This is what I dreamt on the 21st of August.
The time is 2:28 and I feel more than a little hazy around the edges. I need a drink. My tongue is slimy but somehow I feel like my legs are quite comfortable where they are. I don’t want to move at all.
There’s a clock ticking on my desk, the kind of thing I never notice at all when the curtains aren’t drawn. Water is dripping in the drainpipe which runs down beside my window. Cars go past outside, but sporadically. People still have to get up early for work, after all. It’s only just turned Friday.
I seem recently to be having a lot of nightmares though I imagine, I hope they’re only about the distant future. There seem to be a lot of cameo atom bombs appearing now but a couple of months ago, I dreamt I bear in a biplane swooped over my garden and tried to kill my family. Tonight, it was me and my friends as implied presences camping as we did this summer. The field, though, is not the same. Neither is the convention centre down the hill. It seems somehow slicker.
My music teacher has lost an arm, the left one, above the elbow.
There is a helium explosion.
The call goes up to get back to the campsite. Our tent until now has hidden a great grey circular door into the ground. We scramble into it and shut it tight, assuming this to be a bunker. Only four of us fit inside. It’s all concrete, all dark. There are holes though, in the side of this bunker through which we can stick our bare hands to receive food.
Before the bomb hits, we can see the missile rising, wreathed in bright white. And we see the plume of grey smoke as the aftermath.
I crawl outside and the shadow of a neighbouring tent protects me from radiation.
I choose to explore.
I come across another camper who wants to fight me. He has a dog in a space suit. I see them off with a bubble gun.
At the corner of the field, at the side of a dark copse of trees, there’s a truck and a guy who reminds me of the Alpha Male character in I Am Legend. He scares me a little because I swear he’s keeping lookout only for me. I keep thinking that he’s gone, then he comes back to poke his head over the hedge. Sometimes, he has a gun as well. The gun is black.
A main road runs parallel to the field, perpendicular to the way out I seem to be planning to take.
There is another strike to come.
I somehow become lost, though not like I have lost my way, like my route no longer exists because everything around me has changed. There are more trees, dark trees. I can’t get past the camper or the space suit dog or the guy with the truck. A useless map is printed on the palm of my hand.
I wake up at 2:26 as the second missile goes up.
Twelve minutes later I am going back to sleep.
