Having narrative dreams again.

[bladespark]

The entire thing was set on a volcanic island with a double-cone, the cone-inside-cone that some of them get. The outer cone was steep and rocky and mostly covered in scrub where it wasn't just bare. One side was higher than the other, making a natural entrance on the lower side. Inside there was a thick jungle, and a tangle of lava tubes and odd stone formations, and a river flowing out from somewhere at the base of the second cone. And then inside the second cone was a series of pools, all interconnected, some above ground and some only below, all fed by a spring deep down at the base.

A tiny village of huts was on the shore next to the path leading in, and a little clan of people lived there, lead by a semi-immortal leader, but with ordinary and very poor members otherwise, who fished in the tide pools on the less steep side for survival.

Somehow this leader had passed away, and one of his sons was meant to succeed him. This was chosen not by birth order, or by any sort of vote, but by a quest to become immortal as a chief should be. I was one of these sons. I was the skinny, scholarly one, and my brother was the incredibly buff, surf-god type, I guess from all the fishing? I remember thinking he was hot, lol. We both had girlfriends, but apparently poly was okay, because I had a boyfriend too.

I left them to go in search of this immortality, and I had a feeling it would be at the volcano's heart. The dream was just a semi-nonsense of hiking for a while, with the "fear of heights" dream stuff I sometimes get where I keep running into cliffs I need to climb or narrow hogsback formations I have to balance-beam along, etc.

Eventually, though, I reached the spring at the heart of the volcano. I thought it might have something to do with the immortality, so I had a drink. I didn't feel different. Then I jumped in. (Or fell in? I forget) and suddenly I knew I was god-like and couldn't be killed.

This was a very euphoric feeling. Then my brother arrived, all "Guess the best man won." But I told him that hey, why can't we both be near immortals? I climbed out and invited him to hop on it. He did, and it made him immortal too. He was all, "Damn, my girlfriend needs in on this, I thought it would only work for one person!" So we went back to the village to get our partners. This part became a little disjointed, and I know there's something in there I'm forgetting, but I'm pretty sure my brother got his girl to the spring fine, but somehow I couldn't go with my partners, they went together?

But there was a meteor strike right as they were in the water, and it sort of shattered everything, including somehow them. I went there, and saw the spring was still there, but I was sure they'd be dead. I found all these pieces. I remember in the dream, they were like shattered safety glass, somehow, little squares, very solid and not at all organic, but I knew they were my lovers.

I couldn't find all of them, though. So I thought maybe I could collect enough of both of them to make one person? And if I put them into the spring, maybe they'd come to life? So I did, and got an androgynous person who was indeed both of them, and had partial memories of both. I apologized to them for messing everything up so badly, but they seemed very serene about it, they didn't mind at all. They loved each other and me, and being one and still being with me meant it was fine. And also they were sure they could look for more pieces and gain more memories. So we all went diving in the water, looking for more pieces.

And meanwhile lots of other villagers started turning up. I think my brother maybe had decided to tell them the immortality worked on more than just one chief. Not sure, maybe they were just there, as things happen in dreams.

So they all got immortal, and we were all swimming around, celebrating, (this sequence was actually very, very long, and there was a bit with our now non-binary lover becoming a kind of messiah figure to everyone else, and lots about individual members getting young again, and couples seeing each other as they'd been when they fell in love, and somebody seeing their grandmother who now looked just like her. It was all very sweet and positive!) Then suddenly something came down out of the sky and hit the water. It was a small air-to-ground missile, like a modern-ish sort of weapon. My brother grabbed it, and being both the muscular surf-god and nearly an actual god, flung it back up into the sky, where it exploded.

This was a sign the island was being invaded by the British.

Except they weren't quite our world's British? Like... Apparently there had been some kind of apocalypse that resulted in them all being stunted and/or mutated just a little? They were using really young soldiers for most of the fighting, because they were still healthy, and everybody older was all weird and barely human.

The first wave of soliders they sent, scouts and such, then, had to get into the spring to come after us, and this cured them of their mutations. They'd been told they and us were a different species, I think, and on seeing they were the same species as us, and looked like us, and had been lied to, all the scouts joined us, including their leader, who was a cranky old man, who was made young by the spring.

We retreated to the lava tube caves, even though that meant leaving the spring water, but they kept firing missiles, and we didn't want them to blow up the spring if my brother could throw all the missiles away before they went off. (I know this is not how missiles work. Nevertheless.)

They found a scrap of beach on the far side, where they could advance through the caves, and made a landing. We were fighting back, but they had guns and we only had hand weapons, and we'd left the spring, so we could be killed. But not permanently, and of course we weren't mutants and had some of them on our side, so we were winning.

We'd somehow gotten rid of the air cover with the missiles, so we were falling back to the spring anyway, when the Nazis showed up.

Not modern bigots, literally uniformed WWII German Nazis. Only, er, post-apocalyptic. But they were less mutated, I guess probably eugenics or something. The British commander, a woman who was also less mutated, was super admiring towards them, and basically fawned all over the Nazi leader, looking for approval as a pure, less-mutated person. She joined her forces to his for a full-scale invasion via the level beach were the village stood. They razed the village, but we managed to fight from the stream waters that ran from the spring, and I guess those were healing once you were immortal.

We also managed to get a bunch of the Nazis' modern guns off the first ones we took down, and then we dared get out of the water and carry the fight to them. We completely massacred them and drove them into full, panicked retreat.

I woke up about this point, thought "Wow, that was weird. And nonsensical, for all it had a narrative." Then I fell back asleep and I guess my brain thought the story needed revising, because I dreamed it again, but different. Same island. Same spring. But this time I was part of a small group of WWII British soldiers preparing to set up a temporary naval base on the island, who had just discovered evidence that a similar group of WWI soldiers had been somehow abandoned on the island in the early war years. They found the remains of the original landing-beach base, along with one native hut nearby, where it looked like six native adults had been living.

I didn't finish this dream out, but I knew that as these newcomers explored, they were going to find out that the other soldiers were still there, and still all seemed to be young, because of course they'd found the immortality spring. Not only that, the population would have grown, as the six people living there were a family, two parents, four kids, and they'd been there for possibly centuries, being immortal, but without any population growth, because of course that'd require incest. Now with some new blood, there would be a few kids.

So anyhow, the WWII-era expedition set off along a path that led into the interior crater jungle, (and ran into a domesticated donkey, who was friendly and wanted to lick my POV soldier) and eventually found a village that was obviously in current use, but completely empty. It had a tiny cemetery next to it, but only three crosses were there. (Somehow I guess three of the WWI soldiers managed to die before reaching the spring.)

They continued on, and I knew they were going to find everybody having an immortality renewal ceremony at the spring, but I woke up before we got that far.