Dream worlds

Yesterday was one long twelve-hour work day of trying to stay awake.  I'm not sure what my problem was, but every time I sat down or even leaned against something it seemed like I was nodding off.  Normally only getting five hours of sleep a night for a week straight doesn't faze me that badly.  Anyway, the point is that I didn't have to come in to work today until 6pm, so I slept in until around 1pm.  And man, did I have some crazy dreams.

The first found me at a college campus.  It wasn't my old college campus, but very similar.  The first clue was that although I knew everybody there in real life, none of them ever went to my college.  The second clue was that I'd been there before in another dream, oddly enough.  There are places that don't exist, but I dream about every once in a while.  Sometimes I recognize parts of them from the real world, hence the similarity to my old college, but there are other parts that I can't place at all.  Other than the campus, there's also a huge waterfall up in the mountains that I visit fairly regularly while asleep.  I wonder if these places are mental landscapes based on our impressions of a place; the concrete reference points that we know so well, combined with those less defined areas that we only catch glimpses of even though we pass them every day.  But if that's the case, then why is the art studio always outside and the art building missing?  Did I mention that I was once obsessed with dreams?

Back to the dream.  We were all hanging out next to the Lit building when we were kidnapped by aliens (this is also how I know it wasn't my old campus, since that almost never happened there).  No secret where that came from: I'd just seen the preview yesterday for the new Predators movie.  Without ever seeing our abductors we were dumped in a strange mock-campus that was a fake simulation of some kind.  Somehow, no matter how far we walked we always found ourself in the same hundred square-yard area.  Soon the various horrors ensued that one would associate with being animals that have been captured for the sole purpose of being hunted.  We were bathed in radiation that was meant to sterilize us, then the weaker specimines were culled and removed by giant spider-things.

During all this I found myself huddled next to a girl who had been a painter and refused to stop just because we were all about to die.  I'm not sure where she got the paints and canvas, but she'd managed to already finish a few, including a pretty good likeness of one of the predator aliens.  Even with everything that had happened, we still hadn't gotten a good look at our captors, but I recognized the one she'd painted immediately.  I also recognized it as a Predator and came to the slow realization that I was dreaming.  So I was able to avoid being hunted for sport by waking up.

I drifted back to sleep and had other, much more vague, dreams that I can't remember clearly other than that they were also very strange.