Caveat: Becoming the Ghosts of Our Ancestors

I was really sore yesterday, from the hike on Saturday.   So I didn't do much.  I watched some television; I started to try to write a story that was so terrible I immediately wanted to delete it. 

Then last night I had some very strange dreams.  The dream I was having when I woke up this morning was like some strange science-fiction movie, with many details and complex plot-twists.  It was one of those "remote colony on another planet gradually goes insane" plots, but there were features to the plot that made it uniquely mine.

The colony was a Korean colony:  yes, there were Koreans making space colonies.  And I was there, as some kind of token non-Korean.  I often didn't know what was going on.   So far, so much exactly like real life.

But… there were invisible monsters stalking the colony – a la "Forbidden Planet."  Members of the colony kept disappearing.   Soon many of the buildings and areas were dilapidated and vacant.

Then there was some weird time-travel experience.  The few remaining survivors of the invisible monsters, including myself, locked ourselves into an underground room and decided to go into some kind of cold-sleep for 100 years, to await a rescue team.

After 100 years, when we came back out, much to our surprise, there were people living in the colony, including families with children.   The people were living the lives of traditional, pre-modern Koreans, although they still had some technology.  They thought we were the ghosts of ancestors.  They had set up Jang-seung (traditional Korean wooden totem poles, carved with the faces of spirits) around the encampment.

And then the awaited rescue team arrived, finally.  The rescue team included my sister.  She was very unimpressed by the state of things.   "Why have you been wasting time building farms and having children?" she demanded, pointing at all the mysterious people who had taken over the colony.  I didn't know.  I was as puzzled as she was.  I was worried about the invisible monsters, still.

There was one strange building, that had been built, while we were in cold-sleep:  it looked a little bit like a church, but was full of machinery.  I went to look at it, on a hill, with my sister and some Korean soldiers from the rescue team, who were chain-smoking cigarettes.   The building was surrounded by carefully planted redwood trees.  When we got to the building at the top of the hill and looked back down at the colony, all of the people had disappeared.  The colony was deserted.  I wondered if we ALL were ghosts.

That's about when I woke up.  Pretty complicated dream.  A little bit like Juan Rulfo's "Pedro Paramo," in space.

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