Just woke up, kinda shaken up.
Had this kinda awful dream..it was about lab mice. I don't do animal testing myself, I never have and never will, I think its awful, the things that are done to animals in the name of science, so this isn't personal guilt showing, but I just had this dream.
I was working at a lab, where there were these mice, and they had grown somehow, due to something done there, to be fully sentient, where they could understand human language after continual exposure to hearing it, although not speak, and were as aware as we are, there was a girl there, youngish woman, or if not working there, someone sympathetic to the cause, I might have been a woman myself in the dream but not totally sure, either way, not important. I only ever got a slight sort of feeling, and only my hands showed in the dream, plus a from the back perspective of my head.
Anyhow these mice, they started making attempts to communicate, which is where this other girl comes in. And I'd gotten them out, when they started to protest about the tortures they were forced to undergo, the seeing their litter-mates 'sacrificed' (they didn't put it so euphemistically in the dream) and the awful things the scientists were doing to them all, only these few were able to communicate it, and this girl, another biologist, I remember us kneeling by a fan, and her doing me something like a tarot card reading, with these little engraved and painted chips. Signs like a knight, to signify protection, something dark, signifying 'covert', and something showing a struggle or fight.
Boss of the lab wanted to make sure all these particular mice were killed straight away, so if there was any truth in it, it could never get out, although he didn't believe it, and me and this 'other?' woman, we basically lifted them and went on the run, while this fucker was coming after them, and using these tarot-card like chips, once a day, to guide us, although it was her, the other person running away with these mice with me, who could read the meanings of them, whilst I seemed to have more insight into what the meanings meant in the specific situation, as it related to this escape. And all the while, these little white mice, they began to be able to use their claws to scratch sign-messages into soft substrates, and then to gnaw open a ballpoint pen and dip the claws in the ink and communicate in pictures, protesting the things they had been put through, and basically begging the two of us who had deserted the lab, losing our jobs for sure, in going towards getting them out to begin a legal fight for their and all lab animals rights, not to abandon them.
Then (IRL) the fucking doorbell rang and some courier came with a delivery for my old man, waking me up. Was a bit of a rough dream because of the content, but I didn't try to drag myself out of it, because it wasn't including the seizure 'danger signal' content that by now I have gotten to know is a time to wake up if I can, to drag my ass out of sleep no matter what, I was intending to stay asleep, although I was sleeping shallowly, enough that I could smell the food my old man was cooking, onions and meat being fried in the kitchen even while asleep. Was at that fine balance point where there was no pain or withdrawal effect from my pain meds but they had worn really low and caused a sort of hyper-REM rebound, having not had a morphine shot for a long while and only a bit of my top-up oxy, and when that happens it has a kinda neat side effect, intense, continued and very lucid dreaming, which I have to admit, is one of the really cool things, amongs good and bad points about being on the pain meds. That state, I can get into it by taking the morphine quite a while before sleeping, and at the last minute so to speak, while it'll still help me get to sleep, but wear off rapidly once I'm asleep, then take the shorter acting IR oxy just before drifting off to sleep. When it wears thin I'm more or less guaranteed to enter the hyper-REM continual, intense, coherent lucid dream state.
And that, its definitely one side effect that I'm not sorry to have. It's nice, kinda neat.
Wish I'd had a little more time before that dream was interrupted though, so I could have seen it through. Damned delivery drivers, I had to get up and answer the door, because it was right at the point this woman and myself, we'd just done this tarot cart-like thingy reading, crouching beside an industrial fan and throwing these chips down; not sure what they were, but looked very old, and made of I think, ivory or whalebone. Something like that from the texture. Although, there seemed no sense of guilt attached to using them/having them used on my behalf, since they felt in the dream to be very, very, very old indeed (I have an artifact like that myself, an antique book page-turner made either of ivory or whalebone, capped on one end with engraved silver, and with silver lettering inlaid along the blade-like end. Didn't buy it, rather, whilst doing a spot of dumpster-diving for copper pipe and lead, anything else valuable I got rather luckier than I ever dreamed possible, finding not mere copper and lead, but antique ivory or whalebone, and many, many artifacts of silver, many but not all hallmarked (there were a load of silver buttons, as in the kind that go on clothing, these aren't hallmarked but they did test positive for elemental metallic silver using a test based on roughening the surface of a button with sandpaper somewhere not obvious and that wouldn't present any decrement of cosmetic value; followed by testing the button, after taking the surface off a part to exclude being merely silver plating, and then moistening the roughened exposed lower surface and applying a stream of gaseous hydrogen sulfide (with great care, for H2S is, aside from in low concentrations being responsible for the foul rotten egg stench produced by..well..rotting eggs, hydrogen sulfide is a very, very poisonous gas, that is capable of killing a man with a single breath, or at lower levels, it temporarily paralyzes the olfactory nerve, disabling the sense of smell, which can lead the incautious to believe that the threat from the H2S is no more, whilst in fact one can simply not detect its foul smell any longer; its as deadly as cyanide gas and perhaps all the more insidious for not only being capable of a similarly near instant knockdown and incapacitation of the victim, leaving them unconsciousness instantly and death moments after, and its sneaky way of paralyzing the olfactory nerve and masking its presence.)
Very, very deadly stuff indeed, but on contact with metallic silver, a black deposit of silver sulfide is formed, similar to the tarnish that forms upon long wearing of silver jewellery against the skin, due to reaction with sulfur-containing amino-acids in proteins in and exuded by skin, sweat etc. or with age, and the buttons did indeed turn dark, where the surface had been stripped. Since those aren't hallmarked I doubt I could sell them as is. But would be worth more if dissolved in nitric acid and the acid boiled off to give AgNO3 then the silver nitrate would be worth more than the metal, and I have everything I need to make suffficient nitric acid to do that job and liters more conc. HNO3.
