Cinematic dream

A few interposing events occurred and then...

A destroyer of the Empire. (Star Wars. The Dark Side. "I" am nearly absent from this dream, except for later.) The destroyer is a large, spherical ship, bathed in a thin, atmosphere-like halo. Its commander is a grim man, subordinate only to the Emperor, probably. He notices a disturbance in the Force, which disturbs him. Something is not right in the progression of the Dark Side. He instantly demands that one of the sergeants or technicians of the destroyer bring him the commander of another vessel. Within moments the other's face is present in some sort of hologram. (I notice, as the observer of this movie-like dream, how quickly and efficiently this high commander's order was executed.) The commander looks at the other, who looks up, mildly surprised, but unalarmed -- how could he be alarmed, when his being is bent so completely to the will of the Empire? The commander realizes that in feeling a disturbance so far away, he attributed responsibility to this far-off commander -- but actually the responsibility lies elsewhere, in the vicinity of the other but not with him. With a motion of his hand, the four fingers slightly curled together, as if he were pushing aside a sliding screen, the commander pushes off the other commander from the projection or hologram or whatever it is, to the true source of the disturbance.

A sweating, smallish, large-nosed head turns around on lumpy shoulders and faces the commander. This seems to be the captain of a smaller vessel, in the previous one's fleet. But he has some reasonably important responsibility, and he is not discharging it well. He faces the commander, sweating, nervous, and wonders in some whining, groveling, yet slightly irritated way what the commander wishes of him. As the commander questions , interrogates him, this minor captain grows fearful, but his fear is quickly outpaced by a surge of anger and as this happens, the scene changes, and the captain begins to grow in size. His body becomes tall, tall, his shoulders spread, but his head remains small, atop his muscled torso like a pinched raison atop a giant swollen grape, and he towers over the commander on a high bluff, a bluff on the green and blue planet the fleet was passing near, why I do not know, but it is the captain's world. And he stands, six or seven times the height of the commander, who looks up at him seemingly unperturbed, and the dream-view pans way back, and I can see the captain, towering over the commander, a giant, the two silhouetted on the bluff, overlooking an ocean of this planet.

Then the view pans back in, and the once-captain-now-giant's head is now proportional in size to his body. It is rounded, of carved stone, like some sort of Aztek or Eastern carving, but not too baroque. As the dream-view takes this in, the giant pushes his hands against his head, and lifts it from his shoulders. Its bottom, where the neck would be, is a tube of sorts, ejecting steam at a ferocious rate. The giant raises his head high, and casts it down upon the commander, who is instantly smushed beneath the weight of the stone head, which buries itself some five feet or so into the earth, but is yet less than halfway submerged. A moment of peace and quiet. A great commander of the Empire has been flattened.

Yet a moment later, the dream-view switches, to a ridgeline near to the bluff, or near at least in giant distance. Heads pop up in succession from the sandy soil, in a pretty evenly spaced row, from the ridge's crest, and each one with open eyes says, "Uh-oh." The Empire will not let its commander fall so easily. The Empire does not brook rebellion. The giants tithed one of their own to the Empire, in return for peaceful slumber, but he could take no more of that servitude.

The giants climb from the sandy rocky earth of that ridge. Some carry weapons, tritons and swords, which they swing over their shoulders as all the giants grimly begin to walk to the bluff where the conflict occurred. The commander, and the other giant, and the giant's hurled head, are all gone from there. There is only a bare bluff, overlooking the ocean below. The giants assemble, probably some forty or fifty, in a grim line looking out to the ocean and sky before them. They do not wait for long before the spherical vessel of the commander approaches from the horizon, and then is before them. It opens up, unfolding in a way, at the ledge of the bluff, hovering over the water below, and the commander steps out. The dream is vague as to whether this is the same commander reconstituted, or simply another indistinguishable from the first. Here he is. He steps among the giants, starting with the ones to the right hand side (the commander's left). I return to the dream. I am the rightmost giant. (I actually returned as the ship unfolded before us.) As the ship was approaching, I had looked to my left and seen us all, assembled. My race. Four or five down, to my left, was a giant who was not so great as the rest of us, being perhaps only twenty feet tall or so, and surrounding by lithe, slender trees in a narrow radius about him, which followed him wherever he went, part of him. The healer. But that was before the commander's arrival. Now he is here, and he brings with him the second of the giants to serve, this one fully assimilated into the Dark Side (though I do not think of it in those words at this point in the dream -- fully assimilated into ... Empire, evil, servitude), and so greatly empowered. Now there is only he, and not the commander -- the dream has fused them or perhaps the commander has receded. He approaches me, and asks to see my staff. He examines it, and comments approvingly on its making. I do not now remember the details of its making, but I think perhaps it had a blue glyph at some point along its length, and was involved in the summoning of storms and the molding of rains. Then with a furious motion he slammed it into the earth, at an oblique angle to its length, and his personality was brought to bear upon it in full. It survives, and he says something to the effect that he is surprised that it has, and that his action did not summon more of its effect, as in lightning or storms. He says that he knows of only one person who could make a staff so strong, and I know flickeringly that he is thinking of Gandalf. He returns it to me, and moves to the next giant, and examines his staff. I do not remember the details of this one, but molded into one of its ends or perhaps into its shank is a thick, curving piece of cured hide, hard and strong -- and he says something to the effect of how it was a good pig that had had that hide. And so forth, down the next few. And the other giants to my left, stupid, are pleased with themselves, for they are reminded of our strength, and complemented by the Empire, and think we might be left alone, and even if we are not, we are strong. But the commander is back, watching his subordinate (whose flesh I now remember was like gray amber, somewhat translucent) examine our staves, quietly scornful and malignant. And he is near to me, watching, and I say to him, "Lord, do not kill us." I know his power, and I do not wish my race to die.
"Why should I not?" says he.
"We are noble."
"How so?" says he. And I know that he is not concerned with nobility, but utility, and though I know we are noble, there is little answer to his question, and I stumble for words. Finally I say, "We can make you..." and point around us at the thick, angled structure that has come to surround us, all of orange-brown beams, polished and well-hewn, seemingly the interior of his command chamber from the ship. For it is we giants who made the paneling of this chamber.

Even as I say it I know this is not enough, it is transparently not enough, self-evidently not enough, and I stop talking. At the end of the chamber there is a gate, and behind the gate is a beast which the commander knows is a slayer, a slayer of all that it confronts, of giants too. I think it is some sort of horse, but I am not sure, and the uncertainty adds to my apprehension. I am a giant, and do not fear, exactly. But my apprehension is great. And the other giants see that this is happened, and know that we are about to be destroyed, and silently turn to face the gate before us. The commander says, "Lift the gate!" and the gates are raised, and tumbling forth are two great aurochs-like black bull beasts, horns wide, hide like black arthropodal cuticle, thick, near-impervious, taller by many times even than us, hurtling at us, bowling us over, sweeping us over the edge of the great abyss that is now behind us. I manage to jump over the horns of the one attacking me, and below its enraged yet featureless black eyes there is no mouth, only the chittering of spider-like feeding parts clacking madly together. I am bouncing and flailing atop its head, knowing that I must not fall beneath, to where those mouth parts slice madly together, and beneath which I believe are the still more horrible spider-like legs of the beasts. My giants are killed and falling, and the dream-view departs me, panning out briefly, to reveal that many of us have also been shot from behind, in the back, from the ship -- some wearing armor that excretes a yellow ooze where the shots penetrated. In some cases I can see that the armor did its job, and those of my fellows were not slain, yet even now they are tumbling back into the abyss, beneath the two great beasts. And back now to my own body, I manage to grab a horn by its base and sink one of my thumbs (for we are giants, and not weak) through the stony cuticle of one of the beast's eyes into the ichor beneath, and it is enraged and hurt, but unless I can blind the beast by destroying its other eye, and unless my fellow giants can do the same, we are doomed, and even then the flailing of the beasts would be sufficient to kill us all, and even so we are falling into a great abyss.

And I wake up.

Nearly instantly astonished by the vividness of the narrative, going over it in my mind, wondering at it. My pulse is elevated. It's ~5:20 in the morning. One thing that's strange about it is how seamlessly Star Wars is woven into it (it took me until this writing to realize that Gandalf is not of Star Wars), and I wonder if this collective mythology idea of Lucas and what's-his-name Joseph Campbell and maybe even Jung (I'm far outside what I know about in saying his name) might have some merit. But that's a quick thought and I'm on to the question of interpretation, which is unanswerable.

I've had dreams with this sort of narrative structure, with plot and denouement and a cast of characters and backstory, and sometimes a third-person viewpoint. I'd say I have such a dream that I can remember about every week or two. I call these 'cinematic dreams'. This may have been the most intense and vivid I've ever had.