I'm on a TV show set on a small spaceship, no bigger inside than a bus. "Cramped setting" I think, "for an entire TV series." But we're not trapped in it every week; at the moment we're docked in the asteroid belt at a modest habitat inside a rock--a small mine. I visit the habitat on business. When I return, I get a good look at our ship from the dock. It looks oddly like a small boat, though secured by a pudgy gold snake instead of a rope--the translucent, low-pressure boarding tube. From this small porthole I can't see much of the station.

The boat bears effigies of cartoon characters from Peanuts: the bowsprit is Snoopy, and the stern has Lucy at the rudder. Oddly, I know now the entire pressurized living space is inside Lucy. EVEN MORE cramped--she doesn't look much bigger than a human body! Surely my sense of scale is off--she and the boat must be far bigger than they seem. No yardsticks in space.

A shadowy figure swims up the tube--it's that woman who's been trying to sneak aboard! Back again. I hurry into the tube to catch her.

And the sleepers dream. Not alone--in teams of six to ten. I get pulled into one shared dream; they're on a sailing ship sailing a sea of... water, I guess. It seems rosy--not bloody, but pink not blue. Barbie-ish. Are they the ones planning our course through the galactic sea?

But even in their sleep, the team senses something wrong. The onboard system letting them dream together isn't digital but biological, and its metabolism is off somehow. I'm awake, I should correct it, but I don't know what's wrong. Run diagnostics...

...and wake at 4 AM to find I feel hot, and my mouth is dry as leather. Severe dehydration! As I write down the dream, sip patiently at a big mug of water (too much in one gulp can make me sick), and slowly start to feel better.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Peanuts: recently read some cartoonists' essays on how this midcentury comic strip tackled feelings others wouldn't--insecurity, sadness, inferiority, loneliness, failure. Is this dream about an issue where I feel helpless, a failure? What? Well, I woke up sick...
• Snoopy at the bow: playful, creative daydreamer--and one of the things he daydreams is being a pilot.
• Lucy at the rudder: cunning, selfish cynic.
• Body of vessel between these extremes: Charlie Brown? Unassertive, insecure.
• Steer by dreams into the unknown: advanced dreamwork! Hints that this dream, though brief by my standards, is important.
• Dreamers troubled by metabolic imbalance: my body feels off. I've been having hot flashes; sweat until I dehdrate.
• Asteroid mine: minerals, metals? Blood levels of electrolytes?
• ACTION: try extra water at bedtime; dehydration's disrupting sleep. And experiment with upping mineral supplements.
• TV show set in space, small ship, warp drive: ???

My housemate Alder stumbles onto a free teaser on the streaming platform Hulu--the pilot show of a new Star Trek series, Starfleet Academy. Opens not in the Academy on Earth, in San Francisco (where I live) but with an interstellar journey on a small, fast ship...no bigger than Starship Snoopy.

Now I reconsider why my dream picked Snoopy as the voyage's guide. Was the dream trying to alert me it was snooping ahead... in spacetime?

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