I had the weirdest dream last night that I was on a space mission with about ten other people to launch some kind of weapon at something (alien).  The details of what, exactly, we were trying to do are fuzzy, but we each had a piece of the weapon we had to carry separately.  Highly sensitive weaponry, mind you.

The spaceship itself was also alien I think — some crazy psychic device where you had to mind-meld with it by shoving your head into this vat of clear gel.  Once your head was completely submerged, you had to actually start breathing the gel, which was possible but felt like asphyxiation.  Then your thoughts became one with the craft and control was possible.

Fortunately, for the first half of the mission, I was not the one mind-melded with the spacecraft. UNfortunately, we were attacked and the “pilot” was killed and the mission was thrown into chaos.  Since we were all carrying highly sensitive weapon components, everyone scattered throughout the halls, leaving me alone in the control room to shove my head in this vat of gel and try to mind-meld with it to get us out of there, save our lives, and – hopefully – save the mission.

Spoiler alert: I failed.

When I shoved my head into the gel and felt it start to get sucked into my lungs and airways, time seemed to slow and everything got as quiet as a heartbeat.  Then I was knocked off my feet and out of the gel by an explosion that put a hole in the side of the spaceship.  I was sucked into space, as were all of my fellow travelers.

Space, for the record, is really cold.  And then you die.  At least, that’s how it played out in my dream.

The good news is after dying in space, you wake up – or at least I did – in a sunny green lawn eating ribs.  Yes, eating ribs.  And you’re not really awake then either.  I must have been enjoying the ribs, because I was also trying to hum a song.  It was a specific song, which I can’t remember now, but I was finding it quite impossible to do both the ribs and the humming justice at the same time.

But as I was humming and chewing, I noticed someone approaching.  Someone who didn’t look particularly pleased to see me parked at a folding table with a plate of ribs in the middle of this grassy space.  Turns out that someone was the neighbor (an amorphous, anonymous neighbor) and I was parked in his front lawn.  I had – and still have – no explanation for why I would decide to cart my folding table and ribs to the neighbor’s front lawn, but there you have it.

And then I actually woke up because Alice had to go to the bathroom.

Just when you think your life is odd or amusing, you have a dream like this that makes you realize you’re actually pretty normal and pedestrian.