Dream 3 - Parka

Your dreams this week were bright and plastic. You wanted to fight, when perhaps it would have been wiser to run.

You’re in a city that’s all tall walls    and narrow alleyways, built on a rocky hill.   It’s sunny, and the sky is so blue it’s almost white.

You’re maybe 13, 14 years old,   and you feel this because the energy you have to go looking for things   isn’t careful or polite, but brash and demanding. You wander with purpose past giant murals     that extend for at least three floors before being punctured by windows, and strung together with laundry. The murals are of long,   blocky shapes, like stone illuminations painted in pink, red, and orange. You zip through the city with wheels as shoes, seeing no one at all,     but knowing that they are all inside, and that this is not usual or concerning, only that you are not from here and that your customs are different.

You reach the top of a plateau that overlooks the city. From up here,   the city looks like it’s made of plastic tubes. You see bright green and red containers on the roofs,    water tanks and waterpark slides.

Your friends appear behind you.  They’re a kind of gang, 6 or 7 kids, operating under an understood code of disrespect for rules. The leader looks at you with a severe but trusting expression. Their eyes are squinting up at you from under a garish bucket hat.   You are more joval than them, so you express that you are happy to be back, and they nod at you solemnly while other members talk amongst themselves further back on the plateau. As the leader holds you by the shoulder, you sense that you have a large tattoo of an animal on your back, which indicates your special role within this gang of kids.

Later, you are inside    with the same gang of kids. It’s an empty apartment with a round balcony, the windows of which creak in the wind. It’s been decked out with scavenged decorations. The sun is setting. The floors are carpeted, but there is no furniture apart from old mattresses in the corners. The streets below are still empty.

All of you are camped here, sitting in small groups and talking strategy. You drift to talk to the various members whom you know, but ultimately they are more familiar with one another than they are with you. Someone is making food, and comes to serve it. As you all sit on the floor and eat, serving directly from the pot onto mismatched plates.

The reason this camp is so new is that the last one was found out. It was a very different place, a series of yellow catwalks built up in the courtyards of where these kids live, connecting them all across the city so that they could more easily meet up. But an official’s car had started parking underneath it trying to catch suspicious activity. Occasionally he would get out of the car and set fire to a portion of the system. You understand this is what you’re here for. You have the ability to transform into something mighty, and fight back. That is why you have the tattoo, that is why you are not entirely part of this gang. You’re not sure how well your transformation will go, but you feel more resolve than you do fear.

This next dream has you on a mission. You’re hired by some kind of organization that throws you into different environments to intervene. You have a uniform, and you are trained. You’re sitting in the back of a car with yellow and red leather seats, being driven by some faceless employee to the location of your next mission. You have a dog with you, bounding on the seat next to you, and you recall having to grab his snout and tap him on the nose with your fist to get him to calm down.

You’re dropped off on the edge of a mining canyon, surrounded by a chain link fence. A large corporate structure follows the slope down to the bedrock. You know that at the center of this operation is some kind of rocket or electric tower, meant to destroy the world. It’s on its way to being armed, and it’s your job to stop it. In this process, the dog is completely essential.

You follow the dog around the fence as it sniffs out an entrance. You climb over supply pipes of various sizes until you see a tunnel dug under the fence that is large enough for the dog, but not for you. You and the dog have to separate.

It takes you awhile to get in on your own, too long in fact. Days have passed, and something is bound to have gone wrong. You climb down a ladder in the facility, disguised as a man in a large black coat and brimmed hat. There is a lowly guard with you, someone young and stupid enough to believe you when you say you have good reason to be here. He’s taking you to meet with the important of higher ups. You make your way across industrial catwalks, mining the boy for information, and trying not to raise his suspicion. Around you you’re already seeing the various levers you will need to deactivate the central machine. They’re spread out all through the facility, on opposite ends of giant cylindrical rooms, and in small nooks of the service tunnels. They glow a conspicuous purple light.

You’re here late at night, so no one is around to spot you being given this impromptu tour.  The final room you’re taken into opens up onto the sky. It looks like an emptied nuclear cooling tower with its inner walls crudely painted purple. At the center is this destructive tower you’ve come to stop. It looks like a spaceship, a water tower and a power line pole all at once. As you inspect the area, the guard shows you a digital clipboard with the code that runs the tower. It looks like slavic embroidery patterns, flashing rapidly across the screen. Unfortunately, you also know that these patterns could only have been extracted from your dog, as they are part of its biology. You know this will have caused it tremendous pain, if not death. The dog was probably caught minutes after having entered the facility, and has been kept here since.

You’re taken by a wave of anger, and in a few seconds you make a decision. You lean down to look the guard in the face and you threaten him, blowing your cover totally open. It will only be seconds before he calls whatever guards are left in the building, and you are eager to fight whoever might come.

This last dream feels fragmented. You remember walking through a forest of glass panes, with a group. All of you are on the backs of fantastical predators, with fangs and claws and fur that seems to shift as they amble, and colors that would make anyone believe they are spirits rather than beasts. You’re in an unknown land, leading this group through danger which you know will come from the surfaces around you. The beasts you ride are your greatest guarantee to safety, and luckily they are beholden to you.

As you reach the end of one of these wide, glass hallways, you start to make out what is being projected onto that far away black wall. It’s a giant video of one of the members of your group, an older, skinny gentleman who has offered nothing but calm and respectful advice throughout this journey. He’s leaning against a vintage car near the porch of a house that reminds you of Louisiana, smoking in silence. At times the camera cuts between still shots of his pensive face in profile, and his bony hand raising and lifting the cigarette to his lips. You turn around to ask, but he has no recollection of this moment.

Next, you remember teaching a child and its mother a hand symbol meant to protect them. You’re sitting cross-legged at the bottom of a light well about as large as an elevator. The walls are smooth concrete, and rise up 5-7 meters before reaching the air. The symbol is simple. It consists in making an ok sign with your fingers, and raising it to your forehead. At first it feels like nothing, but in times of trouble, it will give them understanding they otherwise would not have.

What comes next feels like a memory. You come across a farm that has been abandoned for years. Lost in an infinite prairie of grass with no trees, it makes you realize that what you’ve been dreaming of before has felt new, generated, or perhaps even fake. This was the before. But already the sky is like a mirror, and reminds of the flat surface the world will become.

Inside the farm is an elaborate ball pit with inflated walls tracing out different sections. Molecular models hang from the ceiling. You go looking for a control room, stepping around the sides of the ball pits to avoid having to wade through plastic balls. You get the sense this place was once a temple, and has been abandoned. In the back of the building you find an grandiose spiral staircase that will take you to a better understanding of what this place is, but you do not remember reaching the top.

You remember a story being told as you look around the temple in the barn. It’s a mythology that will result in the world you were in earlier, a veneration of screens and stars, an apocalypse that isn’t destructive, but that will be so radically different that everything you know in this world will disappear.