My back hurts
I usually have really vivid dreams. Most of the time I forget them a few minutes after waking up. But sometimes they stick with me and I have to get them out. So I’m going to start posting them as they happen. I’m not a writer tho and I suck at grammar so sorry if you read this lol
Here is last night’s:
It was a Thursday night no different from any other. We were sunken into our cozy red couch half watching Love Is Blind and half watching tiktoks on our phones and eating chips. It was probably about 11:30 pm and we were doing the typical stall before deciding to get up and go to bed. The loud rumbling roar of a military transport plane entered the air outside. This was not unusual, we lived near the base after all. When our son was smaller he used to affectionately call them the whales of the sky on account of how enormous and gray they were. A handful each day would fly low along the side of our house getting ready to land and we could watch them from our couch through the window that sat to the left of our couch. But this plane was going the wrong direction.
A glint of light caught my eye and I glanced up to the right at the bay window that sat at the center front of our living room. I could see the plane crossing the front of our home, its light moving erratically through the blinds like a floating firefly. I stood up and walked over to get a better look. The plane’s nose was going up and down in a wave pattern like a dolphin swimming. Something was definitely wrong. Jon sensed my unease and got up to look at it too. The plane was now just at the corner of our window almost out of view when on the last upward motion it pulled back far, becoming vertical and stalled. We rushed outside expecting a plane crash and trying to assess whether we needed to help get our elderly neighbors out of their house. The plane was now over our driveway and our neighbors and was starting to fall backward onto its back. As it did the plane started to morph.
The plane maintained altitude, hovering as it widened and flattened out. It looked almost like a sea creature with skin like a tuna now, but still dark gray. Slits appeared on the bottom like little vents and it vibrated and hummed emitting thin golden waves spinning like thin shimmering ribbons evaporating into the air. We quickly went back inside trying to process what we had just seen. It was too much for our brains to process though, so we switched to something easier to latch on to and started grabbing our earthquake emergency supplies and went to wake up our kid. I told Jon we needed to leave. I had no idea what was even happening but the animal-like fear building inside of my gut was telling me we needed to get away from this thing as fast as possible. Jon hesitated, worrying that we would become a target in the car, like a little bug in the middle of a big open sidewalk. He didn’t put up much fight though when I asked him what else we should do as it felt like we were already under a giant humming shoe.
We gathered our backpacks and grabbed some food before bursting out the back door to head for our car. But we were stopped in our tracks. Our kid slammed into the back of us not expecting the abrupt stop and not seeing what lay before us causing the halt. It was our car, what was left of it. The whole car was just a mangled sunken mess of fused metal, black and unrecognizable. The whole care had melted down. All cars had. We looked around to see that every car around was now no more than a 2-foot-tall mess of fused materials.
We pushed back inside to try and plot our next steps but I could feel myself having a panic attack. My hands were going numb, I was starting to feel lightheaded, and I couldn’t control my breath. My thoughts were going everywhere, and nothing was sticking. Jon grabbed my hand, momentarily grounding me. I didn’t have time for a panic attack, we had to make our next move. I looked out the window and tried to think. The room darkened. It wasn’t the outdoors though; it was the walls. They were darkening with a strange pattern similar to those internal burns you get from having a heating pad on your lap for too long. I started to feel a radiating warmth come from inside of myself and my skin started to tighten. Without a word I grabbed my son’s hand and Jon and I ripped through the front door and just started running.
We had no plan, no idea what was happening, no direction, nothing. We just ran as fast as we could away from this thing. We slowed as our breath started to thin and our chests started to ache. We hadn’t gotten terribly far but were now several blocks away in the neighboring neighborhood. The homes were large and old and close to each other. It had been a wealthy neighborhood in the late 1800s and early 1900s and each home was 3 stories plus a basement. As we walked aimlessly catching our breathes eyes pointed down my eye caught the reflection of a basement window. The closest thing to a plan clicked in my mind, we needed to get into a basement.
We spun around slowly looking at all the enormous houses and considering which one would be the easiest to get into and the sturdiest. We spotted a big blue one with white trim on a corner. It was an Edwardian home, large and square with the concrete of a basement poking up just above the grass with tiny windows.
We entered the house with relative ease and the place seemed empty. Normally I would have taken this time to explore the old home and look for supplies but was in no mood. We quickly rounded the kitchen corner to the door to the basement, shut the door behind us and scurried down the stairs. When we got to the bottom we looked up to realize that we weren’t alone. A mixture of about 10 or so other neighbors were also finding refuge in the concrete room. A couple small families and individuals and then the guy who must have been the homeowner as he looked the most uncomfortable. He was about 50, and was wearing brown slacks with a light blue button up shirt and brown round rimmed glasses. His hair was brown with a smattering of grey and was styled into thick tidy waves. Around his pursed lips that he kept chewing was a goatee.
He apparently was some sort of researcher or professor that worked at the university in their animal and plant department. I had been there on one of their public activity days and enjoyed the wet specimens and the stages of plant development they had on display. He seemed nervous about something beyond the unknowable horror we were all living out in real time. It appeared he had OCD, and we were all making him uncomfortable by invading his space. Though cold and uncomfortable he was hospitable so long as we followed his rules and respected his space.
A couple hours had passed quietly as we sat in the basement and we had settled down enough to chat and instinctively try to look at our phones. Surprisingly, considering the cars, the phones still worked…well…sort of. They were still on and the screens still worked but they were stuck on the last screen we were looking at. It didn’t seem to matter though. Who were we going to call? Who could even handle this? Besides, we all had this feeling that this was not simply a local phenomenon.
We could see a bright light in the distance moving across the houses several blocks away. I noticed that our host was frozen where he stood. I could practically feel the cold sweat coming off him myself. After a few seconds passed he shouted, “on your bellies! Cover your faces!”
We didn’t ask questions, we just did it. The basement floor of unfinished cement was cold against my belly as I lay with my face tucked in my elbows like a kid playing heads up seven up. I could sense the light getting closer, scanning up and down as it got nearer to us. Finally, it reached our block. The light was incredible and white. Even with my eyes shut tightly and shoved in my elbows I could tell that the room was lit up like an apple store though the light wasn’t directly on us yet. I know this, because when it was finally in our house it was blinding. It was so bright that I could see the bones of my arms through my eyelids and my skin. A truly haunting sensation.
The light passed and it took a while before anyone felt comfortable lifting their heads to look around. We all sat in silence contemplating what we had just experienced. No one was ready to speak. Everyone sat eyes pointed down thinking about their life and their inevitable death. The light would continue to come, sweeping the neighborhoods, scanning our block every 5 to 10 minutes. How long could we keep this up? I was starting to get a sinking feeling in my gut. This was it. We were just stalling the inevitable.
I heard one of the couples near me speaking to each other, faces still on the cold cement. One of their voices whispered in defeat, “This is it. They have decided this is enough. We are a cancer on this earth and they are wiping us out with radiation. They’re killing us like cancer cells.”
Another white light came and lingered. Heat radiated through me…. And then I woke up.
portraits featured in FTM: female-to-male transsexuals in society by Devor, Aaron H. 1997 read here
(via strawberryglitterkiss)