It's been a while since I last posted one of my dreams.

I've been a little preoccupied lately with the RSS for Charity thing, as well as the fact that my current contract is going to be coming to an end before too long, which means making a decision about work (do I go back to the corporate environment, or live off of my savings and write a book? I haven't decided yet...).

Anyway, I had a nice little dream last night. It was the first in weeks that didn't have to do with programming or blogging.

Here it is...

I was in some space ship in orbit around a planet in the middle of who-knows-where in the universe. Carl Sagan was with me, and we were looking at a map of the planet's surface.

The planet had been colonized at some point in time, and the purpose of this visit was to see how things were going. You know, say "hi" and all that.

Looking at the map, I got the feeling that something wasn't going too well. The first indication of trouble was that there wasn't a sign of life anywhere on the planet - It was nothing but rolling black hills for miles.

I decided to head on down to the planet's surface (is it me, or is this starting to sound like a cross between Aliens and Star Trek?). When I got there, I saw that the land was a charred mess.

The scenery was composed of small hills which were covered in carbon. There wasn't anything else there.

I started scratching away at some of the carbon. It took quite some time, but I eventually managed to claw away enough to see what was underneath.

What I found surprised me.

Beneath much of the black sooty crap was something that looked like amber, but flecked with gold. In fact, "flecked" probably isn't the right word - There were nuggets of the stuff everywhere.

It looked like the planet had been bleeding sap, and that a bunch of gold had been pushed out with it.

I thought the scene was a little weird, so I headed back up to the ship.

Carl was hanging out at a computer, performing some kind of analysis of the composition of the planet's surface (who better to have on your planet-surface-analysis team than Carl Sagan?). What he had found confirmed that part of the surface was, in fact, covered with a strange substance that contained quite a bit of gold.

Mixed in with the strange substance, and in addition to the gold, was a gas of some sort. According to Carl Sagan, the gas was highly flammable.

Flammable gasses are freaky enough in their own right, but Carl had figured something else out: The soot covering the surface of the planet was composed of the carbonized remains of the people who used to live there.

The hypothesis, in the end, was that there was a great quantity of this freaky gas beneath the planet's surface, and that this gas had been pushing the weird goop up to the surface along with the gold.

When the people living on the planet discovered hardened pockets of the goopy stuff, they decided to mine it, which naturally meant taking to it with high-powered drills.

Well, everything probably went all right for a while, but when the first drill bit, heated from all the drilling it had been doing, hit the first pocket of this gas, it was all over - The heat of the drill bit ignited the gas and caused one of those "chain-reaction" explosions that only happen in bad sci-fi movies.

Bye-bye, planet.

Yup. You can tell I've been in a good mood this week.