The Human dream became the Martian dream as we slept on our Mars-bound voyage. We could see colonies amidst landscapes pristine, teeming with strange Martian plants discovered post-bloom.

The Martians were adorned with ivory carvings and had surrounded themselves with esoteric paintings of marauding faces. They spoke in strange tongues, switching between Martian and another almost incomprehensibly clandestine tongue of barbaric intonation. Although they clutched sharp, ivory spears with a fierce resolve, they remained docile in our presence, and told us of the vivid dreams they had engaged in as a group prior to our arrival; abstract dreams, tinged with fragmented images of insemination and visitation by the Mars Moth-Man— he who was oil-funded and had been delivering concrete messages to the people of Mars ever since the first settlers had arrived in the distant past.

But, once we had truly set foot upon Mars— from outside the strange realm of dreams which lives solely within our collective mind's eye— we could not have foretold that our shared dream was revealed to be a sprawling wasteland of infertile soil.