Dreaming of sci-fi thrillers.
Apr. 16th, 2006 07:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
katsarisHad a sci-fi murder thriller for a dream last night. Not a *scary* one really (though a bit gruesome/bloody at places) but more of a poignant/sad one. Unlike most dreams this one did reach a place where one might definitely say "The End" -- at which point I awoke, and decided not to bother trying to fall asleep again. And it was a cool ending IMO -- so if you want to skip to that one and ignore the previous disjointed bits, be my guest.
The disjointed bits
Most of the pieces that remain to be are a bit disjointed but here's the basics: Almost of all of it was taking place on, under or over water. The main "good protagonist", the action hero if you will, was played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. By the dream's end the feeling was that of me watching a film on television, though earlier on I seemed to be in the role of a young boy helping the protagonist.
The dream's semi-coherent plot (as far as I remember) began with a mass murder on a yacht of some kind, accompanied perhaps by a kidnapping. There were some iffy suspicious characters like a doctor (well-dressed and bald), but "suspicious" more of in the sense that he may have had some dark dealings/past that this murders were a consequence of, NOT that he wanted them to happen. He may have been out of his depth.
Then followed a scene where people (including Schwarzenegger) swim around among debris trying to locate something, perhaps a ransom note or something of the like. That's the only bit where I remember participating as an active character instead of "watching". I'm a young boy, and dive to help also. Even as I dive, I think that my shoes and clothes will make this difficult for me, and indeed they do, but in the sense that they are keeping me afloat, not pulling me under. I think in my dream that it's as if gravity works backwards in the water.
I remove my shoes and clothes so that I can swim underwater -- and end up witnessing the bloody underwater suicide of an older teenage boy which I think of as "the doctor's son". (I think he also appeared earlier in the dream, and he had reasons of guilt/shame for the suicide, but I can no longer remember what they were, or in what way he was responsible). There's some confusion over whether he choked or stabbed himself to death. Or whether he intentionally choked but accidentally stabbed himself, I guess. (It was a dream, it didn't *have* to make sense :-)
There was some more stuff following this which I don't really remember. I'm pretty sure some more people died, both good and bad.
The ending
The ending sequences begin when a group of 4-5 characters arrives to the side of the yacht, leaping with ropes. The people on the yacht are happy as if they are saved and approach them to chat happily, including a young girl. However a remark by one of those newcomers (betraying knowledge he shouldn't have) makes the protagonist realize that *they* are the bad guys. He also knows that they are cyborgs but I'm not sure if he had this knowledge from before, or whether it was also related to them being the bad guys.
But at the same time the protagonist sees the young girl being so very close to them talking to them, and her leg is half-entangled in some sort of net/mesh so that he couldn't even pull her away quickly -- therefore he doesn't dare act against them. However the head bad guy already knows that he knows -- he laughs evilly and the whole group jumps away with the ropes they have.
The girl slips and falls overboard. Schwarzenegger leaps for her but fails to catch her and then (I think) dives after her towards the water.
There's a discontinuity here, and then there's the final final scene. I get the feeling that years have passed. It's a busy place of some kind like a restaurant or a bar, on solid land.
There's a young girl who seems as if she's remembering everything that happened years ago - indeed it feels as if all the previous sequences were her memories/flashback of the event. She asks Arnold how many kids died back then.
He starts thinking of everyone who died, but the girl says "No, I'm talking just of the children".
There was the doctor's son, and also another boy. So Arnold says something to the point of "two".
But the girl says "I remember a girl falling, and you diving after her. How did that turn out?"
".... she didn't make it."
"So there were three. Three children that were killed."
At which point we understand that *she's* the child. Perhaps a decade or two has passed but she looks roughly the same. Letters over the screen proclaim something to the point of "Ella Jane Cyborg" -- it seems that the dead child was replaced with a cyborg, presumably by a grieving parent.
Then the girl cyborg starts crying. First she says something about how if she had known about cyborg eyes, it wouldn't have happened (there seems to be some plot-point I no longer clearly remember about cyborgs being recognizable by their eyes). Then she starts sobbing about how emotions hurt, and why do people have them, while Schwarzenegger hugs her trying to comfort her.
In the end we see that Schwarzenegger also seems to be a robot in the final sequence -- not a human-looking cyborg but a fully metallic robot. It's unclear whether he was also "replaced" for some reason, or if he was one from the beginning and simply stopped hiding it. That's the end of the dream, and I wake up.
--
It was a cool ending, I think (though having Arnold as a robot also may have been one step too many, thinking it critically). But the bit about the girl cyborg -- that's cool IMO. One would normally expect that the character remembering the events would be the one *definitely* to survive. And the emotions/pathos were also great I think.
*g* Cooler than my average dream, anyhow.
The disjointed bits
Most of the pieces that remain to be are a bit disjointed but here's the basics: Almost of all of it was taking place on, under or over water. The main "good protagonist", the action hero if you will, was played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. By the dream's end the feeling was that of me watching a film on television, though earlier on I seemed to be in the role of a young boy helping the protagonist.
The dream's semi-coherent plot (as far as I remember) began with a mass murder on a yacht of some kind, accompanied perhaps by a kidnapping. There were some iffy suspicious characters like a doctor (well-dressed and bald), but "suspicious" more of in the sense that he may have had some dark dealings/past that this murders were a consequence of, NOT that he wanted them to happen. He may have been out of his depth.
Then followed a scene where people (including Schwarzenegger) swim around among debris trying to locate something, perhaps a ransom note or something of the like. That's the only bit where I remember participating as an active character instead of "watching". I'm a young boy, and dive to help also. Even as I dive, I think that my shoes and clothes will make this difficult for me, and indeed they do, but in the sense that they are keeping me afloat, not pulling me under. I think in my dream that it's as if gravity works backwards in the water.
I remove my shoes and clothes so that I can swim underwater -- and end up witnessing the bloody underwater suicide of an older teenage boy which I think of as "the doctor's son". (I think he also appeared earlier in the dream, and he had reasons of guilt/shame for the suicide, but I can no longer remember what they were, or in what way he was responsible). There's some confusion over whether he choked or stabbed himself to death. Or whether he intentionally choked but accidentally stabbed himself, I guess. (It was a dream, it didn't *have* to make sense :-)
There was some more stuff following this which I don't really remember. I'm pretty sure some more people died, both good and bad.
The ending
The ending sequences begin when a group of 4-5 characters arrives to the side of the yacht, leaping with ropes. The people on the yacht are happy as if they are saved and approach them to chat happily, including a young girl. However a remark by one of those newcomers (betraying knowledge he shouldn't have) makes the protagonist realize that *they* are the bad guys. He also knows that they are cyborgs but I'm not sure if he had this knowledge from before, or whether it was also related to them being the bad guys.
But at the same time the protagonist sees the young girl being so very close to them talking to them, and her leg is half-entangled in some sort of net/mesh so that he couldn't even pull her away quickly -- therefore he doesn't dare act against them. However the head bad guy already knows that he knows -- he laughs evilly and the whole group jumps away with the ropes they have.
The girl slips and falls overboard. Schwarzenegger leaps for her but fails to catch her and then (I think) dives after her towards the water.
There's a discontinuity here, and then there's the final final scene. I get the feeling that years have passed. It's a busy place of some kind like a restaurant or a bar, on solid land.
There's a young girl who seems as if she's remembering everything that happened years ago - indeed it feels as if all the previous sequences were her memories/flashback of the event. She asks Arnold how many kids died back then.
He starts thinking of everyone who died, but the girl says "No, I'm talking just of the children".
There was the doctor's son, and also another boy. So Arnold says something to the point of "two".
But the girl says "I remember a girl falling, and you diving after her. How did that turn out?"
".... she didn't make it."
"So there were three. Three children that were killed."
At which point we understand that *she's* the child. Perhaps a decade or two has passed but she looks roughly the same. Letters over the screen proclaim something to the point of "Ella Jane Cyborg" -- it seems that the dead child was replaced with a cyborg, presumably by a grieving parent.
Then the girl cyborg starts crying. First she says something about how if she had known about cyborg eyes, it wouldn't have happened (there seems to be some plot-point I no longer clearly remember about cyborgs being recognizable by their eyes). Then she starts sobbing about how emotions hurt, and why do people have them, while Schwarzenegger hugs her trying to comfort her.
In the end we see that Schwarzenegger also seems to be a robot in the final sequence -- not a human-looking cyborg but a fully metallic robot. It's unclear whether he was also "replaced" for some reason, or if he was one from the beginning and simply stopped hiding it. That's the end of the dream, and I wake up.
--
It was a cool ending, I think (though having Arnold as a robot also may have been one step too many, thinking it critically). But the bit about the girl cyborg -- that's cool IMO. One would normally expect that the character remembering the events would be the one *definitely* to survive. And the emotions/pathos were also great I think.
*g* Cooler than my average dream, anyhow.