A Very Strange Dream
Dreams fascinate me, especially my own. I don’t have ‘those kind of dreams’ that I am able to write down very often, for the simple reason they are just so hard to define, constantly changing, shifting, often riding on a kaleidoscope of emotions that words are simply inadequate at freezing, what is essentially an ephemeral experience.
Dreams are experiences within our inner worlds, riding on and at times accentuating our fears, anxieties, concerns — but also our visions, motivation and wants for ourselves.
This dream was none of those. There was no emotion. There was no fear, there was perhaps, a certain growing sense of unease as bizarre goings on become woven into meetings with people, none of which I had ever met before. But there they were, their faces, their backgrounds as real as anyone I have met in real life. This was no ordinary dream. It was a genuine ‘WTF experience’. It played out right before me as real as a film, sharp in its imagery. As unexpected as a thriller and utterly unexpected. It just happened.
Being an author, I try my best to capture these dreams, since they plug straight-on in on my writing. Another Medium post captured a dream I called North Dawn Rising. That dream has been written into a scene on a book to be released at the end of 2017. Here is that scene, feel free to compare the two. They are very close. That dreams has since spurned a whole new layer in an epic fiction project.
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The Dream
This dream didn’t really have a linear progression to it. All dreams happen in time, and the impressions and experiences generated in the dream-world of course develops some kind of memory of what has been. This dream was not that easy to pin down, though the imagery and memory of it was fresh in the minds-eye.
I ended up defining the dream as 4 scenes. I’m not sure how the scenes really played out as a sequence, but I do recollect each of the scenes and still do, now a day after I had the dream.
Scene 1: The Basement Incident
I am inside a house. The house seems familiar but I am not sure it is mine. I am stressed, work has not been what it should be. I need an income.
A package has arrived, I have it in my hands, so it must have had my name on it. It seems the right thing to do to open it downstairs, in the basement. I descend to the basement and proceed to open the package. It is heavily taped together and I have to exert more effort to open it. Something tears, a fine mist of dark-green powder filling the air. I drop the package, fearing what it might contain. I look down to see my clothes stained by a dark-green powder. I know I have to take them off. They have to be washed. I have to take a shower then I don’t need to think anything more of it.
Afterwards, I call someone, a colleague. They ask me if I breathed it. I don’t think so. They are quiet. I sense they are concerned. They tell me to burn my clothes.
Scene 2: At The Auditorium
I arrive at an auditorium. It is like any other auditorium, a large space dedicated to lecturing, tiers of seats descending to the lecture podium. The auditorium is empty apart from someone with whom I am familiar talking with someone to whom I am not. The person with whom I am familiar is a business associate, the colleague I called. He is always busy, arranging meetings. Often he calls me to this meeting and that, meeting people with interesting agendas, none of which ever seems to actually manifest itself into business. I get the impression a lecture has been held here. On the screen are posters of some project or other, seeming business related and not academic.
I am introduced to the person I do not know. A Chinese student who has something to show me. He unrolls a poster in his hand, it is a drawing. A partly technical drawing it seems, very neatly drawn showing something I do not know. I shows repetitive symbols but I do not known what they means. My colleague turns to the serious-looking Chinese student, who proceeds to explain to me what the poster shows.
As he begins to tell me, I look around again, getting the distinct impression there are big business interests coming into play, that a large meeting has been conducted here earlier in the day. I recognize the logos and titles of business interests. Whatever is going, but it is all being kept under covers, and the Chinese student knows why.
Scene 3: The House Incident
I have returned to the house. I am with a companion. Something has changed since last time I was here. Much of the house has been boarded up internally, the rooms emptied. a plywood wall follows the line of the wooden stair to the floor above. There is no furniture in the house anymore, bare floorboards and walls boarded over, curtains drawn across windows. I am not alone. My companion leaves me to examine the basement. I notice an odd odor within the house. It seems to be coming from the basement. I peer down the stairs, seeing the lower walls covered in a dark green substance, like algae. It is not pleasant. I don’t want to go down there and turn to climb the stairs, one tread at a time, entering an empty floor above.
There are no walls, only one big space. Everything has been removed, apart from a vast tank in the middle of the floor. It stands to waist height, and is made of dark glass. A cover is on the top the tank. Curious, I am drawn to look inside. I stand at the end of the tank and look down, noticing the refraction of water. It is like a big aquarium tank, I notice. Something can be seen moving inside.
It is not a something, more a dark slowly moving mass of sediment within. I take hold of the edge of the plywood cover and pull it to the side. Here, the windows are not covered, up here it is light and airy. Except, the tank is dark and closed. As I pull the cover to the side, light enters the water within. The light seems to create a commotion. What was still water erupts into a frenzy of activity, the muddled dark forms of what at first seems like sediment brought to sudden activity. Forms dart for the surface. I realize the plywood cover was resting on top of a sheet of glass. The tank is full to the underside of the glass I can see, as first one, then another and another organisms like thin, smooth sea-cucumbers both big and small leap to attach themselves to the underside of the glass, being and turning not far from my downward-peering face. I realize they are trying to reach me.
Scene 4: The Café Incident
I am sitting at a table inside a down-town café. The owner of the café is the father of the Chinese student I met at the auditorium. He seems friendly enough. A regular working man with tidy short-cropped hair wearing a white serving apron. He is bothered. I must have asked him about his son. He cannot tell me anything about him or where he is and leaves my table to attend to serving other people, and so I return to writing something on a notepad on the table in front of me. What I am writing is not important. I am minding my own business. I sense two people sitting at the table next to me. I pay them no attention.
They leave as I am writing, lost in my thoughts. They exit. Soon there is a commotion at a table outside. The sound of a breaking glass, raised voices. I look up instantly, but too late to see who it was or why this has happened, the table crashing to the ground. I get up and run to see what is happening, the table upended, the debris of a lunch lying on the ground with the occupants already gone.
Scene 5: The Happening
There has been a flooding problem. The house is seen from the outside. This place looks like a US-type suburb, a house built of wood on two floors, sitting in the middle of a suburb of other houses, each set back from the sidewalk, each built of two floors with forward-facing windows, the entrance door to the left. This is the house described in scene 1, from the outside. As I’m looking at this house, a boat appears from the down the street. The boat os floating upside-down, since the hull of the boat would be too deep for the shallow flooding that is perhaps, about half a meter. I realize the boat is heading for the house. I hear cries for help, the house, now seen as isolated is going to be evacuated. Someone has called for the emergency services, and these services are the people operating the boat. I step back from the sidewalk. My feet are not wet, so I am standing on higher ground, perhaps.
Someone screams from inside the house. The men in the boat are confused as other screams accompany the first. No one, including myself knows what is happening. The men make an effort to paddle faster now, moving towards the house. I step back into the immaculately manicured lawn of the house opposite the one where the screams are coming from. Something is happening. People appear at the windows, anxious to escape. Someone falls from a window. The men in the boat are desperate now, but still they are too far away. The men are wading through the water now, more people opening windows, trying to escape. Then it happens. No warning, no little incident. It just happens right there, in front of me in real time.
There is an explosion but there is no fire. There debris from falling wood or glass. Something erupts from the house, a column of…. something. It is not smoke, I don’t know what it is but it is… a plume coming from deep within the house, rising high above the house. The plume is made of… something, of substance, but not solid, like a congealed mass of — something. And then the plume, the mass, it spreads apart, a cloud of debris, like coagulated gravy. I realize it is organic, that the substance is now falling to the ground. A dark blob the size of a tennis ball lands on the edge of the lawn in front of me. It disintegrates into a mass of small, writhing short eel or leach-like organisms. They are wriggling. They are moving… they are moving fast. I look up, and see all around me, the every house, every lawn is being smothered in the same writhing organisms.
I have no idea how, or what genre, but I intend to turn this dream into a book at some time in the future. But horror definitely has something to do with it.
