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.

Going All the Way

It was a good night. Shuffling down the street, Tom knew this. It was one of the few things he did know at that moment. Everything else was lost in the haze of the evening’s indulgences.

Those lights were so bright – he hadn’t noticed ever before. And the shadows they cast, they seemed alive. He knew them all by name.

There had been friends, drinks, girls, more and more…

The street stretched on in front of him like a tall hallway, its ceiling lost in shadow. He could feel himself moving along it, but nothing seemed to get any closer. Tom couldn’t tell if he’d been walking for a few minutes or a few hours. That really didn’t bother him.

What bothered him was the fact that he felt himself coming down. When he’d started walking, he’d stood hundreds of feet above the cracked cement, and was still able to count every chip in its surface. Now he felt himself diminish, receding towards the ground, which seemed to blur and become an abstraction.

Fuck that noise. He pulled his last joint of the evening out of his pocket along with his lighter. He’d been saving it for a good time, but this was a necessity. When he got where he was going (where was he going, anyway?) he could always roll a few more.

The alley to his right beckoned. Taking off his backpack, he sat down and lit up. Shit, that was really harsh. He had just the thing for that. He reached into his backpack, pulling a bottle of beer from it. Twist the cap, tip it back. That made two left.

Like the passing of his own personal civilization, Tom left behind the telltale traces to be swept up in the flood of time: an empty bottle with the butt of a joint in the bottom. And, a few feet away, a twist-cap.

But he didn’t go back the way he came. At the other end of the alley, he saw a subway entrance. Fuck yeah. Sure as hell beat walking in the wind. Making his way towards it, he tried to remember which one it was, and which way he needed to go. But he couldn’t quite tell where he was, so he shuffled the question off to the side of his mind.

Down the stairs, down the halls, towards the noise, and onto the platform, where a train was just opening its doors. He made it on just before they closed and found a seat. As the subway began to move, he saw that his car was empty.

Where was he going, anyway? And where was everyone? And… had he even paid a fare? He must have, but for the life of him, he couldn’t recall having done it. The train steadily picked up speed. Head spinning more and more, he managed to form one last thought – this is not so good.

Black.

Up. Through the open door. Onto a deserted, semi-lit platform. Fall. Puke. Better. Up again.

He found himself walking down a hall. Where to, he had long ago given up wondering. It was lit by intermittently spaced naked bulbs directly above. Then from up ahead came the sound of footsteps. In heels.

The door at the end of the hall opened. There she stood, framed and silhouetted.

“Hey.”

“Oh,” he managed, “Hey…”

She paused, tilted her head. “You lost?”

He shrugged. “Yeah. Whatever, though.”

“The party’s just down that way,” she said, with a nod of her head to the hallway behind her. “Come with me.”

He made his way towards her, knowing she studied his every step.

“I’m Amy,” she told him, extending her arms towards him.

“Tom,” he said, returning the hug.

“Do you have anything to drink, Tom?”

Wordlessly, he slung his bag off his shoulders and unzipped it, revealing the two remaining bottles. Amy smiled at him and pulled both out. He couldn’t help but be infected by that smile, and replied with a grin. He put his bag back on, and she handed him a drink. They opened the bottles, tossed the caps, began walking, and drank.

After a moment, he laughed softly. She looked at him questioningly.

“What?”

He shook his head, smiling. “Oh, no, never mind.”

“What?!” She was laughing now, grabbing his free hand.

“Hey!”

She led him through a side door.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“The party can wait for a few minutes, don’t you think?”

have you any dreams you'd like to sell?

I often dream movies. In shots. In such cases, I am not a participant; I am a disembodied observer.

A group of pranksters were setting up a slingshot stretched across a town street. When they had tied both ends to lampposts, they pulled it back and launched this great gob of goo into the crowd walking down the street away from them. Chaos. Everyone began running towards the castle on the point beyond the town. People were running along the top of the aqueduct that lead to it, against the flow of water.

The slingshot people started launching boulders up onto the aqueduct, whose momentum carried them up the incline to the castle.

Out on the water, the pirates were watching. They made their way past the castle on the point, watching everything unfold, and headed into the bay.

In another place...

It was a very baroque room. It had character, of a studied, regal, and somewhat menacing kind.

It also had a wall that wasn't.

Where the rest of the room was ornate, this wall was conspicuously blank. Defying all expectations of what the room should be like, it was as if this wall was not a part of the room at all. Perhaps that was the best description of it.

It seemed to those who had gathered there that something had sliced through the middle of the room, leaving this blank grey surface as a divider. No one went near it, they just stayed by the opposite wall. Then someone decided to try to bounce a ball off it.

The ball simply passed through the surface without a sound. Wordlessly, the person produced a second ball, and tied a length of string to it. He threw the ball, holding on to the end of the string. After the ball and half of the string had passed through, he gave a tug. The string remained taut and he couldn't pull any back through the wall. But he kept pulling harder and harder until it finally snapped. They all left the frayed tail end of string sticking out and never returned.