After several repeated similar dream segments, I was walking down a staircase toward a door which said STUDY AREA on it. A chair was blocking it, but I moved the chair to go inside. There were a few people who looked familiar from prior dream segments working on computers.
me: "Okay, so who are you people. Why have I been coming back repeatedly after awakening, into this environment and running into you?"
bearded man: (pointing to another man) "We're working on your story. He's the writer. He doesn't care much for sweet foods -or- sweet stories, so this has been a doozy."
me: "If he's a writer and I'm a character, then this is like that 'Stranger Than Fiction' movie? So when you put down the pen I die? I don't really see how that works considering that we're talking right now."
writer: "You talking to us is weird--and weird seems to be the new normal around here. But no, that isn't how it works. You're just someone who has the best holography team in the business working for you. The maestro himself is over there."
He was gesturing at a large computer display which had a virtual being on it that looked at me, and then did a little morphing effects show. It was an animation reel showing cool stuff the computer could do.
me: (pointing around the room) "This is the best in the business? Dirty carpet, folding tables, four bearded guys with PCs?"
computer: "Don't hold me responsible for that particular bit of bad taste. These are just patterns from what's near in your project; it's convenient and recognizable. But if you'd like to have a 'Matrix moment', why not?"
The people vanished as the screen jumped off the computer and grew to wall size. It began showing plans for what looked like the surface of an aircraft carrier. A grid pattern started emerging from the floor, which it then remolded into being the carrier surface, with painted landing lines running down the center. I stopped to poke at the ground as it formed, and it was an unusual plastic-like material. I tugged bits of the surface of one area and chipped away to reveal an inner structure. What was underneath looked like plastic gears of different colors.
me: "Interesting. But the room before had carpet, and more varied textures. When you build it this way, from a model, can you still do ordinary materials? Or does everything come out like this colored 3-D printed plastic?"
computer: "Getting you to see what's there--uncontaminated by what you expect to be there--will be difficult, if not impossible. We don't use the physics you know because it's very outdated. Even slight improvements to yours would offer benefits. Maybe a simple example can help you extrapolate why we'd have moved on with much bigger changes. Let's talk about water for a moment."
On the wall near me, two showerheads appeared at about shoulder height. Water began to run out of them. The left one had a drain underneath it, while the right one was somehow just dropping the water and circulating it back up into the head.
computer: "Water systems you've seen always have a source and a drain. But what if you had something that was water-like but whose molecules had a special property--something akin to magnetism. So you could drop pure molecules out of a reservoir and then pull those pure molecules back in. No drain needed, see?"
I put my hand under the cycling showerhead, it felt like normal warm water.
me: "Okay well, that's pretty cool. And really this seems to offer a lot of creative possibilities. Seems like it could be fun to just make things materalize and rewrite physics on a whim. But I have a sort of bigger-picture question, if you don't mind."
The screen showed a little animation of a cartoon character and a telephone, and started playing a jingle about it being the "Questions for God Call-in Show".
cartoon: "Okay we're back! We just finished talking to Julia, and now we have another caller, his name is Brian. Okay caller, God speaking... you're on the air. What cosmic mystery can I solve for YOU today?"
Note
I don't remember the other name, but there was a bit of a flash of a preamble of someone with a silly question for God.
me: "You're making fun of me now. But my question is about all the dreams where I find myself in sort of broken horrific environments, or people attacking and injecting me with needles and such. Or scary bugs and my face melting. How does that fit in with any of this?"
Note
Some reporter-type people with notepads and cameras seemed to walk out of the wall, and looked at me perplexed.
reporter: "What do you mean about by 'bad environments' and attacks?"
Before I could explain what I meant, a bunch of uniformed people with impractically large guns (like from a cartoon or video game) came in and started shooting up the entire place.