I am sure this dream was influenced by reading the writing of iceowl about Antarctica, though I have had my own obsession with that continent for a few years now.
My friends and I were travelling to Antarctica. It was a school trip - my friends were still in school, and I was the age I am now, supervising them along with our teachers. We were totally unprepared for the trip - teenage boys trudging through the cracking crust of the snow in thin grey school trousers and shirts, shivering. We'd started off in a strange city at night, and my friends had been trying to persuade me to sneak out of the guest house and go drinking with them. I'd refused, because I said that I was responsible for them.
Unfortunately this meant that for the rest of the dream I was on the 'outside' of my friends, having lost their trust in some important psychic sense. We were trekking across a large, open expanse of windblown ice and snow, white dust swirling in the wind, the ground shimmering with blue streaks, and I was pushing them on to get to a shack where we could shelter. One of them started fighting me, angry that I was ordering him about. He was a lot bigger than me, but I tripped him over on to the snow and then put him in an arm lock until he gave up. I realized around this time that Lindsay was in the group, and it made me worried, because I knew I could take care of myself but now I would have to watch out for her too - not just because of the ice, but because I was making enemies who might try to get at her.
We were pushing for the South Pole. The closer we got, the stranger everything became - I had given up trying to supervise my friends, and we were all walking alone through the ice storms. Lindsay and I walked together through a network of ice caves with glowing walls, which seemed to be some kind of hospital, and there had been a terrible disaster in which many people had been killed. In one cavern, a nurse was trying to resuscitate a woman who was nothing but a severed head and part of a shoulder and arm. Her eyes stared straight ahead and her hair shook. On another slab, another woman's head stared at us, blinking. The nurse shoved it away, and it fell backwards into a snowdrift, blinking frantically in protest. Bloodied sheets of plastic and pieces of human matter covered the snow all around. We ran the rest of the way through the cave, trying not to freak out.
Later we found a snowmobile, and started skidding through the mountain ranges, crossing a deep crevasse using a ramshackle wooden bridge. I didn't know how much longer this would take, and I seemed to be immune to hunger and thirst and cold, but as we crossed the bridge I realized that I couldn't finish my journey because I was going to be late for work. Reluctantly, I made myself wake up and get out of bed.