Star Wars Invades My Dreams

I woke up this morning remembering a strange dream about a new Star Wars movie I'd seen. As is so often the case with my dreams, it took me a little time to both realize it was in fact a dream and to understand exactly what it was I had dreamed. In this case, the "new movie" I'd seen was an alternate take on Episode I, one in which Obi-Wan and his apprentice, Darth Vader, journeyed to the distant planet of Tattooine on some mission vital to the success of the "good guys" -- I don't distinctly recall who Obi-Wan and Vader worked for -- in the ongoing Clone Wars.

At some point in my dream, the two Jedi are traveling aboard a starship or are aboard a space station in the vicinity of Tattooine. They're then personally assailed by a bunch of guys wearing armor similar to Boba Fett's, except that it was a different color (blue?). In their fight against them, some guy helps them out and he turns out to be Anakin Skywalker, whom Obi-Wan senses is strong in the Force, despite his being a lowly navigator from Tattooine, the very planet they're going to. Obi-Wan asks Anakin to act as his guide, since he's never been to Tattooine and having a friendly local in his company would be useful. Vader counsels against this course of action, but Obi-Wan rebuffs him and we see Vader begin to seethe with resentment against Skywalker.

And that's most of what I remember. What's interesting to me is that what I remember of the dream appears to be a composite of events from the actual Episode I and events from issue #24 of the Marvel Star Wars comic. Like most dreams, it's not filled with original ideas so much as reworkings of ideas from other places, although, in this case, if I do say so myself, it's actually pretty clever. What impresses me about it in retrospect is how many little details from the 1977 film -- details the prequel films either ignored or forgot -- were worked into it, like Skywalker's being a "navigator on a spice freighter" and Darth Vader's being a separate character from Luke's father. I also vaguely recall there being a "scene" in my dream in which Anakin's brother, Owen, argues with him about helping Obi-Wan, saying something about how "the Clone Wars don't concern us here on Tattooine."

As I've said before, I've don't hate the Star Wars prequels the way that some fans do. I even think there are a lot of solid ideas in them (and my dream self would seem to agree). What bugs me most about them is how many things established in the original trilogy they either outright ignore or twist into such knots as to be unrecognizable. I mean, Star Wars -- Episode IV in Lucas speak -- establishes very few specific details about Luke's father or about Obi-Wan's younger days. Even assuming that, as Lucas developed it, Obi-Wan was shielding Luke from the truth in his conversations, there are too many discontinuities with what we see in the prequels for it to hang together as well as it should have or indeed could have, had a little more effort been made to do so.