Part 1:

Sara had been there as like stage 2 after an earlier group (who were like official NASA astronauts) had done some local terraforming and now I was there with her. They had managed to make a relatively small area very hospitable, which as a side-effect created an outer zone of intermediate hospitality resembling a desert, with enough oxygen that a person could be out there and not immediately die, populated by people who wore crazy Mad-Max-style outfits and rode around on dinosaurse.

It seemed that I started my tour in this park (let's call it 'landing park') with lots of big trees (many of them had like 4-foot diameter trunks), which had been the first ones planted by the initial group. North of that was a big grassy space, like a normal park where you'd expect to see people throwing frisbees and having picnics, and beyond that was more trees and buildings.

We had an apartment north of that open area, which we walked to on some sidewalks along the east edge of the park. As we walked there there were some younger people on the sidewalk near us, and we were all making fun of Elon Musk for not having been the one to colonize this place (because it had actually been a NASA project).

I kept asking Sara questions about how it had been in the beginning. Was it already habitable when you got here? She told me that, no, the first group got things started but it was still pretty rough. The sky was still orange, the atmosphere wasn't breathable yet, and it had been hard to get stuff to grow. I had so many more questions. How did they get the first plants to grow? Do we expand it now by planting new trees at the edges?

We were at the apartment, which had electricity and running water and all that good stuff. I wanted to take a shower. I started asking Sara if she had helped build the water distribution system, too, but my incredulity about it made the shower disappear (it was replaced by a blank counter in front a south-facing window), and I didn't like that, so I decided to stop overthinking things because this dream was cool and I wanted to stay in it longer.

Under the apartment was a big room full of people working on computers, which I thought was very silly. Why send people to Mars just to have them work stupid desk jobs? But also down here were all these big pipes with stuff flowing through them, which I decided was probably the water-recycling plant, where wastewater got cleaned so it could go back to people's showers, and extra minerals were extracted so they could be put to other use. I suggested adding some filters..

Later I was back at that park with Sara, looking around, expecting to see some Martian desert in the distance, but there were trees as far as I could see in every direction. Sara's group had made a log of progress on the afforestation project.

I was curious about the bubble of oxygen that we seemed to have, and if the reason there were so many big trees were that the trees helped hold that bubble in place, and also about the outer realm inhabited by the dinosaur-riding people (this was a thing which I was vaguely aware of). What kind of plants grew there? What kind of equipment did people need to survive? Sara confirmed about the trees holding the atmosphere down, and talked about how stupid it is that some companies (back on Earth) were allowed to dump waste gasses into the atmosphere that displaced more than 50% of the oxygen.

Intermission: My mind drifted to thoughs of a silly video game that seemed to be about bugs running along pipes. The ones I was running along were taking me through some underground utility tunnels in the Mars base, somewhere near or just northeast of our apartment. The thing about this game was that all the creatures were very silly looking, including myself.

One of the technologies that had made this all possible was a new space docking system, where the doors were these thin membranes, and once two spacecraft were docked together, they'd change the pressure so that the membrane would break and all the people waiting on the source side would be sucked into the destination module. This was a lot cheaper than making metal doors, I guess.

Part 2:

I had decided, maybe because Sara's adventure as a second-phase terraformer sounded so awesome, that I wanted to start a homestead out in the Martian boonies. This was a thing they were encouraging people to do. I had visions of how this would look, and in them I saw myself with a helmet with a shiny reflective visor, and behind me was my house dug into some rocks and lit up inside with different colored lamps. This looked very cool because the ambient light outside was dim and orange in comparison to the light from inside the house. Pictures we get from the rovers don't show that contrast, so looking at them gives you no idea how bright the sky is.

Those thoughts all happened to me while I was standing in a train station, on Mars, somewhere north of Landing Park but still well within the habitable zone, on my way to do just that. Sara's friend Rachel met me there and helped me carry my stuff, which there wasn't that much of (because luggage fees for interplanetary trips are too high). Heather and one of her workers were also with us. Niles from Frasier showed up, too.

We were then in a place with deep, fluffy snow. The place we were standing was kind of overgrown with bushes (which were covered in snow and that we were actually standing on top of) and surrounded on the east, south, and west by coniferous forest. To the north there was a retaining wall with a ramp along the front up and to the right. The snow was layered thick on everything, and it smelled really good, and I loved it. I loved how there were big trees everywhere on this terraformed part of Mars, and that there weren't a bunch of plows plowing all the snow away. Well, the ramp that we were walking on up to a road seemed to be plowed. At the top of the retaining wall to our left was a church with a guy out front who wanted to talk to us about Jesus or maybe just sell us something. But I didn't have time to talk because then we were catching a taxi.

After we got in (the whole big and growing group of us), the driver recognized one of us as a former heroin addict like himself, and was like "okay but I gotta scan you all to make sure there's no current heroin addicts," and he did, but he couldn't read me because of a force field, so I had to mess with a computer on my wrist to temprorary disable it. It made the requisite sound effects, which was important in case anyone watched this again later. Then we were good to go and he took us somewhere else.

That was the really cool part. Then there was some other stuff about video games and typical representations of Marian colonies. Some of them had domed greenhouses scattered around, or big trees (either inside or outside of the domes). Well at least that part was accurate; we do have big trees on Mars.

Then I was recalling the whole dream, thinking "wow that was a cool dream and I want to write it down", and running around trying to find my laptop. At one point we were in the apartment north of Landing Park on Mars, having sex in front of the bathroom mirror. Due to the low gravity (which I had not paid any attention to at any other point in the dream) I could pick Sara right up. And then were about to go visit my parents' down the road (which is on Earth—it seems I was getting a little confused about where I was at this point) so I was thinking I'd grab my laptop and take it along so that I could jot down notes while we were there.

I woke up for real at about 4AM and jotted down some of those notes on my computer.

Then I went back to sleep and had a dream in which Andrea was visiting, and we were at my parents house. I had taken Mabel and Alvin out on the bike path. It was getting dark and was time to bring them back; but couldn't grab both, so I grabbed Mabel. I futzed around trying to find my way home because bike bridge was a little bit of a maze (as it sometimes is in dreams. I tried to talk to some girl at the bridge, and/or Andrea back home, where I grabbed my water backpack and flashlight. By the time I got back to the bike path it had rained a lot and was dark, and the path had flooded! So I was swimming along with a couple friends saying "Alvin! Alvin!", and I shined my flashlight around at the bushes where I saw some wet chickens and cool flowers, but was not finding Alvin. Eventually I woke up, but decideed to go back into the dream and just find him, because it's a dream and I can do that. But I didn't do it convincingly enough, because then I forgot that I had 'found' him, and we ended up at this tunnel farther along the path and were closing the glass doors at the tunnel entrance so that the flood water, which was rising even higher due to some upstream dam having been opened, wouldn't come in. I hoped Alvin was okay.