Participation at last!

We had never seen anything like it before. I had no idea what this being was made of. It was in the same room as we were, and we couldn’t see it at all. Then one of us stretched out her hand. It broke the vertical surface of some till-then invisible liquid. There was nothing that we could see that contained it. The hand moved through air, and then, creating ripples, into this thing. She took a step forward, immersing her face, and started to blow bubbles.

This was when the thing was friendly.

By the end, we found ourselves running up a steeply inclined hallway, in some kind of weird hotel. We were holding bundles of papers in our arms: printouts, notebooks, reports, scribbled notes… But it was there, trying to stop us. We couldn’t see it until it let fall from itself litres of water at a time, which soaked the papers we were holding. We were suddenly struggling with far heavier loads.

When we got to the top, and rounded the corner, we found ourselves in an empty restaurant type lounge, the sunken dining area of which was covered in about a foot of water. The temperature in there was falling rapidly. We had to hurry, throwing all the papers – everything that anyone had written about or because of this creature – into the water, before it froze. Only then was the danger removed.


Three of us were walking through the wasteland at night. All around us was an industrial debris-strewn landscape of grey. We were walking along near the top of a ridge, which peaked to our left. We were just walking, but I wanted to leave that place.

I climbed to the top of the ridge. Far beyond, I could see a smooth inwardly sloping tower, with a beam of red light stretching upward from its top. I moved to walk towards it, but my companions told me not to. It was someplace we couldn’t go.

I noticed a line along the top of the ridge. On the other side of it, a fine grey dust had accumulated on the ground. I picked up a rock and threw it in front of me. When it crossed that line along the ridge, a small distortion spread in the air around it, like a ripple. When it struck the ground, a red glow surrounded it for a moment.

I jumped through, and though I created a bigger disturbance when I crossed over, I didn’t feel a thing. When I landed, the red glow started at my feet and climbed halfway up my legs before dissipating. I half expected to start becoming invisible or to disintegrate and become more of this grey powder that had cushioned my landing, but nothing really happened. I said farewell to my friends, and started walking towards the tower.

When I got there, I found an entrance at the base that led to curved stairs down below. Not far down these stairs, I came out into a semi-crowded sort of subway or tram station. I got on one of these trains just before it headed out.

Once outside, we were on streetcar rails set in a busy city street. Ahead of us, a large bridge spanned a river that flowed through the city. As we were crossing the bridge, I realized that this wasn’t where I wanted to go, so I got off once we got to the other side. I was still trying to find some sort of “way out” (way out of what, though?), and I noticed a big cargo yard next to the bridge and the river. In this yard were many containers of the sort used on trucks, trains, and boats. I wanted to explore, but along the guardrail on the side of the road was an electric fence. So I walked along the roadside across the bridge, until I finally found my way back to the subway station.

Inside, one storey above the platform level, not far from the ticket booth, was a stairway that led into the next part of the building, which appeared to house a school. However, the stairway had a metal gate in place, so that no one could move between the school and the station.

I was standing so that I could see the landing on the floor above in that stairwell, where students were going to and fro. Two of them seemed to get into some kind of altercation, which rapidly escalated to the point of one of them pulling a kitchen knife on the other. (It is probably worth noting that the guy who pulled the knife was a Frosh here this past year.) I looked around, but nobody in the station seemed to have noticed. Frantic, I watched the events unfold. The two struggled together, the knife-wielder slowly closing the distance between his weapon and his opponent’s face. Suddenly, in a flurry of motion, they were apart, then the attacker started slicing the other guy’s head. At one point he seemed to be trying to cut his ear off. I screamed for people to stop them.

I don’t know what happened then. I can’t remember a thing.

The next thing I do remember is making my way around to the other side of the station with a group of people. We had some kind of lighting kit with us, with a light and collapsible parabolic reflector on a pole. We found a large stairwell that extended for about five storeys above us and at least as many below.

We needed to fix the light, though. I started fiddling with the cables, attaching another light. When I went to join the cables, I found that they weren’t power cables, but RCA audio/video cables. When I looked again, there were two microphones, not two lights, attached to the pole.

We went down one flight of stairs, stepping past some rather bohemian-looking guys and girls half-sprawled out on the lower landing, and found ourselves in a vast underground excavation project. It appeared to be the construction of a new subway line. We weren’t the only people there. There were lots of construction workers, but also just as many people – just ordinary people – down there taking tours. I passed the guy who works the door at my college’s pub on Thursdays, and we greeted each other friendlily.

A train came, and a bunch of us got on. Eventually, we came out above ground, and when I looked around, I found that I was travelling with my family now. We were on our way to a movie theatre. My sister was saying something about the (to her mind) excessive profanity in entertainment these days, and some twentysomething guy started to make fun of her. I told him that things were cool, and just to leave her alone. Then we arrived at the station by the theatre.

I don’t know what we were going to see.