I was thinking about FD recently, yes I know that says a lot about my state of mind and that i probably should increase my medication
but there you go, there's a dark lining to every silver cloud.
Anyhoo, I was recalling after a particularly intense episode of BSG that the Bearded One once famously said that he could live in the Star Trek universe, easily. I've often had similar thoughts myself, since I was a child, and started watching SF at about 6 or 7. But of late I've started to examine these escapist fantasies quite closely, largely as a result of several odd dreams I've had in recent years.
Before I was about 10, SF was part of normal kids play for me, acting out Land of the Giants and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet with my brother and my mates, or playing with my various kits and action figures etc. Straightforward stuff. But I recall that about the time of Star Wars in '77, I was about 13 or 14, this took on a different dimension and I used to think about actually living in these universes, generally just before i went to sleep. Of course, in these escapist meanderings I was always the hero, having all the adventures etc, and pretty much this stayed my internal world in this respect for many years, although after ROTJ had come and gone, it wasn't quite so interesting for me (and by this time I couldn't really afford these sort of daydreams and had to knuckle down, now being in my 20s) and for a long time such thoughts stopped. I became more interested in history anyway.
Some years ago I had a very distinct and bizarre dream where I was some lowly crewman on the Enterprise-D, and Baldy Picard came down to wherever it was I was working and gave me right telling off and threw me off his ship for being useless! Wow, i thought, I can't even have dreams where I'm any good anymore, even fictional characters despise me. A couple of years later, I had a recurring sequence of dreams where I was kidnapped by aliens when I was coming back from the local shop after buying a packet of cigs, taken to the other side of the galaxy, but into some sort of stasis, unfrozen years later, put into slavery by some bad aliens (that looked suspiciously like rabbits!) escaped, nicked a ship, had some Privateer type adventures, and eventually met up with flippin' Voyager, and after telling my story to Cap'n Thighslapper Janeway, got offered a lift back home although several centuries late. These dreams went on for weeks, it was like having my own mini-series of Voyager going on my head.
IIRC i didn't exactly integrate well on happy-clappy Voyager. I struggled to fit in, find something to do, all the technobabble was beyond me, and they were all just too dam' nice, those Federation types. For a long time all I could do was clean the floors, paint the walls, and waste time in the holodeck (this all seemed very familiar!) Eventually I managed to persuade Chakozits to let me do something useful so he let me tinker about with stuff in the cargo bays and I eneded up inventing a HL1 style gauss-gun, which overloaded and blew a hole in the side of the ship! I got into deep schtuck for that and Janeway nearly threw me off at the nearest planet.
Tuvok saw some potential in some of my less crazy ideas, though, and I ended up designing an automated internal defence system because Voyager was always being boarded (Kazon, Vidiians, Hirogen, Borg, those people with the weird noses...) and it was largely based on good' ol' 20th Century technology and worked really well. From then on, things were better, and I started coming up with all sorts of useful ideas.
However (and I really wasn't expecting this) sometime later on a seeming inoccuous away mission (always the most dangerous sort!) I got zapped by an alien artifact thing and turned into a woman! I was still me, but female. i totally freaked and really didn't cope with this, especially when male crew started coming on to me <yuk!> I pretty much did everything i could to not be female, including demand the Doctor fix me, which he refused to and smirked a lot, but because he was a hologram i couldn't punch him.
After what seeemd like a very long time, I began to get used to it, couldn't do anything else really, and actually started to get on a lot better. For some reason i was fitter, stronger, faster, brighter, to the point where I was really rather good at everything and started to get selected to go on special missions and eventually joined Starfleet and did all those courses of Tuvok's. You'd think that would be a good note to end this bizarre but vivid series of nightime wanderings on, but no, it gets even weirder later on!
I told the wife about these regular dreams after a couple of years and she thought it was hilarious and wished she coould join in. I told her that in my dreams I keep a picture of her and the kids in my quarters on Voyager and that, like Sam Beckett, I'm always trying to find a way home. Bear in mind that I'm not just thousand of light years way from home, but 300 or so years into the future.
One day i get called to Janeway's office and the Doc announces that he and Be'lanna have figured out how to reverse the effect of the alien device on me. I told them to b*gger off as all their hare-brained schemes invariably go wrong, and I was quite enjoying life now and was prob'ly never going to get home, I migth as well stay as I was; but eventually after much Voyager style boring moralising, I agreed. And it didn't work. Well it did, but not as planned. Instead of turning back from a woman into me, it just made two of us. The female one, and normal me again. It rapdly became clear that despite having the same memories and experience, and virtually identical DNA apart from gender, we were two completely different personalities; I was me, desperately wanting to get back home, not having a great time and there against my will, and then there was the female version of me, whose thoughts I didn't have any more, doing very nicely thank you and Captain Janeway's proper little pet, cosy chats with 7 and all that, hmph. I was back to cleaning the plasma conduits, although they did occassionally find me even worse jobs to do, like slogging through some jungle on a swamp planet for miles to set up a communications array, or being stuck in some sewers under bombardment after being "accidentally" sent into a war zone. Or being stuck for days in a broken shuttle trying not to freeze or starve to death.
In order to integrate me with the crew again, and to force me to get on with my "other half" Janeway sent us off on a long mission in the Delta Flyer, which was an unmitigated disaster. We didn't get on, fell out about everything, even on the stuff we had in common, which was a lot because we were in fact the same person, but developing in different directions now. I can't remember all the details, but when we returned, I decided to leave Voyager, got put off at some trading planet, bought a ship and started to head off back to the Alpha Quadrant by myself, and had a great time. Much fiddling with the ship and some Freelancer/X2 style upgrades, I was nipping along a right old pace, but realised that I had some sort of psychic link with my other half and thus realised that Voyager was or would be in trouble. I managed to arrive int he nick of time and saved them from some threat or other, and they were all very grateful and said they'd missed me <yuk!> and as I was starting to get a bit bored anyway and had lost all my mp3s and videos from the Voyager archive that I'd ripped before I left, I decided to stay this time. I got a few more interesting things to do this time and helped Be'lanna out in Engineering and 7 with the Astrometrics array, which i found quite immersive and fruitful. I also developed an Andromeda style drone defence system for Voyager which proved very effective.
Then these particular dreams ended about 3 years ago,a nd I didn't have one again until about 6 months ago when on it's travels throught he outer edges of the Beta Quadrant, Voyager encountered a temporal anomaly/wormhole which seemed like it might lead back to Earth another time, maybe my own, and I could go home once and for all. which I volunteered to investigate in the ship I'd bought for my travels. Unfortunately it proved to be rather more than I could handle and I got sucked in and was flung, as I'd thought, back to Earth, but an Earth millions upon millions of years in the future, with a dead sun (indeed all the stars were dead) and a cold night-dead land inhabited by gross aberrations of humans evolved for eternal darkness, and vile horrors from other dimensions who were apparently the cause of the dead sun and stars, who feed on life itself. And there I'm stuck, at the end of all ages, with these things whispering to me in the darkness, hid under a cliff with my ship cloaked and shielded, living in silent fear, hoping that the things in the night won't find me and take my soul.
apart from me watching and reading too much SF and horror, what does all this mean?
Sun Jan 28, 2007 12:39 pm 
