Nightmarishly long update
Sep. 13th, 2002 09:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mousmeMaybe it's the cold(er) weather, but now that I'm actually sleeping relatively soundly again, the vivid dreams that had almost abandoned me all summer have returned.
I was going to qualify the nightmare I had last night as post-apocalyptic, but realised that it would be a misnomer, as it took place just as the world was *beginning* to end.
I haven't had a dream feel that real in months. It was really very disquieting.
I hope I can remember enough of it to post here in a relatively coherent fashion. Here goes:
The dream began as my family and I and some of our friends were returning in the metro from the theatre, or perhaps a movie. I was younger than I am really, or perhaps it was just my friends who were younger. My friend Anna was there, looking about twelve or thirteen years old, so a few years before she stopped talking to me.
We were discussing what we had seen, and while everyone was vivacious and happy, there was a terrible sense of unease. The metro itself never made an appearance, but the station we were in was reminiscent of a grossly misshapen Verdun or Place-St.-Henri. The walls stretched high above us, looming and grey and drab, seeming almost to touch at the top instead of being joined by a ceiling.
The scene then slowly switched to a hushed gathering of people. We were all still together, my family and Anna's, but a pall hung over us and the people we were with. There were quiet whispers running through the crowd, everyone wondering whether the prophecy we had just heard was true, that the world was about to be punished. It seemed arbitrary to us, because this higher power did not appear to have a motive to want to inflict suffering on us. It was an unseen, malevolent force in any case, and it made all of us fearful and uneasy.
I returned to my home, which in my dream was a large house which was built on many levels on a hillside. I had an unshakeable feeling that the impending disaster was in fact much nearer than everyone seemed to think. I checked the state of my cupboards and pantry, and realised I didn't have enough food to withstand a prolonged siege.
I went to find my mother who was visiting me, and was appalled to find that she was busily polishing off half a loaf of bread. I explained to her that we needed to be more careful with food from now on, that we'd have to ration ourselves and that a loaf of bread might have to last us for several days. She looked sheepish and rather like a scolded child and agreed with me.
We went shopping for more food and stocked up on non-perishables at the supermarket. I was growing increasingly uneasy and nervous, as I felt the danger levels around us increasing.
I was holding my mother by the elbow as we were about to cross a street, when I suddenly realised that there had not been a rise in the pavement where we were when we had passed by earlier, and with a thrill of terror it dawned on me that It had begun.
The ground began to writhe before and beneath us, and tremendous black cracks began forming in the asphalt. People around us began to shriek and run, recognising the first signs of the apocalypse. With a great crack the pavement split apart and two giant black marble hands emerged from the chasm, wreaking havoc and destruction in their wake.
They didn't move from their asphalt prison, however, and I was able to drag my mother to safety in my house, giving her strict instructions not to go outside under any circumstances. We barricaded ourselves inside, and I boarded up as many of the windows and doors as I could, knowing that the outside would be in chaos soon enough as more hands would erupt from the ground and claim their victims.
I had to leave my sanctuary soon afterwards, however. My father was still missing, and I knew we still didn't have enough supplies to see us through what promised to be a lengthy ordeal.
I ran through rain-and-lightning-blasted streets, keeping my head ducked down and avoiding as many of the black hands as I could, not sure exactly what they would do to me if I was caught, but as sure as I was alive that it would be the end of me if I was.
I turned into a large avenue where I found myself surrounded by large metallic-silver backhoes that were tearing up the pavement. Everywhere I turned there was another metallic monster ripping up huge slabs of concrete and threatening to crush me beneath its wheels or rip me apart with its wicked teeth.
I screamed as loud as I could, thinking the operators hadn't seen me: "Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!"
Until finally a boy about my age who was standing not too far away managed to attract the attention of one of the operators. The man looked at him disdainfully and shut down his machine, and I ran to safety, realising to my horror that they *had* been trying to kill me, thinking that I had been affected by the ongoing apocalypse.
I looked around me, and saw that the street was literally dying before me. The boy who had saved me was the only other human being (apart from the machine operators) who still looked the part. The others were desintegrating shells of their former selves. Unlike zombies their flesh was not rotting or decaying, but rather had melted from them, leaving shells that looked rather like blood-covered plastic moulds of human beings. They were still alive, but moved sluggishly, blindly, reaching out with arms that no longer had hands.
I stumbled past them, the mocking words of the operators still ringing in my ears: "Show me one person here who isn't already gone. You'll join them soon enough."
I raced up the avenue, along some vast cobbled stairs where someone had begun writing the lyrics to "Martha" by Jefferson Airplane, but the writer's mind had clearly given way sometime into the song, and the rest was gibberish scrawled in blood-red ink that dribbled into the grouting between the stones.
I ran.
At this point in the narrative my cats woke me up. I think I might have been calling out in my sleep or something and startled them.
When I got back to sleep, the scene had shifted, but the dream was the same. I was clambering up the ivy hanging from the wall of a house buried deep in the woods atop a steep hill. I was deathly afraid of being caught by the woman who lived there, who was Evil(tm)and in league with the malignant force that was destroying the world slowly but surely.
This part of the dream is a bit hazy, but I remember being discovered and having to flee for my life down the rocky path leading through the trees. I cut across country, ignoring my companion's recommendation to follow the paved road (she was a young woman I had never seen before and never saw again for that matter, although I seemed to know her in the dream), and slithered down the rocky hill, loose stones skittering ahead, making my heart rise up in my throat with fear every time that they would lead to my discovery.
Eventually I came to a halt and began a more cautious advance, hiding in the thick underbrush. There were people everywhere, assembled in a makeshift militia, dressed haphasardly in camouflage clothing. I saw a group of soldiers marching a rag-tag band of children up the slope along the path I had earlier scorned. The children, oblivious to what awaited them at the end of their journey, were running and jumping and frolicking amongst themselves while the soldiers behind them looked increasingly grim under their ragged and dirty uniforms.
One of the children, a small boy, ran up to a young soldier with a bushy black beard and curly black hair and grasped him by the hand, swinging his arms cheerfully and shouting: "Look, everyone, look! It's Jean! It's Jean who pulled me out of the river last year!"
Jean's face contorted at that remark, and he gruffly pushed the child ahead of him, knowing only too well that the boy he'd saved only a few months before was heading towards imminent death. None of the soldiers seemed altogether happy about having switched sides like that, but they seemed to think it was their only way of surviving.
Brushing away my own tears, I continued back to my home where I entered through the back door, which was at the top of the house. As I mentioned, the house was built on a hill, but it was also built to match the steep slope, so that the back door led onto the third story of the house, while the front door was at street level.
To my dismay, I found that I was unable to close the back door properly. Somehow the doorknob was loose, and several centimeters of wood were missing from the edges, making it swing back and forth without locking into place, so that I couldn't even block the handle with a chair. With a great deal of effort I managed to block it off with a large chest of drawers and went downstairs into the kitchen to find that my father had been found and brought back intact and in fine spirits.
I was extremely relieved to find him home, and left him in the kitchen with my mother, venturing one last time into the ruined city beyond our door.
By now the scene was one of total chaos. The streets around me were reminiscent of Berlin right after the bombing, with crumbling buildings and smoking craters with charred innards. Some of the shops were still open for business, and I could see thick woolen socks on sale as well as dry goods, as survivors prepared to wait out the storm.
My cats woke me once more, and in a weird full circle kind of way I found myself back in the strange house, trying to sneak past the evil entity's mistress. This part of the dream is blurred by now since I've been working on this post off and on all day, but I remember there being a kind of verbal showdown between us à la James Bond & Generic Bad Guy, and once again I found myself fleeing the premises.
This time, however, the forest was anything but natural. I found myself leaping from tree to tree, although the trees were inexplicably shaped like high chairs and I was afraid that they would overbalance as I teetered precariously on them.
Luckily it seemed that I was more agile than my pursuers, and I flung myself in at the front door of my home, only to find that my parents were being threatened by a group of soldiers similar to the one that had been shepherding the children to their execution before. They were demanding payment from my parents in order to leave them alone: one dollar every ten minutes. Joining the soldiers were a group of ragged women (kind of like the "tricoteuses" from the French Revolution).
I opened the door to shout at them, and a man slipped by me, and I grew furious at him for invading my home. He moved with lightning speed, so fast that he was sometimes invisible to the naked eye, and so I grabbed his immediate superior by the neck and threatened to puncture his throat with my pen if I ever caught his man in my house again. He jeered at me, pointing out that I'd never be able to tell if he was there or not.
Eventually my posturing seemed to take its toll on the people threatening us from outside our windows, and they moved off, and I retreated upstairs. I retreated to a room which looked like an English library, dark and cosy with leather furniture. I wrapped myself in a blanket and sat down to watch television (Star Trek was on, as I recall), reflecting ruefully to myself that this was probably the last time I would ever get to watch television, as the world was about to end.
My parents came to join me later, at first to admonish me for watching television, but then they decided to join me, thinking that my reasoning was sound, and that after all the recent upheavals we deserved a break.
The dream would have continued but my alarm clock rang. Bleh.
I was going to qualify the nightmare I had last night as post-apocalyptic, but realised that it would be a misnomer, as it took place just as the world was *beginning* to end.
I haven't had a dream feel that real in months. It was really very disquieting.
I hope I can remember enough of it to post here in a relatively coherent fashion. Here goes:
The dream began as my family and I and some of our friends were returning in the metro from the theatre, or perhaps a movie. I was younger than I am really, or perhaps it was just my friends who were younger. My friend Anna was there, looking about twelve or thirteen years old, so a few years before she stopped talking to me.
We were discussing what we had seen, and while everyone was vivacious and happy, there was a terrible sense of unease. The metro itself never made an appearance, but the station we were in was reminiscent of a grossly misshapen Verdun or Place-St.-Henri. The walls stretched high above us, looming and grey and drab, seeming almost to touch at the top instead of being joined by a ceiling.
The scene then slowly switched to a hushed gathering of people. We were all still together, my family and Anna's, but a pall hung over us and the people we were with. There were quiet whispers running through the crowd, everyone wondering whether the prophecy we had just heard was true, that the world was about to be punished. It seemed arbitrary to us, because this higher power did not appear to have a motive to want to inflict suffering on us. It was an unseen, malevolent force in any case, and it made all of us fearful and uneasy.
I returned to my home, which in my dream was a large house which was built on many levels on a hillside. I had an unshakeable feeling that the impending disaster was in fact much nearer than everyone seemed to think. I checked the state of my cupboards and pantry, and realised I didn't have enough food to withstand a prolonged siege.
I went to find my mother who was visiting me, and was appalled to find that she was busily polishing off half a loaf of bread. I explained to her that we needed to be more careful with food from now on, that we'd have to ration ourselves and that a loaf of bread might have to last us for several days. She looked sheepish and rather like a scolded child and agreed with me.
We went shopping for more food and stocked up on non-perishables at the supermarket. I was growing increasingly uneasy and nervous, as I felt the danger levels around us increasing.
I was holding my mother by the elbow as we were about to cross a street, when I suddenly realised that there had not been a rise in the pavement where we were when we had passed by earlier, and with a thrill of terror it dawned on me that It had begun.
The ground began to writhe before and beneath us, and tremendous black cracks began forming in the asphalt. People around us began to shriek and run, recognising the first signs of the apocalypse. With a great crack the pavement split apart and two giant black marble hands emerged from the chasm, wreaking havoc and destruction in their wake.
They didn't move from their asphalt prison, however, and I was able to drag my mother to safety in my house, giving her strict instructions not to go outside under any circumstances. We barricaded ourselves inside, and I boarded up as many of the windows and doors as I could, knowing that the outside would be in chaos soon enough as more hands would erupt from the ground and claim their victims.
I had to leave my sanctuary soon afterwards, however. My father was still missing, and I knew we still didn't have enough supplies to see us through what promised to be a lengthy ordeal.
I ran through rain-and-lightning-blasted streets, keeping my head ducked down and avoiding as many of the black hands as I could, not sure exactly what they would do to me if I was caught, but as sure as I was alive that it would be the end of me if I was.
I turned into a large avenue where I found myself surrounded by large metallic-silver backhoes that were tearing up the pavement. Everywhere I turned there was another metallic monster ripping up huge slabs of concrete and threatening to crush me beneath its wheels or rip me apart with its wicked teeth.
I screamed as loud as I could, thinking the operators hadn't seen me: "Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!"
Until finally a boy about my age who was standing not too far away managed to attract the attention of one of the operators. The man looked at him disdainfully and shut down his machine, and I ran to safety, realising to my horror that they *had* been trying to kill me, thinking that I had been affected by the ongoing apocalypse.
I looked around me, and saw that the street was literally dying before me. The boy who had saved me was the only other human being (apart from the machine operators) who still looked the part. The others were desintegrating shells of their former selves. Unlike zombies their flesh was not rotting or decaying, but rather had melted from them, leaving shells that looked rather like blood-covered plastic moulds of human beings. They were still alive, but moved sluggishly, blindly, reaching out with arms that no longer had hands.
I stumbled past them, the mocking words of the operators still ringing in my ears: "Show me one person here who isn't already gone. You'll join them soon enough."
I raced up the avenue, along some vast cobbled stairs where someone had begun writing the lyrics to "Martha" by Jefferson Airplane, but the writer's mind had clearly given way sometime into the song, and the rest was gibberish scrawled in blood-red ink that dribbled into the grouting between the stones.
I ran.
At this point in the narrative my cats woke me up. I think I might have been calling out in my sleep or something and startled them.
When I got back to sleep, the scene had shifted, but the dream was the same. I was clambering up the ivy hanging from the wall of a house buried deep in the woods atop a steep hill. I was deathly afraid of being caught by the woman who lived there, who was Evil(tm)and in league with the malignant force that was destroying the world slowly but surely.
This part of the dream is a bit hazy, but I remember being discovered and having to flee for my life down the rocky path leading through the trees. I cut across country, ignoring my companion's recommendation to follow the paved road (she was a young woman I had never seen before and never saw again for that matter, although I seemed to know her in the dream), and slithered down the rocky hill, loose stones skittering ahead, making my heart rise up in my throat with fear every time that they would lead to my discovery.
Eventually I came to a halt and began a more cautious advance, hiding in the thick underbrush. There were people everywhere, assembled in a makeshift militia, dressed haphasardly in camouflage clothing. I saw a group of soldiers marching a rag-tag band of children up the slope along the path I had earlier scorned. The children, oblivious to what awaited them at the end of their journey, were running and jumping and frolicking amongst themselves while the soldiers behind them looked increasingly grim under their ragged and dirty uniforms.
One of the children, a small boy, ran up to a young soldier with a bushy black beard and curly black hair and grasped him by the hand, swinging his arms cheerfully and shouting: "Look, everyone, look! It's Jean! It's Jean who pulled me out of the river last year!"
Jean's face contorted at that remark, and he gruffly pushed the child ahead of him, knowing only too well that the boy he'd saved only a few months before was heading towards imminent death. None of the soldiers seemed altogether happy about having switched sides like that, but they seemed to think it was their only way of surviving.
Brushing away my own tears, I continued back to my home where I entered through the back door, which was at the top of the house. As I mentioned, the house was built on a hill, but it was also built to match the steep slope, so that the back door led onto the third story of the house, while the front door was at street level.
To my dismay, I found that I was unable to close the back door properly. Somehow the doorknob was loose, and several centimeters of wood were missing from the edges, making it swing back and forth without locking into place, so that I couldn't even block the handle with a chair. With a great deal of effort I managed to block it off with a large chest of drawers and went downstairs into the kitchen to find that my father had been found and brought back intact and in fine spirits.
I was extremely relieved to find him home, and left him in the kitchen with my mother, venturing one last time into the ruined city beyond our door.
By now the scene was one of total chaos. The streets around me were reminiscent of Berlin right after the bombing, with crumbling buildings and smoking craters with charred innards. Some of the shops were still open for business, and I could see thick woolen socks on sale as well as dry goods, as survivors prepared to wait out the storm.
My cats woke me once more, and in a weird full circle kind of way I found myself back in the strange house, trying to sneak past the evil entity's mistress. This part of the dream is blurred by now since I've been working on this post off and on all day, but I remember there being a kind of verbal showdown between us à la James Bond & Generic Bad Guy, and once again I found myself fleeing the premises.
This time, however, the forest was anything but natural. I found myself leaping from tree to tree, although the trees were inexplicably shaped like high chairs and I was afraid that they would overbalance as I teetered precariously on them.
Luckily it seemed that I was more agile than my pursuers, and I flung myself in at the front door of my home, only to find that my parents were being threatened by a group of soldiers similar to the one that had been shepherding the children to their execution before. They were demanding payment from my parents in order to leave them alone: one dollar every ten minutes. Joining the soldiers were a group of ragged women (kind of like the "tricoteuses" from the French Revolution).
I opened the door to shout at them, and a man slipped by me, and I grew furious at him for invading my home. He moved with lightning speed, so fast that he was sometimes invisible to the naked eye, and so I grabbed his immediate superior by the neck and threatened to puncture his throat with my pen if I ever caught his man in my house again. He jeered at me, pointing out that I'd never be able to tell if he was there or not.
Eventually my posturing seemed to take its toll on the people threatening us from outside our windows, and they moved off, and I retreated upstairs. I retreated to a room which looked like an English library, dark and cosy with leather furniture. I wrapped myself in a blanket and sat down to watch television (Star Trek was on, as I recall), reflecting ruefully to myself that this was probably the last time I would ever get to watch television, as the world was about to end.
My parents came to join me later, at first to admonish me for watching television, but then they decided to join me, thinking that my reasoning was sound, and that after all the recent upheavals we deserved a break.
The dream would have continued but my alarm clock rang. Bleh.