As I was telling my pal Mickey, the other night I had a rather cool dream in which I traveled with the first Doctor and a young Sarah Jane Smith. Shortly after arriving on a crumbling planet (presumably future Earth, though I don't recall the Doctor ever saying precisely where we were) not unlike the setting of "The Dalek Invasion of Earth", we determined that the Daleks (DALEKS!) were operating on the planet and were attempting to manufacture a Doomsday Device (TM) to destroy the world and take over the galaxy or effect some similarly grandiose and terrible outcome. In order to stop them, we had to locate the only surviving pretzel vendor in the area, as soft pretzels were apparently the only remaining substance with the proper texture and consistency to serve as wires in the Daleks' invention. It was even more imperative that we locate him before the Daleks did because he was so nice that he would give his sole remaining pretzel to anyone who simply asked for it -- and, if the Daleks themselves did not reach him first, whoever acquired the pretzel would be in grave danger. So after the Doctor informed us of these details from the interior of the black-and-white university building in which the TARDIS had landed, Sarah Jane and I ventured out into a Technicolor world in order to track down the vendor and thwart the Daleks' plans. Just as in many of the Hartnell serials, the Doctor was absent for most of the adventure.
In addition to the interiors of buildings being in black-and-white and the outdoors appearing in color -- which I admittedly did not notice during the dream -- some other quirky things happened that did cause me to take note. At one point, for example, I was hiding underneath a tarpaulin near the unfinished device when a Dalek saucer touched down nearby. As it did so, it first lowered landing gear consisting of a tripod, each leg of which had a wheel on the bottom. Then, after the wheels touched, the ship raised up from the ground again and the wheels rotated so that they were positioned parallel to the ground. After another light brush against the ground, the tripod legs folded inward and in half, such that the spacecraft now balanced on a shorter tripod. Wheels then emerged from the bends of the legs, at which point the Daleks' spacecraft rolled around the corner of a building and out of view. Given the way the tripod legs dangled loosely and the saucer jerked about as if suspended by a string, I was prompted to remark under my breath, "What a cheap and superfluous special effect." I mean really, weren't the Daleks already supposed to be on the planet?
And then there was the end of the dream, in which the Daleks exterminated some janitor guy who was with Sarah Jane before approaching the pretzel vendor and asking for a pretzel. I arrived just as it asked, but because -- apparently -- at some other point in the dream I had done a favor for the pretzel vendor without knowing it was him, the vendor chose to give me the last pretzel. At this point, facing certain extermination, I noticed that a crowd of hungry children had gathered around us... so I ducked into the crowd and began breaking off pieces of the pretzel for each of the children. I felt slightly guilty as I did so, though. While my actions were partly motivated by a desire to help the children, I also remained patently aware of the fact that, with me crouching, the kids effectively formed a shield that would prevent the Dalek from being able to shoot me as I made my way through the crowd and back to the school that housed the TARDIS. But now that I think about it, the Doctor was always endangering people on his adventures, so maybe that was par for the course in a "Doctor Who" adventure.
I woke up shortly afterwards, whereupon I went back to sleep and had a fragmented dream that included skateboarding, exploring an abandoned prison with a bunch of people I haven't seen in over a decades and whose names I'd be hard-pressed to remember in waking life, and drinking coffee in a roadside diner. Anyway, here's hoping that I have the opportunity to travel with the Doctor again in the near future!
Anyway, apparently Wesoteric behaves slightly differently than Scary-Crayon (possibly a function of some of the other plugins I'm using over there), so I had to do some additional tweaks to get the plugin working over here. It also means that you may encounter some SQL errors -- please let me know if you do so I can try to fix the code accordingly. Thanks!
