Thursday, August 11, 2005

A futuristic dream I had in May


I lived in the future, which was apparent because there were moving conveyor belts for sidewalks. I was walking and suddenly I stopped and grabbed this tiny old woman (I think she was Chinese?) and started running with her towards “the edge.” The people of this land had a very fast, very beautiful sunrise, and not everybody got to see it all the time. Only if you were close enough to the edge, did you get to see it. So there was always this mad rush. The edge was just the edge of land. But the sunrise happened at the end of the water, which we thought was the end of the world. Also, it was never really dark. There was all this artificial light and the sun would just rise and set really fast. It was always a grayish daylight. I had grabbed the old woman because she was so slow, I figured she never got to see the sunrise. I thought I was doing her this huge favor by running her over to it. But we were too late. I decided, really quickly, that I wasn’t giving up, and I wanted this old woman to see a sunrise before she died, so I ran down the cliff and stole a boat and started paddling furiously towards the horizon; tracking the sunrise down. All the people on shore were shouting and making this huge deal, because it was very illegal and unheard of and dangerous to leave the land. Then we weren’t in a boat anymore, but just swimming. I was trying to keep all my stuff afloat (two big plastic bags full of stuff) while I helped this old woman swim. The water was getting very stormy and it started raining. She was really scared and weak, and she couldn’t swim. Suddenly we “heard” that there was a tornado heading our way. I told her that was propaganda. She said no it wasn’t, so to make her feel better, I started swimming back towards the land. But we were really far out and I couldn’t see the land anymore. Then I saw the tornado, coming from the direction of the land. It was really thick and dangerous looking. We started swimming away from it. Then there was a new small island ahead of us. We pulled ourselves on shore and started looking for shelter from the storm, really desperately. This was all happening very fast. As soon as we were on the island, the old woman became younger and a different person, but I don’t know who. We were ducking the wind, running under rock ledges, and trying to find places that were low and covered. The other person ran ahead of me down a hill and I called out to him. (Now it was a him.) I saw that there were hundreds of these very sick, leper-like refugees at the bottom of the hill. They looked like zombies and were all huddled underneath this cement boardwalk (A little like the Brooklyn Promenade) that reached over the whole beach, all the way around the island. The idea was you couldn’t touch the refugees, and my friend touched them as soon as he got down the hill. He was dead immediately and disappeared from the dream. I huddled somewhere alone until the storm passed. Then the dream "cut" to months later. I had set up residence on this island. It was a leper island. I was the only person who didn’t have leprosy on the island. The reason nobody else came there is because the lepers were all on the beach; the first thing you saw. So everybody approached the beach and then thought “woop, leper beach!” and turned around. Somebody had banished them to the outer reaches of the island and they had never wandered back in. I had set up this sort of “medicine woman” station for myself. I wasn’t touching them still, but I coaxed them back onto the rest of the island, and we had a whole community. I was just treating the pain from the leprosy, but wasn’t able to actually cure it. Then I discovered that the leprosy was getting worse and it was starting to kill children. Suddenly this real medicine woman (dressed like a pioneer with flasks and such) arrived on the island, and found a miracle cure. The cure was she simply staunched the original “wound” by cutting it off and burning the cut-off ends.

3 comments:

emily said...

Last night I dreamed I was "intertubing" in one of the lakes when suddenly it was winter and my boyfriend couldn't remeber my name, nor could he say it over the howling wind and sleet.

Sooz said...

-interofficing
-innertubing

An interoffice communication is between two employees. An inner tube comes from the inner layer of a tire. I think.

emily said...

dream land