Go North for Freedom, part 2

I fall in love with a man. He's not glamourous or perfect in any way, just a nerdy looking guy with a blue collar job. We decide to move up to the Yukon and set up housekeeping, so we load into an old Cutlass Supreme and point it north. it's already winter when we leave and there's snow on the road.

For a Canadian road trip it's a romantic experience; the truck stops are charmingly gritty and the parkas are toasty warm on the inside. We make out in parking lots a fair amount. By the time we pull in to our destination, a fair-sized northern town, the car is loaded with supplies and we have had a big adventure we will always remember.

Then we settle down to sensible Northern living in a modular house made out of two old shipping containers. My husband and I both work for the local transit company, him as a vehicle mechanic and me as a dispatcher. Sometimes my job involves knocking truly gigantic icicles off the doorways of the building I work in. My husband has a hobby that involves multiple vats of boiling liquids kept in a part of the garage, metallurgy maybe? It's delightfully geeky.

We still make out in the chilly garage sometimes, because we just can't help it.

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.

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.

This morning I dreamed that I was on a river cruise from Central Africa to Scandinavia. My sisters and I swam in the river and watched the water change as we went north - crocodiles and water snakes giving way to trout and kingfishers. I remember trying to recall the names of the countries we passed through on the map, but couldn't; can anyone remember that kind of symbolic detail while dreaming?



Today a twofer. Driving past the PNE yesterday I suddenly remembered a dream I'd had a few days ago, where in they had built a fancy new big ol metal roller coaster at the park. Not only was this roller coaster big and awesome, it had an amazing feature: the train was designed to detach itself from the track for part of the route like a caterpillar spinning a cocoon - connected to the track at the front only, and the rest of the length whipping around in the air as it sped along.

Dontcha hate that, when you dream of something cool, and only become aware later that it doesn't exist in the real world? Happens to me all the time.

The neighbourhood is changing

There was a bit of time travel in this dream: two eras of my life sitting site by side on the landscape.

At the beginning of my dream, I am back at mom & dad's, painfully depressed and wondering how I got back here. It's the suburban bungalow where I lived (miserably) from age 10 to 14, in my room in the basement, on a tree-lined street. The house is full of mom and dad's friends, a family reunion or something ... then my sister arrives! I go out and meet her in the driveway, and there's also a kitten or two out there on the lawn, one of them white with flowers on its collar.

My sister is, of course, as uncomfortable at mom and dad's house as I am, so we grab umbrellas and go out for a walk. I offer to show her around town, as I now live in a different city. I suggest we go to my place, where we can visit with the ancient cat we had as kids, but she says no, she doesn't want mom to be able to find her. So instead we just walk around the block. On the corner, we pass the squashed-flat body of the white kitten with flowers in its collar, run over in the gutter.

It turns out that my apartment building is directly behind my childhood home. We get to it by crossing an alley. I decide it would be fun to show sis the weird shop in the basement, a high-end automatic vendor where well-off tenants can buy $50 steaks and gourmet salads and basically anything they want out of an automatic dispenser machine that takes credit cards. So we go in the back door of the building and find ourselves in a concrete passageway that branches off in several directions, as if there were also a subway stop under there. We try to get to the shop, but there is a security guard who wasn't there before and he stops us. I have forgotten my keys, so he doesn't believe I live in the building. He sends us away.

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.

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.