by odradek » Wed Mar 22, 2017 6:36 pm
Parts of this dream are missing. I had one piece come back to me as I was riding home from work.
I went to the pool to get some extra swimming in, but it was open swim and the lane lines weren't in. A girl in the pool, someone I apparently know but did not translate to anyone in real life, pointed out that there was a side pool, next to the trampoline, that was one line wide and almost full length. shorter than full length, but also long enough that it wasn't noticeable. It was too narrow for two, so I had to take turns doing laps with one of my college teammates who was a breaststroker and in dreamland had gained a significant amount of weight. At some point far before I had gotten a decent work out in, we were told to get out of the pool for some reason. The pool featured a glass door with a panic exit that looked out over the planes and far away plateaus and even more distant mountains and the sky was darkening to a sickly gray, the wind was picking up and we could see in the distance something like a tornado made out of what might as well have been the line piece from tetris all stacked up parallel to and scuttling across the near horizon and...doing something to it.
"Don't open the door," warned someone who seemed like an authority, but they were just a low level assistant manager at the pool or something. I was some kind of authority figure, somehow, and knew not to open the door. But it didn't matter, whatever was happening outside was not to be stopped by the door. It soon began to affect the swimmers, person by person, as they started to complain. It was palpable. The storm was a material transformation of a person's attitude to one of resignation, something like a complete unwillingness or disbelief in the ability to change anything, even themselves. The sky grew darker. There were now windows in the pool and we had a great view of the world giving up on itself, just as the pool-goers were doing. I left. Some got on me, but not enough to completely drag me down. I was still alive.
Somehow I found myself on a high mountain, crossing a rope bridge over a misty gorge to a palace built into a mountain village. People lived beneath tiered gardens and ladders let you go up and down between levels. There was a view of the plains where the pool was and it was dark gray and sandy - it had consumed itself, and anyone who was down there, into pointlessness. The people of this village knew of the danger and had built a command center overlooking the world. They said, or I knew, that whatever they had built it out of could withstand whatever the storm was. Maybe. They knew what it was and they knew how to resist it but they had no interest in doing so - they instead wanted to see what happened to the world and take notes., even as the storm grew. Deep in the cellar, where the storm was slowly climbing up the cliff, was a guy in a cell who had been exposed to whatever it was and had beaten it. He came out more determined than ever, he said he knew how to stop it but he needed to go to where the storm had started. Its strength would be too much as it was but there was no time, no time at all, we had to do this but nobody would listen to him.
I turned off my phone alarm that was set for 6:40. The clock radio went off at 6:20 and it was nothing but hissing. Not radio static, a foreboding hiss. Toggling the alarm setting found different kinds of hissing, until it tuned into a station where a man read off things that had been lost.