and blinking, respectively.) While I waited for the train to pass, a gaudy-looking sports car rolled up alongside and the drunk-looking driver began to yell incoherent obscenities at me through a rolled-down window. I suddenly realized that I had exited the surreal and dreamlike part of the program and was transitioning into the low-quality unimaginative nightmare part, and that - after the gate rose - the man in the gaudy car intended to make a U-turn and try to run me down. It was not a particularly scary prospect - he looked like he was going to be incompetent at it - but it was depressing in a tedious sort of way. The train whooshed by, and the man promptly missed me and drove the car into a ditch. After he struggled out of the wreck he chased me on foot, red-faced and wheezing, until he ran out of breath and fell down, at which point I stopped, doubled cautiously back and judiciously kicked him in the head to make sure he stayed down (although I may have also harbored some misplaced resentment towards him, for making the clouds go away.)
But: even though I dreamt this early on, around two or three, the strange clouds turned out to have sufficient staying power for the image (the key to the rest of the dream) to stay with me until morning, undisplaced by more mundane stuff from later in the night.
Dreamscape and Clouds
A desert, but not as isolated as it looks; it was only a block or two south of where I live (in reality this would be a light industrial zone with some strip malls, not at all desolate. Only the rail line is correctly placed (i.e. actually there), but it's at grade, not with an overpass. Anyway: it was a very bright day, sunny but not hot due to a brisk breeze. I was walking somewhere, I forget where, when I stopped atop the overpass and looked up, and was surprised to see a bunch of odd clouds clustered in a small part of the otherwise perfectly empty and blue sky. The clouds (between one and two dozen) were all perfectly spherical and relatively sharp-edged, with the exception of between one and three small protrusions each - these were very regular as well, bumps, spikes, truncated cones. On clouds that had two or three they were distributed symmetrically, too, on opposite ends. The clouds were being buffeted by the wind, but they weren't breaking up or altering shape; neither were they moving from that one quadrant of the sky, either singly or all together. They were moving relative to each other, though: they dipped, rose, rotated (it was hard to tell because of their featureless regularity, but you could see the protrusions moving), bumped into one another, tangled and separated, but all the while never straying very far from the group, as though they were in an invisible plastic bag or something.
I stood there and watched for a minute or two; then I though to go home and point them out to someone. But by the time I got down off the overpass, the spherical clouds had disintegrated and merged into one large, more conventionally cloudlike cloud, ragged-edged and randomly-shaped (though it did look vaguely like an enormous bird, but I think that was just a coincidence, even in a dream.) So I shrugged and reversed course (the overpass had while my back was turned sunk into the landscape and become a level crossing, with the railway behind a set of lights and gates, which were down and blinking, respectively.) While I waited for the train to pass, a gaudy-looking sports car rolled up alongside and the drunk-looking driver began to yell incoherent obscenities at me through a rolled-down window. I suddenly realized that I had exited the surreal and dreamlike part of the program and was transitioning into the low-quality unimaginative nightmare part, and that - after the gate rose - the man in the gaudy car intended to make a U-turn and try to run me down. It was not a particularly scary prospect - he looked like he was going to be incompetent at it - but it was depressing in a tedious sort of way. The train whooshed by, and the man promptly missed me and drove the car into a ditch. After he struggled out of the wreck he chased me on foot, red-faced and wheezing, until he ran out of breath and fell down, at which point I stopped, doubled cautiously back and judiciously kicked him in the head to make sure he stayed down (although I may have also harbored some misplaced resentment towards him, for making the clouds go away.)
But: even though I dreamt this early on, around two or three, the strange clouds turned out to have sufficient staying power for the image (the key to the rest of the dream) to stay with me until morning, undisplaced by more mundane stuff from later in the night.