A dream - fantabulous imagery

You ever wake up from a dream, and just lie there for a moment, and go WOW over and over in your mind?  Eventually saying it out loud?  And you're still saying it ten minutes later, until finally you have to write the whole thing up?

I worked in some kind of lab, like a Frankenstein lab with three other people... but it was more modern than crazy.  Just kind of haphazard, but definitely not all in order.  Maybe even kind of dangerous.  There was this tall nuclear fusor standing in the back room, which was constantly giving off heat.  I wondered about it, and asked the eccentric old scientist who was responsible for it if it was dangerous, and he just shrugged.  The walls of the entire lab were made of concrete and cinder blocks though, so as long as I wasn't near it, I figured I wouldn't get slowly fried.  There was also a large swimming pool in one room, and the old guy was trying to change the water so that it had healing properties.  With the radiation from the fusor. 

I came to work one day and the tall radiation machine had been moved into the main lab.  I wasn't sure how much I liked the idea of working around it all day, every day, slowly soaking up neutrons.  I asked the old scientist why he'd done that, and he said, "So I can charge my cell phone.  Check it out."  I looked at it, and he'd attached his phone to it. 

"Does it really charge like that?"

"Yup, just soaks up the neutrons."  I thought about sticking my cell phone to it to see if really worked, but I didn't want to soak up the neutrons.

Apparently we were also an operating room, because a sick man came in and we operated on him.  We had him hooked up to all kinds of pumps and tubes, and his heart monitor was beeping away.  We had high hopes that we could save him, but then his blood started to clot.  I watched the tubes turn purple with clotted blood, and one of us cried, "It's an embolism!"  We did frantic things to him, but then a big purple bubble welled up on his abdomen and then surged through one of of the tubes, and the heart monitor stuttered and flatlined.  Well, I guess he died.

Then the old coot who had been irradiating the pool jumped into it and started screaming, "It works!  It works!"  I thought he meant to revive the dead patient.  I was worried that the water was irradiated and deadly, but he seemed so joyous that I jumped in too.  We all jumped in.  The water started to flow very fast, and we were washed outside into the street, which was flooded.  I swam over to the curb and dog paddled there, holding onto it.  I turned and saw the most spectacular sight of my life.

A large thunderhead covered a third of the western sky, and the sun was setting behind it.  It looked like a gigantic fireball.  Above, where the sky was clear, Venus and Jupiter were in conjunction, forming an almost single star, blazing in its intensity.  Below, I could barely discern another planet and its moon as a gray smear.  If I shifted my vision to the left, I could make them out.  As the sun set and the clouds moved, the lighting behind and inside the clouds would shift, patterns of orange and white light would coruscate through the clouds, parts of blue sky would become briefly visible, and rays of sunlight would emerge and fade, emerge and fade.  It was glorious joy, watching it.  My colleagues swam over, and we all turned to behold the sight.  I wanted to say that it looked like a monstrous explosion.

Instead I said, "It looks like a gigantic fireball.  Like the western sky is on fire, and the explosion is frozen in time."

The crazy old man handed me a fifth of some kind of liquor.  He handed bottles to my other colleagues.  He lifted his in a toast.  We all drank from our bottles, as a salute to the glorious evening.

Then the thunderhead seemed to well with light, and it turned white, and it was as if a wind blew across it, because vapor writhed and boiled for a few seconds, and then blew away and vanished, leaving it looking even more clear and pristine.  Then the blue and orange colors of the sky behind it began to shift.  I looked up at the conjunction, and the two planets were circling each other and dancing.  I looked at the faces of my friends, and they were shifting, moving like puzzle pieces.  I began to grow suspicious.

"What was in that bottle?  Did you dose us, you asshole?"

The crazy one smiled and didn't say anything.

"He dosed us!  Are we gonna trip tonight?  He dosed us!"

"Yup, I dosed us.  Yup, we're gonna trip!"

I thought that I might be afraid, but the tension and anxiety never coalesced.  I resigned myself to an insane evening with my insane colleagues.  We all smiled.