Go North for Freedom

Unlike in real life, I had a whole lot of fun in my dream last night. I dreamed I was the type of girl who goes to parties every night. Some friends and I were getting drunk and dancing on tables in a run-down old house, well on our way to trashing the place. Once it was trashed, we moved on to another house, the one I lived in when I was 10. We started up the party again, an ounce of pot was spilled out on a table, and I was exploring the old rooms with a bottle in my hand. I came to what was formerly my parents' bedroom, intending to claim it as my own, but things felt different. The room had a creepy, hair-raising vibe it didn't used to have. After a few minutes in there, I started to hear voices coming from the ceiling, and once I heard a baby crying. My instincts said to get out of there, but I hung around a bit longer, trying to make sense of the voices from the ceiling, but they were just muttering disjointed phrases, like the hybrid in Battlestar Galactica. As I listened, the voices resolved themselves into a woman. She walked out of the shadows in a corner of the room, took hold of my hand and squeezed it. She said, "Go north for freedom," and a pilgrimage began.

"End of line."

My party friends and I set out on an epic trek towards the north. The whole world had been turned into a neverending series of malls and hotels; we never go outside. But this new world is populated with large spiderlike robots that lie dormant under staircases and in darkened rooms, waking up whenever they sense movement. They attack my friends and I. Our pilgrimage to the north becomes similar to a first person shooter game, where we scout ahead for robots and fight them whenever we can't avoid them.

Eventually, my entourage and I find new digs in an ultra-modern building, all glass and stainless steel, where all the cool features in the apartment are controlled with buttons on a sleek silver console. There's one in every room. I stand on the bed and play with the buttons that are supposed to move the window blinds into myriad stylish arrangements. Instead, they fall on my friends' heads. They are not amused, and they start listing all the ways in which the automation in the apartment will not work. They say the track lighting will leak and the windows will turn dark. Somehow, one of the cushions from a charcoal Danish modern sofa goes flying out an open window, and I can't go out to retrieve it because my keys have gone missing. To punish me for the falling curtains thing, a friend makes me drink gin from his cupped hands.

We do eventually head outside to look for the flying cushion. We walk all around the building and its in-house fine-dining restaurant in a quaint, old fashioned annex. Clear on the other side of the building, we find several people gathered on a patio overlooking a garden. Piles of detritus line the concrete walls of the garden, including my wayward couch cushion.

Art Therapy

I dreamed that I went to the house I grew up in (happens every so often) and found the place haunted by the ghosts of a man and a woman. Their bodies are in the house too, all dried out in peaceful attitudes. I asked them what they were doing in my childhood home; they said they are here to tell me I needed to take some things away with me: a black cat, a grey cat, and an apple from the tree in the yard.

The time I drowned

This dream felt so much like memory that I woke up re-evaluating my beliefs on past lives.

I dreamed that I was a fifteen-year-old girl living with my father and grandmother (who were the same as my father and grandmother in this life) in a small wooden house in a forest on a river. It was a gloomy, depressing place, all drooping trees and rotting wood and sticky mud, and, then as now, my family seemed obsessed with keeping the dim, dirty past alive with dusty old pictures and books about virtuous girls who died young.

There is a rickety dock behind our house, and it's one of my household duties to wait on it every evening for my father to come home and help him tie up his boat. Sometimes I beg my family not to make me stand down on the dock at sunset, and I always do the chore sulkily, but it makes no difference; my father needs help tying up the boat, and my grandmother's too old. This duty is the most hated thing in my life, because I am afraid of the river. In the daylight it's not so bad, but as the sun goes down, things appear on the water that were not there in the light.

Every night when the shadows lengthen, a boat like my father's appears out of nowhere, just sitting on the water near the opposite bank, absolutely still regardless of wind or current, and the man in this boat simply stares at me and leers. He never moves nor makes a sound, but he is always there when the sun goes down. And some nights whispering voices can be heard, and when I look around, I see a man and woman standing on the bank near me, or worse, walking through the water towards me. I know none of these are of this world, and I know equally well that they want me. They make my skin creep like spiders in my bedclothes.

One night there is a storm blowing, and I fight long and hard with my grandmother to let me forgo my duty down at the dock. It is already eerily dark out because of the clouds. I beg and whine and threaten, but finally my grandmother shouts me down and calls me names and tells me that if my father drowns trying to dock his boat, it will be all my fault and so will the abject poverty that will follow his loss. She hands me a lantern, shoves me out the door, and slams it in my face. I walk down to the dock wailing in anger and fear.

The creepy little boat and it's leering occupant are already there when I assume my post, sitting perfectly still in the water while waves rage all around. Groaning voices are in the air, and the ghostly couple are already out in the water up to their shoulders, reaching toward me. I can't see my father's boat anywhere, and there's no way of knowing when he will arrive home. The dock pitches under me as I stand there crying in terror, and I cling to a rotten post for support. I look up to the house, but it looks so far away and closed to me, offering no safety. When I look back at the river, the ghostly couple are right there, their hands on the edge of the platform, their mouths hanging open. When the waves lift the dock, they heave at it, seeming to laugh at my fear. Tree branches whip back and forth as the wind intensifies, and finally, after a number of tries at it, the waves and the ghostly hands manage to tear the dock away and flip me into the water. I hold on to one side of the loose dock, trying to keep my limbs away from the wraiths that are in the water with me, just a few feet away. There is an iron hook on the dock that has come loose from the ring that holds it to the supporting posts, and I brace myself as well as I can against the muddy bottom and try to bring the two together again. I come tantalyzingly close a few times, but the waves are too strong. I keep losing my grip on the solid post, and losing track of which way is up and home, and which way is the rushing river. Exhaustion finally overtakes me, and I slip under the surface. The last thing I see is the dock over my head, cutting me off from the air.

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.

Another Nuclear Apocalypse

My family and I are preparing for a farm-country fall fair or something, collecting bushel baskets in the pickup and carrying around armloads of pies. The fair is a big outdoor event, with a number of tents and trucks parked all over a field. Hundreds of people are socializing happily and eating well.

Then news comes over the radio that nuclear war has broken out. The news spreads fast through the crowd and the mood becomes sombre. People stand around their vehicles listening to the reports. After a short time has passed, the voice on the radio starts listing places that have been targeted and we hear with horror that a bomb will explode very near us in only a few minutes. People scramble to collect their children and find shelter, but we are in the middle of a giant field with only tents and trucks around us, and so all anyone can do is huddle on the grass and wait. A man near me asks me to look after his son if he dies.

Presently the bomb explodes. It's very hot and bright and skin burns. Everyone knows to wait for the big wind; it comes after a few seconds, and all the tents and some of the trucks fly away, spinning along the ground.

The man beside me has died. The boy and I get up and go looking for other survivors among flapping bits of tent and overturned vehicles. After walking only a few metres, we see three strange grey machines in a row, each with two green lights for eyes. They are apparently military machines - they see anything moving as the enemy. They fire on us three times. The boy is hit and dies; I crawl back and lie there among all the dead and wounded. My sister finds me there; she is unhurt and is walking through the crowd trying to help where she can. She brings me all the dying children to hold until they die. After a few hours I am surrounded by forlorn little bodies. I get up and limp around looking for more survivors.

There are other machines arriving which also kill everything that moves, this time big truckosaurus-like things that chase people down and chew them up. I have to hide behind concrete barricades and even crawl under heaps of detritus to escape from them.

Relief doesn't come. People go into the forest and start acting all feral. At one point some others and I have to stay up a tree for days to escape cannibals, who eventually kill each other. Some people band together and decide to build a stockaded town. The interior is all broken up into apartments.

Finally, somehow, I get back to Grandma's house in the city. I hide in the basement crawlspace behind the water heater until others from the family arrive - Grandma, Mom, my sister and my cousin. Some semblance of normalcy has returned to society. We take turns keeping watch out the back door, and the front is barricaded. For a while it's winter, with huge drifts of snow in the backyard, but eventually spring comes. I spend some time telling Mom about the horrible things that happened after the bomb. In my mind I keep hearing happy songs about flowers and sunshine, trying to cheer myself up.

I go out walking behind the house and see sculpted cherry trees in blossom. Some of the branches have been packed into a sort of transparent plastic rectangle, making a sign that looks like it's been carved out of blossoms. Petals are falling out the bottom of the sign. There is a drift of petals under the tree, and I am so in need of comfort that I roll in the pile of petals like a dog in garbage.

While stuffing my hair with petals, I hear an ambulance siren very nearby. It sounds like it's going to pass the house but stops before I can see it. The siren changes to music,and I smile because it's one of the happy songs I cheered myself up with during the terrible times. Then that song ends and another of my happy songs comes on. It's too much of a coincidence, and I sprint around the house, trailing petals, to see the source of the music.

There's a van parked beside Grandma's house. It's not an ambulance but has a siren and loudspeakers attached to it. There's a man standing beside the van. It takes me a while to recognize him, but then I see he is one of the bomb survivors/forest people. He was severely traumatised by the, er, trauma, and I had thought he was insane, but he has recovered and now lives in the van. He is very different than he was before the bomb, very nervous, but he is a whole person. I am very happy to see him, and can't stop patting him on the arm and complementing his cool van.

Black Powder

On a cruise ship one night, snow begins to fall out of the darkness, and some of the children on board go out onto the decks to play. The snow is so thin that it disappears under their feet, leaving dark little foot-shaped marks.

Then, as they stomp and jump in the snow, black things peel off the bottoms of their feet and float in the air like jellyfish. They are crisp little parachutes, crinkled at the edges and slightly stiff, like paper. They are alive.

More people come out to see the parachutes as they drift in a manner not at all random. They are drawn to people, bumping into legs and faces, and just as the people are becoming disturbed by their strange movement, the parachutes are joined by something else: swarms of black bats that come out of the dark, clinging with claws to whomever they touch.

Everyone the bats touch, changes. They turn into ghosts, and if you look a ghost in the eyes, you become one too. Panic ensues, and people run for the glass doors. Some get in with bats clinging to them. Once they have changed, the bats crumble to black powder on the floor, and the ghosts stroll dreamily around the ship, looking just like regular people until you look into their eyes.

A day goes by. People are hiding from ghosts and one another all over the ship. I walk around, staring at my shoes and calling, "Who's there?" whenever I see something moving. Anyone who answers is still a person.

The ship's pilot, thankfully, is still at his post and is taking us toward land, but night falls once more before we get there. Black winged gargoyles thump against windows wherever there is glass. In the morning, a small group of people pick their way carefully to a gangway, jump overboard, and swim the short distance to dock.