Solid Block of Ise

When I slept last night I had a dream. Towards the end of my sleep-cycle I had this disturbing dream that’s been haunting me all day.

It was a dream of ending, of destruction and violence. It was a dream about death.

It wasn’t a nightmare, since I almost never have those. I’m almost always aware of my dreams, and thus they seldom frighten me in the sense that nightmares do.

But this dream, even though it wasn’t a nightmare, was disturbing.

In it, the end of the world had come. Society had collapsed, and I roamed around the wintery darkness of a northern Sweden desolate and isolated. It was as dark as the arctic night could manage, and there were no lamps to scare it away. Houses were ruined, burned-out shells that once sheltered families. Even the winter itself was harsh and dark, not the beautiful expanses of snow that one usually associate the arctic winter with.

I saw my parents house. Like every other house it was a ruin, burned walls and wrecked memories. Long abandoned, the ruin was covered with frost. I knew this place was dangerous, and my companion –who suddenly appeared in my dream, creating that absolute continuity that every dream always has– knew this as well and drew his sidearm. Or her sidearm. I never found out the gender, the face hidden behind a mask of some kind.

Then suddenly, my dream switched to a flashback, and I found myself standing on my parents lawn, handing out automatic weapons to strangers. I realized we were getting ready to defend ourselves against some unknown threat, and I started handing out weapons faster. I didn’t know who or what the enemy was, but I knew there would be very few survivors.

Equally abrupt I realized that everyone I was handing out guns to was a child. No one was older than maybe 8 or 9 years. They cradled their gun with a desperate resolute I wished I’d never seen in the eyes of a child. They aimed their guns at an invisible enemy, reminding me of child-soldiers in Africa. In a way I guessed they were the same thing - the sandy deserts and humid jungles replaced with the arctic cold and silence of the north.

My flashback ended at the same time the children opened fire. I stood looking at the ruins of my parents house, amazed at the trees which had fallen into the ruins, connecting it with the husk of the garage in a bizarre kind of way.

Then something roared. Or actually, the sound was more like a lions roar combined with a sound of some kind of engine. In the upper harmonics a high-pitched squeal could be heard, like a pig screaming in fear. My companion turned and opened fire at something I couldn’t see. I felt a sharp pain in my back and knew that I would be dead soon.

Then everything went dark.

After that, I woke up.

License

This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 Sweden License.