I had a
nightmare last night of the kind you wake from exhausted from having to fight it.
I was on a
mattress, under a
sheet. Only it was the whole world; one giant mattress, on which you had to walk standing up, pushing up the one giant sheet covering the world. Occasionally, I ran across other people, sojourners like myself, walking past with one hand up against the bottom of the sheet. Presently, I found that it was possible to cut a slit in the sheet and climb through it. But making that climb took you not to the topside of the sheet, but to another dimension, a plain white plane filled with rectangular doorways and hallways. A door opened revealing the inhabitant of this plane. It was humanoid, but it had no eyes in its face. Instead, the back of its head was one giant eyeball. The front was a mass of thick dark bronze spikes, each coming to a razor sharp pyramidal point. Set in the center of that face was a large mouth full of knitting-needle
teeth. It wore a dull black business suit. When one of these creatures saw those of us who had come through the slit cut in the sheet, it let out an awful howl, like a siren, to alert others of its kind to our presence. Doors opened, and out they came, setting on one of my companions with their spiked faces and those teeth, devouring him as he screamed.
The only escape was to run back to the slit in the sheet and dive through to the mattress and sheet world. There, we continued our trudge to find an endless horizon. But then it occurred to me that if we could cut a slit in the sheet to end up on the ground in another world, maybe we could cut a slit in the ground to go to still another. I tried it, and found myself climbing down into the backroom of an old bookstore where I once worked, many years ago, a dimly lit room filled with wooden crates of books, and wooden shelves. It was dusty and old. I turned to look back up at the slit I'd come through, and there was one of the spike-faced creatures from the plane of doors, looking back down at me. And I knew I'd led them through to our world, and an horrid infestation would follow.
I ran. I tripped. I awoke. So lucid was the dream that I couldn't tell right away that it hadn't actually happened, and I tried to get back into it so that I could do something to stop the destruction I'd wrought.
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As a rule, I'm a fan of the
Robert Heinlein short story -- the name escapes me at the moment -- but the one where all his characters get together for a reunion on the grounds that writing a story about another world causes that world to come into existence as an actual alternate Universe. And by hammers and nails I hope that's not so with this one!!
Question of the day:
What's the worst nightmare you've ever had?
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In node auditing news:
jessicapierce is
on page 5 of 11.
hamster bong is
on page 4 of 14.
passport and
Pretzellogic are next up.
Blessings, all!!