Last night's dream
March 7th, 2008 10:41![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mc776I was on the run. Couldn't stay in one place too long, always had to be on the lookout. Not sure who it was, even then I think: just some ominous threat, perhaps from some aggrieved colleagues or friends-of-a-friend, nothing necessarily lethal but bad enough that I'd like very much to avoid them.
But somehow I couldn't leave this mall.
It was a vast, unbounded thing of wild swooshing escalators and round multi-leveled plazas that looked like a woman's cursive turning into the Tower of Babel. It was brilliantly lit by a thousand shiny surfaces in the daytime, in colourless contrast to the fluorescent low ceilings in the back passages and fire exits that seemed only to lead back into some other part of the mall. I could only assume that the place was finite, as I had repeatedly gone through the indoor garden and sporting footwear shop a few times, as well as this restaurant I was sitting in. Well, the one I'm in now, anyway, after the incident at the place with the fries.
"You want FRIES, huh!? Is that IT!? Do you have any IDEA who the FUCK you are!?"
I got the fries anyway. Not sure if I paid before being forced out by the server's enraged sneer. Anyway, here they had poutine too, and I think a mocha.
After a few minutes of eating and glancing nervously around me, I was on the move again.
Life went on. The days and weeks passed in a blur - well, more of a scene-shifting fade-out, as my dreams often go without somehow making me aware of the fact of it being a dream. During that time I got used to the way the mall worked: escape was impossible, but the network of back halls and tunnels could take you almost anywhere you wanted. The architecture constantly shifted when not in one's presence, stabilizing only while being perceived or consciously thought about. And on my runs I began noticing more than just the shoppers and the menace of my pursuers.
They were warriors, I think, remnant spirits adapted into modernity from an age long forgotten by the bulk of us common folk. They were here intermittently, poking about the puzzling non-Euclidean maze as I was, though with an air of faded familiarity that I could not ascertain. Sometimes we even spoke, and over time I got to know more of their background, and their purpose.
I learned of the old wars and perpetual conflicts that formed this part of the world, and the mall built over it, in tiny but faintly recognizable fragments, pieced together from odds and ends of things told in that way that things come out when confidence and privilege are eroded by the norms of casual banter. There was an underlying layer to everything here, of which the actual levels of the mall and the uncanny fluorescent tunnels were merely a crude metaphor. Some could not cross into certain layers, while others could not leave certain layers while still being present in the one they wanted to use. I seemed to be in the latter category, spanning several at any given time: as such, I was constantly a conspicuous target.
Some time passed, and I was on the run again. But this was no longer the merely social problems of old, but an actual threat to life and freedom that I sensed; yet somehow it felt no more daunting than before. Of course, being unarmed at the point I ran anyway.
For the first time something managed to follow me into one of the fluorescent corridors. This time a fire exit lay at the very end, with nothing else but cracked yellow-white wall in between. I took the exit...
...and stepped out into the ruined city. The warriors stood there, in all their varied genders and ethnicities, but dressed and armed as modern soldiers in a desert. I took my rifle, adjusted my helmet, and joined them. They faced off against a lone figure with a bulbous blue-grey head trimmed with brown veins that looked like pulsating gnarled roots. A thousand small monsters surrounded the figure, and as I projected my mind into the buildings beyond I saw more such figures standing at the ready, all around our little group. I felt the figure before us gloat in triumph, and for a moment I saw what lay beyond the city.
We were on top of a grey plate of rock, stranded in void and humming with supernatural ability to retain life. This power was what they were after. And two vast dragons, one red and one blue, swooped in and threw down blue and red fire onto the worldplate, scouring it of life anywhere the flames touched. And as I returned to my own perception and the figure before us signalled and the thousand monsters surged forth in their assault and we raised our weapons...
...the alarm went off.
But somehow I couldn't leave this mall.
It was a vast, unbounded thing of wild swooshing escalators and round multi-leveled plazas that looked like a woman's cursive turning into the Tower of Babel. It was brilliantly lit by a thousand shiny surfaces in the daytime, in colourless contrast to the fluorescent low ceilings in the back passages and fire exits that seemed only to lead back into some other part of the mall. I could only assume that the place was finite, as I had repeatedly gone through the indoor garden and sporting footwear shop a few times, as well as this restaurant I was sitting in. Well, the one I'm in now, anyway, after the incident at the place with the fries.
"You want FRIES, huh!? Is that IT!? Do you have any IDEA who the FUCK you are!?"
I got the fries anyway. Not sure if I paid before being forced out by the server's enraged sneer. Anyway, here they had poutine too, and I think a mocha.
After a few minutes of eating and glancing nervously around me, I was on the move again.
Life went on. The days and weeks passed in a blur - well, more of a scene-shifting fade-out, as my dreams often go without somehow making me aware of the fact of it being a dream. During that time I got used to the way the mall worked: escape was impossible, but the network of back halls and tunnels could take you almost anywhere you wanted. The architecture constantly shifted when not in one's presence, stabilizing only while being perceived or consciously thought about. And on my runs I began noticing more than just the shoppers and the menace of my pursuers.
They were warriors, I think, remnant spirits adapted into modernity from an age long forgotten by the bulk of us common folk. They were here intermittently, poking about the puzzling non-Euclidean maze as I was, though with an air of faded familiarity that I could not ascertain. Sometimes we even spoke, and over time I got to know more of their background, and their purpose.
I learned of the old wars and perpetual conflicts that formed this part of the world, and the mall built over it, in tiny but faintly recognizable fragments, pieced together from odds and ends of things told in that way that things come out when confidence and privilege are eroded by the norms of casual banter. There was an underlying layer to everything here, of which the actual levels of the mall and the uncanny fluorescent tunnels were merely a crude metaphor. Some could not cross into certain layers, while others could not leave certain layers while still being present in the one they wanted to use. I seemed to be in the latter category, spanning several at any given time: as such, I was constantly a conspicuous target.
Some time passed, and I was on the run again. But this was no longer the merely social problems of old, but an actual threat to life and freedom that I sensed; yet somehow it felt no more daunting than before. Of course, being unarmed at the point I ran anyway.
For the first time something managed to follow me into one of the fluorescent corridors. This time a fire exit lay at the very end, with nothing else but cracked yellow-white wall in between. I took the exit...
...and stepped out into the ruined city. The warriors stood there, in all their varied genders and ethnicities, but dressed and armed as modern soldiers in a desert. I took my rifle, adjusted my helmet, and joined them. They faced off against a lone figure with a bulbous blue-grey head trimmed with brown veins that looked like pulsating gnarled roots. A thousand small monsters surrounded the figure, and as I projected my mind into the buildings beyond I saw more such figures standing at the ready, all around our little group. I felt the figure before us gloat in triumph, and for a moment I saw what lay beyond the city.
We were on top of a grey plate of rock, stranded in void and humming with supernatural ability to retain life. This power was what they were after. And two vast dragons, one red and one blue, swooped in and threw down blue and red fire onto the worldplate, scouring it of life anywhere the flames touched. And as I returned to my own perception and the figure before us signalled and the thousand monsters surged forth in their assault and we raised our weapons...
...the alarm went off.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: March 7th, 2008 19:39 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: March 8th, 2008 05:47 (UTC)Nothing "on-screen" anyway.
(no subject)
Date: March 7th, 2008 19:40 (UTC)a woman's cursive turning into the Tower of Babel
I like *_*
I learned of the old wars ... constantly a conspicuous target.
Want to play.
We were on top ... we raised our weapons...
Want to play x2.