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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jack7" data-source="post: 4768206" data-attributes="member: 54707">The Dreaming DM, Part Two: In examining some of my old dreams in my Dream Logue I came across an old entry in a special section separated from the rest.Over time I recorded Seven Special Dreams, those dreams seeming to me to be the most important dreams I ever had. These dreams are also some of the most intense and clearly detailed of all the dreams I've ever had, going back to the very first derma I can ever remember having, when I guess I was about five to six years old.This particular dream (the one discussed below) I had as a teenager and to me it not only foreshadowed a number of things that would happen to me later on, but I thought after re-reading it that it would make an excellent adventure story/game mission. So I'm gonna briefly detail the dream here and then try an experiment in which I adapt it to a game/adventure storyline.The Dream of the Other Hand: This dream began with me at an archaeological site. While there I decided to separate from the rest of the expedition and made my way over to a sort of lonely area that had been untouched by either excavation or prior exploration. I began to dig and eventually uncovered a crystal case, that was clear and easy to see through (it was as transparent as glass but far heavier, almost like holding something made of gold). Even though the crystal had been buried under significant debris, and there were other artifacts scattered nearby that had been weathered and were in various states of decay, this crystal flask seemed completely clean and pristine when I recovered it. It wasn't even scratched by the dirt and other debris. It was as if the flask had been hermetically sealed inside and out and had been preserved exactly as it was covered or buried. This struck me at the time in the dream as both odd and wonderful. And very weird and frightening.I took the flask in secret back to the camp and concealed it from everyone else for a time. The object (and it reminded me instinctively of both a petri-dish and a sealed test tube) was sort of spherical in shape (from an overhead view) with pinched ends, looking much like two pie plates turned upon each other, but there was no visible sign of join because the crystal looked as if it had been created as a single piece with the object it contained perfectly cantered within it (without any visible means of support, the object within did not touch the inside of the glass). And inside the object was another object, easily visible and open to examination. That second object being most of a forearm and the hand of some creature.It was in no way a human hand. It was crudely clawed, the scales being a sort of blue-green color in appearance, and very rough. the hand had three long digits with long claws at the ends of each digit and it also possessed a complimentary and opposable digit (like a thumb only far more versatile) that sprang from the center of where would be the wrist on a human hand. I was extremely excited as I relayed that nothing like this had ever been catalogued and that I had apparently found the remains of a completely unknown species.I spent all night making a personal investigation of the object with my personal investigative kit and the next morning revealed my find to everyone else. I kept what I had discovered through my private investigation a secret. Because although I could find no way to open the crystal casing I found by examination with a magnifying glass and an ultraviolet light (like I use during crime scene analysis) that the underside of almost every "scale" contained a sort of cryptic and unknown language in script form.The team members took the find (by now we were calling it the crystal arm or alien arm) to a big lab at some university (I can't remember which one but seemed like MIT to me) and they were also unable to open the case or penetrate the crystal (which we had all figured out now wasn't crystal at all) but they did discover that the DNA of the scales resonated information when bombarded by certain wavelengths of radiated energy.  The find became famous and most people, including the examination team were certain it was alien in origin. But I didn't believe that. I thought it was an indigenous but unknown species that had existed in human pre-history and that had probably died out and been lost. I kept working on the notes of the script I had discovered on the underbelly of the scales as well as copies of the information triggered by the resonant bombardment. Eventually I pieced together a map of where I thought the species had originated and found it lay on the bottom of the Ocean, but not just the Atlantic, in several places, including under the mass of the Antarctic. I didn't tell anyone what I had discovered.The dream then switched to me diving in the Atlantic where I eventually discovered a huge undersea ruin of mammoth proportions, but covered in thick silt. It was about half way down a large mountain range which lay in the lip of an immense trench that strangely enough US subs used as a navigational beacon line. I had to make several dives but eventually found my way into an underground area of the mountain range that contained an atmosphere, where I found buildings and a lot of artifacts. What I found confirmed to me that the original arm had indeed belonged to one of the creatures who had built this place, that they were partially amphibious, and that they were indigenous to earth and had existed in human prehistory. (And that in their day they had been more primitive than us in some ways, and more advanced in others.)The dream skipped in place again and I was in a large storeroom where I found literally thousands of stacked crystal cases with forearms like the original find. I also found some sort of way of obtaining information from the cases and arms so that I came to understand that the unknown race had suffered some sort of horrendous plague outbreak that had led them to all cut off their arms and store them in these cases. I really wasn't sure of exactly why but the arms contained "sympathetic information" that led me to conclude that somehow the plague had been accidentally self-inflicted and that they had intentionally mutilated themselves in hopes of killing off the plague and of preventing it from spreading to other creatures. For some reason I kept getting the impression of enormous corruption and sadness regarding all of the dismembered arms. The dismemberments had led to the eventual extinction of the race, but why never became clear.The next skip in the sequence of events in the dream had me back at home examining one of the cases and arms I had brought back from the Oceanic site, through the electron microscope I had in my private lab. I was convinced that despite what the creatures themselves had thought the real and actual disease was contained not in the arms  and the DNA but in the scripted information on the underside of the scales. The media kept talking about the original find as if it was alien, not prehistoric, and that the genetic information had led to stellar coordinates that were being searched for alien life.But I became frightened and obsessed (in the dream) that the real danger lay in cracking open any of the cases and letting out the "Script" of the language on the scales. That the "writing on the scales" would somehow lead to the same thing happening to people, and would kill humans off. That we too would misunderstand the real cause of the disease and try remedies that would kill us rather than combat the disease (if indeed it could be called a real dis-ease, it seemed more like a mass psychological/genetic disorder to me). So I decided to try and sneak back into the lab at the university and steal my original find and then try and find some way to hide all of the artifacts. But I woke up before that happened. When I woke I clearly remembered almost all of the details of the dream, and I also remember the feeling of corruption (which was almost like being sick at your stomach through disappointment) and decay and fear I felt until I realized it had all been a dream.For Adventures regarding this dream see <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/245660-adventure-ideas-2.html#post4871041" target="_blank">Here</a>.</blockquote>

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