I'm in a
skyscraper, a sleek, angular,
black mirrored one, although the room I'm in is part of an expensive apartment rather than an
office. I couldn't find anything made of glass to mix a drink in, so I've made a
tequila and
orange juice concoction in a heavy white
ceramic mug.
I'm looking out the window at the city below. Actually, I'm looking through the smoked glass wall of the apartment, as skyscrapers don't have windows per se. I don't think about what city I'm in, I just look at the circles and dapples of light cast yellow on the ground below by streetlights, and the tiny twin cones of grey lit by every fast little taxi on the tarmac.
As I turn from the view, I see the apartment in detail. Overstuffed black leather furniture on light tan carpet, minimalist lamps and bookshelves made of tubes. Deciding that I want to sit down for a while, I begin walking towards the couch. As I move, I feel something change in the way the world feels, something subtle but unmistakable, and I stop to analyze my situation further.
When I stop, my inertia doesn't damp out like it's supposed to, but instead makes me stumble and nearly fall. Instead of going in the direction I was, it pushed me backwards, toward the black plate glass. I'm confused, I don't know what's going on, but it's making me feel sick inside, seasick, the sickness of not being sure which way "up" is.
And worse, as I stand there the pull is getting ever stronger. Gravitational attraction, undeniable as that dealt out by any mass, pulling me where I don't want to go. My concentration is shattered, so I drop the mug. Instead of falling near my feet it falls in a perfect diagonal, tracing out a triangle's hypotenuse rather than a straight drop.
The bottom of my stomach drops out as I watch the mug fall, and I stumble and almost faint. In my stumbling I'm pulled a few steps closer to the window, and the still coherent part of my physical intuition tells me the only way I can effectively fight this new gravity is to hit the deck and hold on to the carpet. I try to do so, but the dream fades out ...
... and fades back in as I'm falling. Fast, faster, fastest, deep breaths and deeper throbbing panic, the kind only a falling dream can cause. As the ground gets close, details rendered more and more clearly, I awake sweaty and terrified and out of breath.
This dream/nightmare came a few nights ago. At the time I didn't think I would node it, because it was a falling dream and those are often purely scary but not very interesting. I've decided that this was interesting enough to make an exception for, since I remembered the whole context of the fall, not just the waking up scared part.
By the way, I do realize that in real life tequila and OJ would be foul together. That's just how it happened in the dream.