Alien Invasion Dream - The great harvest
An intense dream I experienced is detailed below. Years passed in this dream, it was a lot to take in the next day. I’ve written it exactly as I lived it, so some parts may not make too much sense, dreams are funny that way. I worked hard to make it a fun read, hope you enjoy it!
For a summary TL;DR version, scroll to bottom. If you like the summary, please consider reading the long form (~15 min read). Thank you!
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Long description:
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I woke up in bed next to my wife. My eyes opened, but I couldn’t move, only blink and look around. It was the first time I’d ever experienced sleep paralysis, and the sudden powerlessness had me instantly on edge. I felt the mattress shift as my wife rolled out of bed. From the corner of my eye, I watched her get dressed, but something about the way she moved didn’t feel right, like she wasn’t really present. A moment later, I felt my own body start to move, though I wasn’t the one controlling it. I was getting dressed, too, following the same path my wife had taken. As we stepped into the hallway, my cat hissed at me; something she’d never done without reason. The look in her eyes wasn’t recognition, but fear. That’s when it hit me: we were being puppeteered. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t cry out, but each time my eyes met my wife’s, I blinked rapidly, hoping to get through to her. Nothing. She was in a trance, her face slack and expressionless. We pulled on our jackets and walked out the door, leaving it wide open behind us. And as we stepped into the street, I saw them; neighbors moving in perfect sync, lined up and trudging forward like lifeless sleepwalkers. Every one of them is trapped in the same eerie dance.
Mentally hijacked, I kept walking, now part of a growing crowd converging on the main street. Still unable to control anything but my eyes, I felt like a passenger trapped in some twisted amusement park ride. My body, nothing more than flesh and bone pushed forward by an invisible force. Dread sat heavy in my gut; nothing about this felt right. By now it was clear, everyone around me, every neighbor, stranger, passerby; they were all under the same spell. As our group reached a massive bridge and climbed higher, the scale of it hit me. The entire city was on the move, a sea of people heading in the same direction, all in sync, all walking to the same rhythm. The sound of thousands of footsteps hitting the pavement in perfect unison echoed through the air, an eerie, mechanical cadence like a nightmarish military march. We walked for what felt like over an hour, no breaks, no deviation, until we arrived in the heart of the city, where every single person began funneling into a massive community center, as if drawn to it by some shared command.
As I stepped into the community center, I lost sight of my wife in the crowd, but before I could even process it, my body guided me to a table where I was compelled to sit and take an IQ test, bubbling in answers with a number two pencil. Strangely, I still had just enough control to influence which bubbles I filled in, so I rushed through it as fast as I could, barely reading the questions. My only focus was getting it done so I could find her. Once finished, I carried the test to a machine operator who fed it into a scanner, and after a few seconds, without a word of explanation, I was directed to Lineup A, which fed into a large tent marked with a bold letter A over the door. As I moved forward, I started noticing the people around me, none of them looked like the type you’d expect to ace an IQ test. Glancing toward Lineup B, I caught sight of a different crowd, more alert, put-together, academic even, if that’s even a real thing or just a stereotype my brain latched onto. Either way, it didn’t sit right. Eventually, I was ushered into Tent A, where I was strapped into a reclining chair that looked like something from a dentist’s office, cold and clinical. All around me, others were strapped into similar setups, and one by one, blood was being drawn from them. Not just the standard vials, but bags and bags, as if they were draining us dry.
Someone came up and hooked me up to a blood-drawing machine. I closed my eyes, bracing myself for what was coming. Suddenly, I felt a sharp punch on my shoulder, and the draining sensation was abruptly cut off. “Hey! You! Eyeballs! Blink twice if you understand me!” I blinked twice, barely processing it. “Let me get you out of this trance, just give me a second.” For a split second, I saw her—she looked exactly like Jade from Beyond Good and Evil. She had a katana strapped to her back, a small backpack, and a headband holding her hair out of her face. Her fluorescent green lipstick popped against her athletic build, and she wore a sleeveless crop top under an open leather jacket, paired with jeans. Before I could even blink again, she dropped her bag, pulled out a syringe, and injected me with something. After packing everything back into her bag, she got to work. “Start wiggling your fingers, focus hard. I need to get you out of here before they notice!” Slowly, I began to move my fingers and sit up. She handed me a swig from a water canteen, then passed me a flask. “You’ll want this,” she said, “You’re gonna need a drink for what I’m about to tell you.”
I took a swig from the flask and jumped to my feet.
“Whoa, easy! Don’t try to walk yet. The drugs take a minute to fully kick in,” she said, holding out a hand to steady me.
“What did you give me, anyway?”
“We don’t have much time, so here’s the short version,” she said, lowering her voice. “An alien race released a virus, engineered to infect the entire population. Once everyone was exposed, they triggered it to take over our bodies and minds. But you... you’re different. They can’t control your mind.”
I stared at her, trying to process what I’d just heard.
“We developed a treatment,” she continued, “but it only works on about one in a hundred thousand. You're one of them. That’s why you’re still aware. I’d tell you more, but we’ve gotta move. Now.”
“I can’t leave yet, I have to find my wife,” I said, my voice tense.
“Can you stand? Good. Then follow me, we need to get out of this tent first. We’ll look for her, but we have to move fast. And if she’s not like you…” she hesitated, “there might not be anything we can do.”
I swallowed hard, nodding. “Alright. Let’s go.”
Kim led me to the edge of the tent, where we lifted the canvas wall and ducked out beneath it. We made our way toward Lineup B, hoping to spot my wife in the crowd, but she was nowhere to be seen. Without much of a plan, we slipped into Tent B. What we found stopped me cold. There she was, strapped down, her skull cut open, her brain completely removed. The sight hit me like a punch to the gut, and I doubled over, vomiting. Kim kept watch, but thankfully, none of the entranced people even flinched. They had no awareness of us, just like I’d been before. Turns out all the people carrying out orders were hollow, moving on strings. Kim grabbed my arm and pulled me away before I could break down. Outside, she asked if I knew anyplace we could hold up for the night, somewhere with guns preferably. I told her one of my neighbors used to hunt, and we made our way to his place, locking all the doors behind us. But before settling in, I told her I wasn’t going anywhere without my cat, Bailey. It was non-negotiable. I slipped back to grab her, along with some food, and when I returned, we finally settled in for the night, trying to catch our breath in a world that no longer made sense.
Kim and I finally had a moment to talk. That’s when I learned she’d actually seen some of the aliens up close. According to her, they were huge. Around seven feet tall, thin and lanky, with triangular heads. Their skin was a patchwork of textures: part grey, part a sickly mix of human-like flesh and other biological grafts. The human skin wasn’t natural, it looked like it had been surgically attached, like trophies or twisted augmentations. She explained that the brains being harvested were implanted onto the aliens’ shoulders, hooked into their nervous systems. The blood they were draining from people was being pumped directly to those brains, keeping the tissue alive. It was grotesque, but somehow functional. From what she and others had observed from a distance, it seemed like these brain grafts were making the aliens more intelligent, more capable. Beyond that, we didn’t know much. Just fragments. Guesses. But even that was enough to make my skin crawl.
The next day, we gathered supplies (guns, ammo, food), then set our sights on my friend’s cabin. His family owned an island with a water tower they’d built themselves, completely off-grid. It seemed like the perfect place to regroup and figure out our next move. Kim told me she had a way to reach others who’d helped develop the vaccine/treatment, and if the cabin turned out to be safer than their current location, she might be able to signal them to join us. I loaded Bailey into her carrier, and we hit the road. But when we arrived, what we found shattered me, my friend and his entire family were already dead. It was another gut punch, especially because I was so close to them. Kim helped me carry the bodies and bury them at the edge of a clearing by the cabin, where we made a simple but respectful gravesite. We ended up staying there for over a year, and during that time, Kim and I grew closer, comfort turned to trust, and trust eventually turned into something romantic.
Over time, Kim and I settled into a rhythm, growing comfortable with our strange new life. We ran side missions for the resistance, working in sync like we’d been doing it forever. But then, the voice started. I tried to ignore it, thinking maybe I was going crazy. It didn’t help that it sounded like a cartoonish Dracula impression, like something out of an old movie. One morning, the voice actually woke me up. “Good morning!” it said. I rolled out of bed and stepped outside, hoping that putting some distance between myself and the dream-like haze in my head would shut it up. “I vant to suck your blood! Ha, just kidding,” the voice continued, almost giddy. “But I do have some of your blood in me. Did you know I can see what you see? Hear what you hear? Took us a while, but by tracking where you stare at the stars and the landmarks around you, we finally pinpointed your location. You’ve been careful... but not careful enough. I’ll be seeing you soon.” That was it, I couldn’t take it anymore. I spoke aloud, even though I knew Kim might hear me talking to myself. “How are you seeing what I see?” I demanded. The voice laughed again, smooth and eerie. “Ah! You speak to me at last! It’s simple, really. Your blood is inside me. That’s how the link works. We use your human blood to keep those lovely brains we’ve harvested alive. And through that... we stay connected.”
The mystery Dracula voice in my head wouldn’t shut up, it rambled on about how it had been watching me for years and, disturbingly, how much it enjoyed the sex I’d had with Kim the night before. “Good job, by the vay!” it said with a laugh that sent a chill down my spine. Then it shifted topics as casually as flipping a channel, explaining how the harvested brains were enhancing their intelligence, letting them absorb our history and culture in an instant. But I couldn’t focus, something felt off. I looked toward the skyline and saw three alien crafts approaching fast. The voice was just a distraction. I bolted for the cabin and woke Kim, slamming the door behind me just as the crafts arrived. The windows exploded inward in a blast of glass and sound. My cat, who had only started trusting me six months ago, darted under the couch. For some reason, the thought of my cat not trusting me again hit me harder than the fact that we might be about to die. But the crafts never landed. Just as quickly as they appeared, they were gone again, vanishing into the horizon, leaving only silence behind. I stood there, stunned, trying to make sense of it, then turned to Kim and said I needed to check things out. But the moment I stepped outside, I heard him, not in my head this time, but out loud, standing somewhere nearby. The voice, the laugh, unmistakable. The Dracula voice... in person. I don’t know why, but I hadn’t brought a gun, just a large knife clenched in my hand, suddenly feeling way too small. In my head, I was thinking: “my cat will never trust me again!”
As I followed the sound of Dracula’s voice, I spotted his shadow stretching across the rocks, he was waiting there, taunting me like it was all a game. His head was triangular and strange, with a grotesquely oversized mouth full of cartoonishly large teeth, each one the size of my thumb. The thing looked like it could swallow a regulation basketball whole. Even without making a move, he radiated danger. His body was twisted with freakish augmentations, shirtless, wearing only black shorts and no shoes, and most disturbing of all, a human brain was grafted to his shoulder, pulsing faintly. Kim trailed behind me, unsure of what was happening. I didn’t give it much thought, I walked straight up to him and drove my knife into the shoulder-brain. Kim screamed, and Dracula just laughed, the sound deep and unsettling. My vision blurred as he calmly explained that because of our psychic link, killing his human brain meant I’d killed myself too. And just like that, everything collapsed. I woke up in my bed, stunned. A truly surreal moment to wake up.
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TL;DR:
I woke up paralyzed and trapped in a mass mind-control event, with my wife, myself and neighbors moving like puppets. At a community center, I was separated and nearly drained of blood before being rescued by a woman who looked like Jade from Beyond Good and Evil. She revealed aliens were using a virus to control humans and harvest brains to enhance themselves. I was one of the rare people who was partially immune. After discovering my wife had already been harvested, we fled to a remote cabin, grew close, and joined the resistance. Eventually, a Dracula-voiced alien tracking me through a psychic blood link arrived. I stabbed the brain graft on his shoulder, only to realize it was tied to me and as I began to die, I woke up. Throughout the dream, I was also unnecessarily worried about my cat, bringing her along the whole time I could.
