Weird Dreams Catalogue: Rejects on the Research Skiff (Patreon)

The dreams don't get any less weird and chaotic. This one I remember fewer of the exact details, but...such is the way with dreams. Anyway, all aboard the boat to hell! 🔥

The Scene: I am part of a research team looking into a treatment option for a terminal illness, and after finding some promising results, we're to showcase them on a boat? In front of some big (presumably pharmaceutical?) execs.

Shortly before we leave for the boat, I run into an old friend who starts telling me that I can't go and present my research (which should be classified, so like...idk how she knows about it) because she's been doing research with a rival reserach group (idk when researchers started having rivalries, but...🤷‍♀️😅) and they did a case study on someone with the same terminal illness where they tried the same treatment we'd been researching, and he got way worse and died only weeks later when he should have had months/years to live. I tell her that's concerning, but also an isolated case and can't be generalized to a larger group, so thank you, but I'm still going to my fancy cruiseline presentation because I'ma friggin baller okay 😎 (jealous bitches 🙄).

Me and my research team meet with the execs at a party somewhere the night before the boat leaves. Me and two others sneak away to... climb a tree... to get a better view of the sunset and...balloons...? From my new vantage point, I notice that something seems weird with the "balloons" 😅 so I go to try to tell someone, but then they (the balloons, not the someone 😂) explode with a little mushroom cloud in the distance and a couple of the people from our group disappear and find themselves at the entrance to hell. Hades tells them it's not their time, and they have to find their way back to the realm of the living.

They find a reasonably hikable path and manage to make it back just in time for the boat launch, and we all board and get ready to present our research. Shortly after boarding, we discover that the top exec is actually a woman who our primary researcher has been in love with since they met in school decades ago, but she had married someone else. Apparently at some point her husband had died (lowkey probably from the illness we did our research on because that would be my dramatic ass brain 😂) and later in the dream, the top exec and primary researcher are very clearly interested in each other, obvi 🙄 Can't have a good production without a romance...? 🤦‍♀️ My sincerest apologies.

We eventually present our research, but as we finish, my old friend shows up out of nowhere to tell the execs they can't listen to us because they did research, too and the kid died and "do they want to be responsible for ending lives?" And she starts on a whole rampage, but then one of the execs pipes up and says he knows that researcher and his work, and wasn't it a case study of the man's son? Because he was at his wit's end with what to do for his very ill son and wanted to end his suffering, so at the very least, the research is extremely biased, if not tainted. So my research team's work should obviously be taken more seriously 💁‍♀️ (Take that, rival team! 😎)

Almost immediately after dismissing my intruding old friend, we come across a very angry/ scary looking woman (in the water...? Like a siren or something, maybe? Idk don't ask me; it was only my dream... 😅) who I guess banished us all, boat included, back to the gates of hell. Much of our boat is destroyed in the travel, so everyone is in a bit of a panic trying to get out from the rubble and making sure we all made it. After climbing through the wreckage, the top exec finds the primary researcher to make sure he's okay because romance 🙄 And then we all, upon realizing what's happened, are collectively like: "Oh, come on, again?" 🔥🙃🔥

But Hades still wasn't letting us in. Not a very welcoming host 🙄 In the end, we found out that my old "friend" was actually the one who kept sending us down 🤦‍♀️ some friend smh my head