It’s taken me a couple days to get this all down :p I think I might transcribe the dream-entries I’ve put on lj here so I’ll have them all in one place.
Imagine the world recovering from the ravages of zombie apocalypse. The walking dead still exist, but their numbers are small enough that you’re more likely to find them wandering around alone or in pairs. Nobody spends a great deal of time outside anymore, and if they did, they wouldn’t be caught dead without at least a sturdy Lil’ Slugger (ha! or maybe they would).
Throw in an alarm in real-time that wasn’t supposed to go off, and this grim portrait of life-after-Zday morphs into a world where two barbarian kings war against each other, and their sword-wielding race has ancestral memories of an era when mankind ruled the world with machines. Somewhere, someone inadvertently opens a rift into a dimension where Lovecraftian Old One-type creatures dwell, who, of course, take advantage of the opportunity to cross planes and wreak havoc on the world of men. The two kings ally their warriors to defend their world, and somehow this defense involves trying to restart massive machines left behind by their predecesors.
Some time later, while attempting to activate an office-building-sized machine that will deal a coup-de-gras to the creatures, someone (again! you’d think they would’ve learned by now) speaks the name of the other-plane (Zigi-somethingorother), and opening a gargantuan rift right above their heads. And what should emerge, tentacles a-flailing, but the bastard lovechild of Cthulu and a D&D beholder. Battle ensues, and rages on until the creature catches sight of the “main character” (one of the barbarian kings), and focuses its considerable rage on him.
Now, weird setting laid out, the part that really sticks with me even now is what happened next:
In an attempt to draw the creature away from the rest of his people, the barbarian king flees across the sea — in actuality, a vast expanse of water that is only about ankle deep. As he runs, he lifts up off the ground and ascends toward the sky, the creature still in fast persuit. Rising higher and higher, he’s shocked to find that everyone had always thought was the sky, is actually just a thin sheet of blue-white fabric. He cuts through it as he rises, finding a dimly lit layer, above which — about 20-30 storeys up — is another, much thicker, layer of what my dream-brain told me was insulating material. He cuts through this too, only to find another layer about 15-20 feet above his head that consits of a black tarp-like material.
He cuts through this last layer and is nearly blinded by sunlight — real sunlight, much brighter than he’s ever seen before. The barbarian king emerges into the world of his “ancestors,” filled with strangely shaped, semi-futuristic buildings made of blue-black metals and dark glass. Everything looks clean and well-kept, but the world is dead silent, and my sleeping brain realizes two things at once: 1) the barbarians were put in their enclosed “world” to protect them, to keep them alive, and 2) the world is completely and utterly deserted. It looks like mankind has just gotten up in the middle of whatever it was doing, and left. The barbarian continues to fly along, amazed, forgetting for a few minutes that he’s still being persued by Cthulu’s fugly kid brother. It would appear that the oceans are receding, leaving behind a barren expanded shoreline. It took some time to realize what made it so eerie was that there were no waves, and I wonder if that means the oceans in the “real world” are as shallow as the ones where he comes from.
There’s a loud screech from behind him, and the barbarian is jolted back to the present situation. He coasts down along what appears to be some sort of bazaar, landing next to a glass display with various objects that look very old, but wouldn’t be out of place in our day and age. As the creature pounces, having, for some reason suddenly become small enough for the barbarian to catch in his arms, he grabs a pair of black scissors from the display and stabs the flailing creature repeatedly. It makes a gurgling cooing sound and kind of deflates as he attacks it. There’s not really any gore, though the “guts” are not remotely pleasant. And the dream pretty much ends there, kind of half-inside the barbarian king’s thoughts, feeling his relief that his people are safe, and his hope and excitement at the chance to explore this new world.
It was kind of anti-climatic, really. And the part that made the biggest impression on me was the barbarian discovering and cutting through the different layers between his world and the outside, and realizing that they’ve been shut away while the “real world” died. Also, it’s interesting to note that, because of the alarm going off, I can estimate that the second half of this dream sequence lasted about an hour to an hour and a half.
