Desert Highway

A dream — fiction

Image generated by the author with DALL-E.

In the end, the most surprising thing about the video was that no two people ever remembered it the same. It was a modern-day Rorschach test.

It was only three minutes and twelve seconds long, but people saw different things when they recounted what they had watched.

One thing everyone agreed on was the video wasn’t right. For one, it made you sleepy. People reported feeling a lethargy while watching it. Some said it felt like hypnosis. When you watched the video, it set up camp in your psyche, made itself comfortable, and acted like a damn fool.

I can confirm this to be true. My eyes went where I didn’t want them to go and didn’t go where I willed them.

Everyone was more or less in agreement about what happened during the first twenty seconds. But then, all the stories diverged.

It opened on a long, flat stretch of desert highway. The sun sat oppressive in the sky above. They all said it looked like a dry, hot road through hell. Maybe they were right.

A sedan station wagon hovered in the center of the screen and pointed to the left. The dull gray car was headed west.