dream and nightmare
*I’m at a party – it’s taking place in my parents house, but as I walk through the house it expands beyond the reality of what the house is. It is filled with a lot of strangers, and as I meander I see a few people I know. People I went to school with are cooking food, cleaning things up, sorting the recycling. I appreciate their help, and I move some recycling over to where I know my folks have their cans to go out. I can smell the food cooking, feel the smoke and steam from the grill when I stop to look over the shoulder of the person cooking. The dining room is 5 times the size of the actual room, the table is long, like a conference table. One friend from school is at the end of the table with a laptop – he got a call from work and has to log in to fix some things. I sit next to him and talk for a long time… the party keeps going on around us. I can feel the cool hardness of the table, it’s polished. The walls are decorated the way they were when I was 6… a fishnet across the paneling, glass floats and starfish in various spots of the net. I mention that I don’t recall volunteering my parent’s house for this, I wonder who most of these people are. We talk about work and school and travel.
*I’m watching machines becoming self aware. I see a large cruise ship being engulfed by a what looks like a giant space ship… it is a crane with long flexible arms that come down and wrap around the ship. It is pulled from the water, the people are pulled out of the ship, and I’m watching the formation of the matrix. I see a few people get away… they are the group who will become Morpheus and his fighters. I’m on a dock with a family, we are being escorted by businessmen. We are rich, and are not going to be plugged into the matrix… but we aren’t supposed to know about it. I see a container being offloaded, the container is filled with Japanese women and children… they’ve been brought here to be put into work camps of some kind. They are being lead out of the container by heavy chains wrapped around their wrists, in a long line. I wasn’t supposed to see them, so I pretend I didn’t. We’re on a cruise ship now… the people in charge suspect that we know what is going on, and we have to get away. I’m trying to get my family to get their stuff together… there are 4 or 5 kids, a couple of adults in our group. We aren’t fully dressed, they gave us something to change into for a formal event, but I’m saying we need to run… run now. I can hear them a few rooms away, they are talking about us. They are coming for us. I’m barefoot… I have on some kind of formal dress but I can’t find my shoes, and I don’t think I could run in them if I had them on anyway. I can feel the changes in the flooring as we run through the corridor… short indoor/outdoor carpet, cool tile, thick shag… we are trying to find an exit. We reach a set of sliding doors… they open to a deck that has no railing. I spring my arms out to stop everyone from going over the edge. If we jump, we have to clear the wake being created by the ship, or we’ll be sucked under and go through the props. I step forward, I can feel the smooth fiberglass under my feet… I peek over the edge of the ship and see the wake we have to clear, it is green with algae. I look further out and see a marsh… we are in extremely shallow water, and should be able to make it to land if we can jump hard enough. I can feel the breeze on my face, smell the salt air, feel the vibrations of the ship’s engine through the deck I’m standing on. I’m calculating how hard I need to push off with my legs to clear the wake, and wondering how the mud will feel in my toes when I land in the marsh.
