We're Basement Jaxx...

My dream started off in a situation similar to those in The Aviator. Howard Hughes was test piloting a new high-speed boat that could also jump out of the water and glide for short distances. He claimed it was faster than anything the Navy owned, so they were racing. His experimental boat won, but at the end of the race the boat crashed into the land.

After that the dream cut to a board meeting with a lot of executive-type people, and then four people—two men and two women—who seemed dressed inappropriately and completely out-of-place. Hughes was arguing that his test was a success, not a failure, despite the crash at the end, and was demanding more funding and a greater share of the eventual profits. People were laughing at him. Soon, the person leading the meeting turned to the strange people and asked, "Who exactly are you?" Two of the strange men turned to look at each other, and then answered as if more confused than offended by the question, "we're... Basement Jaxx, of course." "Yes, but... why are you here?" Now more annoyed, one of them just replied, "because we're Basement Jaxx," matter-of-factly. One of the women smiled and leaned forward and then said, "I suppose you'll be wantin' some dance music now." The other woman grinned and added, "with feathers!"

But that was the end of that. I then found myself in the lobby of my building at work. There were a lot of people in black and grey military gear that just screamed "special ops." As his whole crew poured into the building, he whispered to his team of ten or so that they had complete access to the building with their badges, and they were to accomplish their mission and then leave immediately; terminating anyone who got in the way. They didn't notice me standing there with them, listening to their plans. I never really got a sense of if they were the good guys or the bad guys.

One of the military types made his way to the stairwell, and I followed him there. I found that there were stairs down that I wasn't expecting (they don't exist in real life), so I took them. They brought me to a very first person shooter-style industrial underbelly of the building with loud gears and mechanical doohickeys, and walls made simply out of chainlink. I had lost the military guy, but I continued to wander around in the basement of my building, and I finally found a room containing one of my coworkers, my roommate from college, and his mother, sitting around and chatting. There was a chalkboard in the room—chalkboards seem to be a recurring theme in dreams that I've had recently.

As soon as I entered the room I started to warn them that there were people in the building who might be after them, but they didn't listen to me. They didn't seem to notice my presence. I went to shake my ex-roommate's mom by the shoulder, but my hand passed right through it. I was a ghost.

I tried to find a way to communicate with them, but they couldn't hear me, and nothing I could do seemed to affect their world. Then I noticed that I could affect things that had electricity running through them: when I tried to pass my hand through a live power wire, it stopped. I shook one of the mechanical devices in their room—that got their attention. Then, I grabbed an extension cord and carefully wrapped it around a piece of chalk. Now that the chalk was wrapped in the extension cord carrying electricity, I could move the chalk. I took the chalk and wrote on the board (very slowly; the extension cord was cumbersome) as the three people watched in amazement:

This is Travis
People are coming
Get out now

Only my ex-roommate's mom seemed terribly freaked out by the ghostwriting. My roommate said "that looks like Travis' writing; look at the way he wrote his A's." (I have a very distinct way of writing a lowercase letter A—see my blog's header.) My coworker helpfully added, "but he's dead." The roommate replied, "I think we should take the advice. We should get out of here."

And that was the end of the dream.


Currently listening: Sia—Breathe Me (video)