Very interesting dream I already forgot most of the details of. You are encouraged to use this as a writing prompt. This was probably inspired by thinking about The Edge Chronicles and also listening to Of Monsters and Men.
But there were people who lived above the normal levels of atmosphere because they were all lighter than, well, the normal levels of atmosphere.
They were trying to escape some natural disaster that had happened to one of their floating cities, and people on the other side of the planet had offered them sanctuary, but the problem was, to get over there they had to go up out of the atmosphere entirely and into space, and then come back down.
I don't remember why this was a rule but going straight over was not an option and would get everyone killed. Possibly because of giant air predators or parasites that would attack the ship.
Well, they went up into space, but then they got grabbed by some space-whale's gravity and got pulled further away from the planet, further than their ship was designed to handle, or that their fuel could carry them back from.
Eventually the whale noticed them orbiting it, got annoyed, and left them behind inside a....hmmmmm....sentient wormhole? I think?
There were clusters of them free-floating in space and the spacewhales used them as like, scratching posts to get rid of unwanted satelites by flying through them. The whales were big enough to avoid being pulled in, but anything caught by their gravity instead got pulled into one of the wormholes.
The wormholes were sentient like I said, with each individual mouth having at least one personality each, and then they each led to a communal dimension or stomach where everything they ate was digested (not in any like, violent sense of the term, just that as the materials naturally degraded over time the wormholes absorbed them. They didn't have stomach acid or anything like that. There was actually a whole ecosystem inside them that was unique to each colony) and the nutrients shared equally among those in the colony.
Each cluster was its own colony, and by botanical terms one single individual. They needed to be within a certain distance of two other separate colonies to produce new colonies. They accomplished this by, like pawpaw (Asimina triloba) trees, forming new mouths every year, so the colony itself got bigger, so they could "reach" further and eventually have enough reach to meet another colony so they could make actual babies.
This was accomplished by depositing little reproductive-material carrier parasite things onto spacewhales so that when the spacewhale got to the next colony, the parasites would get picked up and combined with that colony's reproductive material, then dropped off on yet another whale, and then the third colony they got to would spit them out into an open area of space where they could grow and form their own new colony.
The parent colonies had to be within a certain distance of eachother for this to be successful, because otherwise the parasites would just die in space before the spacewhale got to the next partner.
Anyways. Back to the people on the airspaceship who got eaten by a colony. They were expecting, well, they weren't sure what they were expecting to find inside the colony, but they were not expecting what looked like the surface of a planet (which they'd seen with telescopes and the very rare extremely brave expedition (most of which ended violently with everyone dying) on their home planet)
Most of the interior was filled with a sea of, miraculously, water. That was inhabied by, among many other things, baby spacewhales. No, this does not imply or state that whales on Earth are baby spacewhales. It turned out the spacewhales weren't just taxi drivers for the colonies' reproduction, they also utilized the colonies as free wombs for their own babies, by dropping off fertilized packets of reproductive material when they came for their routine baths, which got eaten by the colonies, and then the baby spacewhale spent its early adolescence inside, where there was enough gravity to support its little baby structures and plenty of food.
This was relevant, because the people in the airspaceship immediately found a baby spacewhale that had gotten trapped in part of the internal ocean that was too cold for it to properly function, so it couldn't swim back to the warmer areas.
The people in the airspaceship were all just like,,,okay, that is so sad. Let's take a vote. Who wants to help the baby alien?
Eight people volunteered, and they put on their airsuits, which were not at all designed for this environment but they were all willing to take that gamble, since they'd have to figure out if they helped at all eventually if it turned out they were going to be trapped here forever, the airspaceship was lowered to right above the water, and one person jumped overboard first. To make sure it wasn't actually acid or anything.
That was me!!!
It was not acid. And the cold wasn't enough to leech through the airsuit, so I waved and let the the other seven people who'd volunteered know it was safe, so they also jumped out to join me.
I don't actually remember what the plan was. I think we were expecting the baby spacewhale to be light enough that we could push it ourselves?
Well that didn't happen.
Obviously the baby spacewhale was too heavy for people, let alone just eight people, to move by pushing.
Luckily, a bunch of dragonriders showed up! Yes, dragonriders. They riders and the dragons had evolved symbiolically alongside each other to live inside the colonies of wormholes, doing their part to keep the system of their world in balance. There were lots of predators and dangers inside the colonies that would make it hard for spacewhales to survive long enough to leave in enough numbers to be sustainable, so the dragonriders kept careful track of their populations and selectively chose the calves with the best traits, and guarded and protected them to make sure they survived to adolescence.
The ones that were weaker they left to their own devices, and hunted when they needed food.
The calf the airpeople had found was one that they were raising, so they'd come to rescue it after they realized it got pulled into the colder waters.
(They had to let the calves swim free in order to get the proper exorcise for their muscles so they'd grow properly. Normally they checked up on them every few hours, but couldn't just follow them around all day because it'd require sending teams of dragonriders constantly back and forth for breaks, since they couldn't keep up with the whales in boats, only from the air, which would be more trouble than it was worth. Each calf marked for raising could be tracked, and they'd know if it was in distress and would come to the rescue)
So the dragonriders got there, and were...well, bewildered to find a bunch of small aliens attempting to push the calf back into warmer waters, which was going exactly nowhere, and all it was accomplishing was tiring the airpeople out because they were pretty much swimming into a wall.
Luckily it was pretty obvious the airpeople were just trying to help, albeit in most useless way possible, so two of the dragonriders who could handle swimming in the cold water went down to pick up the airpeople, then went about helping the rest of the bigger ones who stayed up in the air to attach a whole complicated system of ropes and sacs of air and cushioned straps to the calf so they could safely tow it back through the water to the warmer areas.
The dragonriders returned the airpeople to their airspaceship once the calf was properly secured and moving, and then, after the airpeople explained their situation to the two dragonriders who were small enough to fit inside the ship, the dragonriders guided them back to where they lived, to get some food and supplies, and then after spending a few hours sleeping, the dragonriders showed the airpeople the way out of the colony, and also asked the colony to let the airpeople out by temporarily adjusting their equivalent of respiration so that they'd be able to throw the airspaceship out of their gravity well and back in the direction they'd come from.
Then they'd have to hope that another spacewhale would pick them up and bring them back to their planet.
One of the dragonriders offered to come with them, to try and help them get home. The airpeople were shocked that the dragonrider would be able to survive in space without a ship, and then were even more shocked when the dragonrider explained that actually, they wouldn't. It'd be a one-way trip for them, using up all their energy to get them home, then they'd die.
Normally, this was done when dragonriders wanted to establish connections within a newborn colony of wormholes (once the colony reached an age that it was safe for them to move in), with the largest dragonrider flying over, carrying supplies, eggs, infants, and two to three caretakers.
The dragonrider would expend all the energy they'd taken up during their lifetime to get from point A to point B, then would die once they got there, giving the new colony a massive boost of nutrients that would allow it to have a period of rapid growth, letting it begin taking in external nutrients at a younger age than it would have otherwise, attracting spacewhales for pest removal and reproduction.
The caretakers would raise the rider eggs and infant dragons, teaching them all the traditions of the dragonriders, and beginning the selection of the spacewhale calves whenever they began to arrive (which could begin anytime between “immediately” after the colony finished its growth cycle, to the time when the new generation of dragonriders were able to start learning how to fly).
The dragonrider knew it wouldn't be able to establish a new community on the airpeople's planet, since it was a planet and not a wormhole, but they were still willing to carry them there to make sure they got home safely.
It wasn't very often that alien people fell into a colony, so the dragonriders didn't get to meet their “neighbors” very often, but they wanted to at least have some sort of friendly contact with other people, and if the airpeople got home safely, they'd be able to tell other people about the dragonriders, and maybe more people would come to visit them.
The airpeople were hesitant to let people die on their behalf, but the dragonriders were very convincing. The airpeople decided to put it to a vote, and 9/10ths of them voted to accept the offer, because the dragonrider was volunteering, and they didn't think they'd be able to make it home if they had no choice but to hope for a passing spacewhale headed in the right direction and hoping it would somehow randomly drop them back on their planet.
So the dragonrider and the airpeople, in their airspaceship, flew out of the colony together, pointed themselves in the direction of the still-visible planet of the air people...
...and I don't know what happened next, besides that there was a fight onboard the ship at some point because someone was trying to do something that would endanger the dragonrider, because my cat meowing at me woke me up.