Sci-Fi Anthology

Had a weird dream last night. One of those dreams where I'm watching the action, but I'm not actually present in the dream. It was basically a series of short stories taking place on a giant space station/starship in the future. The ship didn't have any form that I could make out--it was so incredibly huge that whenever I saw an exterior view of it in the dream, my entire field of vision was filled with just a small portion of it. The ship was crewed by characters from Star Trek: The Next Generation and Babylon 5 (though I don't recall which of the B5 characters actually appeared in the dream).

The first story I remember was this tale about a small derelict ship that a Babylon 5 Starfury fighter rescues and brings aboard. The only survivors of the derelict were two women who were portrayed in my dream by Susan Sarandon and Sigourney Weaver. (I had watched a few minutes of The Hunger while waiting for Fox to stop airing all the endless post-post-football game analysis shows and show the Simpsons the previous evening, and I'd watched some of Alien Resurrection a few nights earlier, so that presumably explains their presence in the dream) All I remember is that it turned out they were actually dead, and their ship was really a ghost ship that's doomed to drift through space for eternity.

Then there was this part where Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer had submitted an essay as part of her application to become student class president aboard the ship. Her best friend--who sometimes was Oz, sometimes was Angel, and sometimes was Buffy--was sticking by her, giving her moral support while they wandered around the spaceship, waiting for Captain Picard and Commander Data to finish evaluating her essay. They liked it, she got appointed to the position of class president, and everyone was happy.

Finally, Star Trek's Wesley Crusher had come back to the ship after spending some time far away, where he'd had a crippling accident that left him having to use a wheelchair. He was having some kind of scientific discussion in the engine room with Captain Picard, Data, and a fish-headed alien guy, when the alien noticed that Wesley didn't cast a reflection in a mirror in the room. It turned out that the Wesley everyone was interacting with was actually a hologram. The real Wesley was actually much more horribly disfigured by the accident than he appeared, and he felt too uncomfortable about his disfigurement to reveal to his friends what had really happened to him. Everyone was sad. Then I started to think about how a hologram, being made of light, would certainly cast a reflection in a mirror. I realized I was dreaming, and woke up.

Speaking of silly sci-fi stories and Rusty's comment about PBS in the '70s, anyone remember this thing called Tomes & Talismans? It was this show about how to use the library thinly disguised as a sci-fi adventure serial, produced by ETV way back when. It was all about this librarian awoken from suspended animation who helps a bunch of kids and freedom fighters learn how to use the resources of an old abandoned library to discover the secrets to defeating the evil Earth-conquering Wipers. I vaguely remember being forced to watch it in school sometimes. They showed a marathon of it really late the other night on PBS, and I just couldn't turn away from it. Maybe it was the childhood nostalgia factor, combined with the overall cheesiness of how it took itself so seriously, and how they attempted to make regular interior shots look "futuristic" by just putting a few blinking lights on the wall and having silver-painted cardboard boxes lying around. I tried to stay up to finally see how it ended, but fell asleep shortly after they learned how to use the readers guide to find an article that could tell them whether their horse could track down a missing resistance member by his scent.