The Pink Brains
The very beginning of this dream was a bit vague, but it picked up vividness immediately. The details of the appearance of my companion were noted during the scene at the door where I was pulling him through.
Begin: I was a young man with an older companion, a short, slightly overweight man with bushy hair. We were standing in a place where we could look out over a bay, and my thoughts were about changes to the landscape I found objectionable.
We went to a group of buildings constructed around a courtyard as in the Spanish style, but these buildings were not in that style. I examined the main building, a one story structure with unusual stonework. It was built of sandstone blocks, precisely cut to fit, but roughly finished on the outside. The courses were not straight, but in a shallow wave pattern. The color of the blocks was a light chocolate, with slight alteration of shade between successive courses. I thought this to be the work of one man of great talent.
We entered the building and found ourselves in a museum displaying the works of an ancient civilization. There was a large prismatic device I remember, which had a window in the top through which it displayed a globe of the world. Trough a window in the front it displayed a map of the heavens. There was some very clever mechanical trickery about this. I wondered if it could still be programmed to represent more modern information than was available when it was built. There were many other displays, but I don't remember them.
The interior of this museum was quite like any modern museum, fairly spacious with a minimum of clutter, giving each piece a good setting in which to be viewed. I recall the people about to have been normal humans, although there may have been some variation. The members of the sophisticated civilization being displayed were dressed in loose robes of pastel color. Some or all may have been bald.
I found a place where a small hole through a wall had been closed with a soft plastic plug. I stuck a sharp instrument through it and looked through the resulting hole. The room on the other side appeared to contain equipment far more sophisticated than the stuff on display.
We followed the wall around a corner and found an entrance, quite prominent like the elevator doors in a large office building, but set back a bit into an alcove. We had not noticed the doors before, and none of the people walking by seemed to be aware of them, nor did anyone try to go through them. these had something like a spell on them preventing anyone from noticing them who did not already know they must be there.
Further, when walking into the alcove I encountered a force causing me to lose interest in going that way, which became stronger as I got closer. Finally it became almost physical, like walking upstream in a fast flowing river. No-one not actually looking for the doors would notice them, and only someone with great determination could actually get through. My companion did not quite have the will power to get to the doors, but he got close enough so I could pull him to them. There was no lock.
Once through the door, I realized we had reached the heart of some fantastic entity, and had urgent reason to be there. None of the many people walking around took any notice of us, since we were there we must belong there.
I went quickly to where I knew the nerve center of the place was located, a small room with indicator lights and switches on the walls. Several of the highest rank of the people running the place were standing around the back wall, where most of the lights and controls were. I went directly to the left side wall. There I found what I wanted. Centered in the wall was a small dark gray panel outlined in silver with a couple of colored lights on it. In the center of the panel was a large, wide, black switch, much like a circuit breaker switch with a very short toggle. This, I knew, was the main shut-off, and I threw it.
At this moment, I realized everything was run by several gigantic pink brains in an underground vault. They were on pedestals with glass domes over them, and I knew I had just blown them out. There were explosions somewhere that rocked the building like a small earthquake. I expected to be immediately attacked by the people in the room, who knew something drastic had happened. I and my companion made some futile threats about how only we knew how to keep the place going now that the brains were blown, but they did not comprehend and ignored us.
We rushed into the outer room, which was a dimly lit computer center, more impressive than in even the most ambitious sci-fi movies. The installation was not only sophisticated, it was permanent, the control panels were set in marble in a marble building.
I went to a console and told the operator, a bald man, that computer #22 had to be blown because it was a pink brain disquised as a machine, so to find the code to do that. He did not question the instruction and found that by depressing buttons 1 and 5 simultaneously it would blow. He did this, and there were more muffled but building rocking explosions. I then told him to key in computer #21, which could run essential services with the brains gone. Computer #21 also shut down all the new brains being grown to replace the old ones when necessary, thus completing the destruction.
Someone had obviously planned for the possibility of having to destroy the brains, and for doing it fast without attracting a lot of attention, but I did not know who. What bothered me was that from the time I found out about the secret room, I could not figure out how I knew where to find the things I needed, or how I knew what had to be destroyed or started, or why it was so important. Knowledge would just appear when needed.
End.
It is probable that all knowledge of intent had been suppressed to make it possible to enter the area without detection by the brains. Information came forth as needed in response to cues. Either this, or someone was calling the shots from outside.