Wow. A lot of dreams lately!
Well, two.
I had this dream last night. It was what should probably be considered to be quite a horrifying dream, except I wasn't in it. I was never in it. So I never felt directly horrified. It was more like a movie, although I felt my reactions to it were directing the action, somehow. Thank God that doesn't happen in theaters (although surely out there, there's some future-interactive-tech-evangelist who thinks it would be a good idea. That's because those people are soulless assholes who have no concept of what good or bad art is).
There were all these characters who were made known to you in various scenarios, and it was like the world we know, but with various bizarre sci-fi elements grafted on. Each of the characters was being forced to live their life over and over, the same period of time unfolding different ways. There were times when the two main protagonists, who were in love but it was never going to work out, were on the run from the government; or else they were living the same scenario from the other side, helping the government track down or fight back against this robot menace that was taking people over from the inside, burrowing through their flesh with mechanics and paralyzing their nerves so they couldn't feel the pain while it was happening, only a loss of control that eventually saw them totally taken over. Then they had to live through it all again, only this time they were themselves taken over by the robots, or one of them was, and the other was bereaved (needless to say) or didn't know it had happened (in yet another run-through).
There were many other characters, characters whose lives played out in crisis over and over again, with different sides of their character revealed each time, and different outcomes each time. There was a gang of children who'd lost their parents, or who hadn't lost their parents but had run from them because of various factors, or were trying to rescue their parents, or who had been turned evil. There was an older guy who kept trying to help people out, and was surprisingly good at it! And you loved him. And he died, like...so many ways.
It was also a little like you imagine reincarnation might be, because even though each character couldn't know what had gone before in the previous scenarios of their lives, still you got the uncanny sense that those lessons carried over. But since the situation kept changing too, it was like an unfair challenge. There was an overwhelming sense that things would end badly, and they did keep ending badly. But each time, there was such a close margin - to where you could see the people you cared about could almost win, just once!
This was a really weird, intense dream! It kept going and going. I feel like it went on for 3 hours, I swear. Like a really long movie, like a James Cameron movie. Except it was good, you wanted to see what happened. Even though it was also unpleasant, it felt like it was developing and building toward something. It really was as if it was a movie. It was as if the movie were a meditation on the topic of alternate universes, all of them infected by the same insidious problem, that was spreading through them all, expressing itself differently in each. In several of the versions, it was the government that was bad - and the robotic influence was somehow on the side of the "good guys"! Parts of the dream were like a bad Steven Spielberg movie. Other parts of it were like the Twilight Zone in color. I remember one vividly horrifying scene where a character we know and care about is lifting a mask, to fit it to her face. She needs to put this mask on to pass through some danger undetected, undercover - or so another character has told her. It is a mask similar to the fright-masks seen in a famous Twilight Zone episode, and when she fits it to her face she stiffens, starts convulsing - she makes an awful, strangled scream and is pressing it against her face against her will. The mask's veins bulge, and you realize with a shock it is more-or-less her own face now, but with a horrific expression.
And then just like that, she lifts her hands away, the expression clears from her face and she says "Ah! That's better." Big breath, relieved.
But she isn't who she was anymore.
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