Dream Diary Entry recorded August 29, 2018

This dream was of a game, or museum, or science fiction show in which I was participating with one or two dozen people. It involved a couple of floors of a building that was also the inside of a spacecraft - it all depends on whether we were doing something real, or a simulation, and I don't remember that. At times, we were traveling over a landscape that seems to be a recurrent-dream representation of the North and South American continents, except that the dream version of Earth I've had lately has a very different landscape and features. South America, or what occupies the southern hemisphere directly below us, is more this mass of largely uninhabited land with strange features, almost like another planet. And as we explored it in the ship/simulation, there was an area of great concavity (not to be confused with, but possibly a memory of, David Foster Wallace's Great Concavity in "Infinite Jest") caused by, and containing, large meteoric stones that made the whole area alien.

The game part of it, or simulation, seems to have been an exercise of which the space travel was a part. After landing somewhere, we would go up and downstairs between two floors with banks of equipment and white banisters and partitions, but there was something wrong: a kind of Andromeda Strain sort of infestation had gotten loose. We strategize, and I participate so that we seem to be able to get well away from the infectious situation and, win or lose, we reset the game. Only it's designed, as we come to realize, so that the second time, when we've started over, and we're exploring upstairs and downstairs again, there's the infestation again. It's inescapable, seemingly, but deadly in real life only that it tells us we lost the game or failed the simulation again.