Bridge Crossings

... in which I explore two divergent ways to cross a bridge.

One: Two supervillains an a hovercar speed away from the scene of the crime, laughing evilly. Ahead, a huge bridge is just beginning to open to let boats through, but the villains gun the engine and sail right over. Just as one of them notices that battery power is getting low on the hovercar, the other suddenly remembers something they left behind, so they turn around and head back towards the bridge. It's fully open, a pillar of iron towering to a great height, but our supervillains are too important to wait. They speed up, fly vertically up the bridge deck, hover over the chasm in the middle, and, engine sputtering, make a rough landing on the other side.

Two: A rickety wooden bridge in a forest is cared for by two elderly people. The bridge has been in disrepair for many years and no-one has been able to cross it, but now, some younger people are there to help fix it. They start by fencing off the edges for safety. They acknowledge that the repairs will take some time, but that they will do it safely and with joy in their work.

A poem was the best way to express it

First, giants herded all the people

into the basements of buildings

by breaking windows and rattling walls

and once a suitable number were down there,

sprayed them with chemicals to preserve them

and then knocked down the buildings

and sealed the people in, for freshness.

Then, the city set about building itself

back up again in its own image.

Power stations grew up in the rubble

of office buildings, and the occasional

remaining human flitted about in airplanes

or cars. The highways were still there,

now flanked by gigantic constructions

housing supercomputers in competition

with each other. And they had weapons.

They took potshots at whatever seemed

offensive; aggressive; overdesigned; larger;

moving; communicating; questioning.

Briefly, the people & their aircraft

were the only things moving;

then Risa invented a supercomputer

that could fly. The day it launched,

a cruise ship bristling with weapons,

it owned the world. It circled the globe

a hundred times, destroying anything

that resisted. I couldn't stop it,

and I couldn't wake myself up.

This building will fall down

I think I have been a little stressed out. Change is good - but it hurts - and it shows in my dreams. The other day I had one of those flying dreams that you remember from childhood - I was flying over the city I live in, looking at all the glass towers and the construction cranes, marvelling at how fast things are changing. After a little while, because I am not a kid anymore, I felt the need to rationalize my flying, so a helicopter spontaneously formed around me along with some friends. One friend asked to be dropped off at his new apartment on the 100th floor of a snazzy new condo, so the copter manouvered as close as possible to the building, and my friend, laughing, tried to climb in his window. Unfortunately, he doesn't make it, and plummets 100 storeys to his death. His buddies in the copter are all horrified and flee the scene.

Something supernatural happens then, perhaps due to the rage of the flat guy over his stupid death. An invisible force takes hold of everyone in the condo building, hauls them out their windows, and drops them all from the 100th floor. Hundreds of screaming yuppies and hipsters fall from the sky all around the building, creating a carpet of broken, but well-dressed, bodies. There is only one survivor, a young woman whose fall is broken by all the other people who hit the ground before her. She picks her way out of the carnage and wanders the city in a daze for some time, and since she is a person who has never really reflected on life or her place in it, the strange brush with death has a traumatic effect on her. Eventually, she decides to become an artist in order to process what has happened to her.

Her first project is to return to the building where the strange event happened and set up a trampoline over the empty elevator shaft and video displays on all four walls around it, flashing images and words while the artist jumps around between them. She then goes on to make a performance piece about the massacre of a pagan tribe somewhere under a great European city, suggesting that it was in fact a mass suicide orchestrated by the tribe's high priestess in protest against the coming of christianity. She performs this in a haunted hotel supposedly built on the site of the massacre. And finally, in her most famous work, the artist flies a helicopter over the Vatican while the Pope is speaking, and releases a swarm of stinging insects into the crowd. She then takes aerial pictures of the patterns created by the crowd's movements as people start running from the insects.

After these exploits, and given her history, the artist becomes world-famous. The developers of an ultra-modern condo complex near Amsterdam bring her in as a consultant as they try to create the hippest high-rises in the world. She is helicoptered in for a gala at the future site of the towers, and a bamboo boardwalk as long as the towers will be high is built for the event, and lined with banks of microphones and folding chairs. The artist sits on the floor in her vermilion evening gown. People forgive this eccentricity, but when she gets up to speak many notice that she has put on a lot of weight, and this starts the fashionistas whispering that she is "washed up", or whatever they are saying nowadays. The artist puts the final nail in her own coffin when she says simply, "This building will fall down," and walks off the stage. She is never heard from again.

To the Far North

In this dream, I took my younger sister Colleen to the far north on a visit to some friends who live in a shack on a cliff over an icy span of water. Once we arrive, my friends declare that we are all going on a trip to a far-off, mysterious place. First, though, we have to go into town for supplies, and that involves crossing the icy water. We don't bother with a boat; we simply spread ourselves on the icy wind and fly over. As we swoop low over the water, I look down and see a pod of whales. "Hey look, whales!" I yell to the others, and they go "Right on!"

At the store, my friend starts to tell me about all the hardships we are going to face on our journey, walking for days over the snow and suchlike. My sister starts to freak out and ask me why I brought her along, but my friend gets impatient with her and keeps belabouring the point of how difficult and dangerous it's going to be. Finally I roll my eyes and say, "Can we just leave?" and so we start out. Step one of our adventure is to turn ourselves into a lynx, a wolf, a caribou and a bird, and we set off across the countryside.