Humanity in that setting is fractured into thousands of factions with no unity. Some serve, some conquer, some work with other races, and most hold a rather high level of corruption. Many are bureaucratic and inefficient. The setting takes place on a gigantic ship which is also a station. (It took heavy cues from Farscape. Including the protagonist being quite literally, a character played by Ben Browder. No, really.)
The story began with him in a not-quite-modern Earth, in that it's slightly-in-the-future, as a test pilot for an advanced aircraft/spacecraft hybrid. However, something happened, and catapulted him thousands of years into the future, onto the ship he would then live/adventure on. In the future, a common trend is for everyone regardless of their race to have a single specialty.
Unlike in most sci-fi works where that single specialty applies to the whole race, with the exception of elves (and even then they aren't one stock mold; they gamble, they lie, and so on), they have diversity such that they are capable of actually functioning as a society. No Warrior Race; No Logic Race; No Diplomacy Race, and so on and so forth.
To put it another way--races don't have a "hat", though elves come close.
HOWEVER.
While races don't...
...In a twist, individuals do.
Individuals, regardless of race, are typically taught to do only a very specific set of tasks. A pilot can pilot almost any craft, because they have studied endless numerous ways to pilot endless numbers of crafts. Said pilot would be skilled no matter what craft they operate...but get them doing anything outside of piloting, and they are outside of their field, thus, basically worthless.
A mechanic can fix basically anything, but when it comes to operating the things they know how to fix, they're basically clueless.
A warrior has studied every combat form known, knowing strategy and tactics on every level: fleet warfare, ship to ship warfare, troop warfare, and of course, melee combat with various styles of martial arts and the like. However, because of that extensive training, that's all they're good for. Assessing threats, and how to best deal with them.
A medic knows everything there is to know about medicine, and has to do so for just about every species.
A scientist has to know just about everything there is to know about science not covered in one of the above fields, and spends their life learning millions of years of collective galactic wisdom and trying to add new knowledge to it.
And so on and so forth.
The special trait of the protagonist is that he comes from a time where technology is advanced enough where he's not worthless in the future, but he's also someone who is a jack of all trades. Literally. He has all of the above for a start. This means that he is versatile enough to help everyone in a pinch.
I had a thought, not in the dream proper so much as after, that a computer would exist, and the computer would in a sense designate the people most suited to lead for the current situation, a trend shared in most communities: the person most suited for the task at hand would give the orders to those out of their element. They do maintain an emergency chain of command, usually at the computer's behest in case it malfunctions; one can override the other.
On the ship-station (which I believe I had as a recognized independent nation), the computer recognizes the protagonist as being what he is, and places him permanently as being the usually-not-assigned position of "First Officer": basically, alternating between him giving orders and being given orders by those in his field.
Obviously, there's more than one expert in each field on staff. Per position, there is existing hierarchy based on skill, talent, experience, knowledge, and so on, in that the more veteran staff who are prodigies in their fields will be the one actively involved in the task, the second-best will be their second-in-command, and others in the field handle other tasks--different shifts (can't be awake 24 hours after all), different parts of the ship, different circumstances (illness, death, injury and the like), you get the idea.
But the ship has a theoretical permanent position of Captain for "permanently in command", not used, and the just-as-theoretical position of First Officer, which was assigned. The protagonist would quickly get filled in on exposition, in that he had basically landed on a refurbished relic, the perfect spot for him. The ship is really, really old, yet has been kept up to date with modern, even advanced, tech, mostly based around human and elvish models, including one taking cues from the ship he was a test pilot of.
Given the international nature of the ship-station-state in that it is a recognized nation of its own, exploring space, attending diplomatic meetings of factions, being a neutral location, and so on and so forth (think vaguely Babylon 5 another huge inspiration on my dream even though I've never seen the series just heard a lot about it), this gives him work to do on an episodic, yet also arc nature.
Sometimes, part of being a recognized independent nation also involves going to war. Most don't dare, because it tends to end badly for them, both because of the capabilities of the ship and because the ship's crew has connections in all the right places to usually have allies. (Plus, the ship has many smaller ships within.) But a few times, the protagonist is busy working on how to best avoid total annihilation from forces that manage to declare war against his crew while leveraging other factions to remain neutral parties in the conflict.
One point relatively early in the setting had him travel back in time, relatively close to the time he had been a pilot. There, it was discovered he was declared dead--in fact, they had the crash and everything, up to and including a body. However, he and his elf crewmate with him had to leave before finishing their investigation of the mystery.
It'd later turn out that thanks to shenanigans (as if there weren't enough already), the protagonist we've gotten to know for the whole show is a future, short-term memory wiped duplicate of his past self's duplicate. In that, at a later point in the show, his entire test ship arrives. Thanks to events transpiring, said original self is duplicated once through a further time split. And, in order to save the day, original-him and his copilot go through a portal (presumably to their deaths where they'd crash), the new duplicate-him goes through a different portal (sending him back in time to the start of the show), and future him remains, and puts it all together.
...I was rather proud of myself for thinking that up given that it sounds pretty standard fare for a sci-fi setting.
Basically, it goes:
Original past-him ends up on the ship, interacting with future-him. Due to the events transpiring, original past-him ends up being duplicated with an exact copy down to the last memory and body. Literally identical in every way.
Original past-him ends up needing to go through one portal, sacrificing himself to save everyone.
Duplicate-past-him, also as part of the saving process (the ship was caught in some complex thingamajig which required a three-part solution, conveniently enough), went into a separate portal. This portal lead to the beginning of the show, with his short-term-memory lost and him remembering only taking off from the flight, not what transpired after. As in, we've been following Duplicate-past-him the whole time, because Duplicate-past-him is...
...Future-him, who was interacting with both the above the entire time, and it's only after the events above transpire that he's able to piece together what has happened.
He takes it relatively well, since as far as he's concerned, he still is the original, in spite of the revelation.
It's confusing to write, I know, but it'd probably be really easy to convey. Basically, for the whole show, we were led to believe he took off, then mysteriously woke up in the station, with no ship and no copilot. However, that episode showed the truth, of that not being the case, that there were a complicated set of events which transpired to set him up as both dead in the past and yet alive in the future.
I feel like I'm rather underselling parts of the setting, in particular, the prophetic visions that are commonplace. Future-sight is a common aspect of the setting, and many episodes involve trying to figure out the best path. In this setting, visions are not of a definitive future, but of probable futures if following certain paths: "If events unfold as they currently are, then this is what will happen".
It doesn't really offer much. Sometimes, the choice is between one unpleasant situation and a worse unpleasant situation; there's no way to abuse the power to find a way around it, and at least a few occasions deal with hard losses taken after making the hard choice and losing, but losing less than the other hard choice.
But needless to say. I absolutely LOVED the idea. It was beautiful.