escape – DailyNightmare

Jail cells at the Southborough Police Station. Photo by my_southborough. Used under the Creative Commons License.

(Male, 50’s) Just a dark and sad dream. I woke up really shaken so who’s to say this wasn’t a nightmare. I was on a 5-person team, and one of the guys was someone I used to work with at an old job. He was a good guy, creative, diligent, exactly the kind of guy I’d choose to bring along on whatever task we were supposed to perform. It was night, really late at night, maybe 3:00 AM, and we were in the courtyard of a stone building, just inside a tall stone fence that surrounded a large activity yard. It felt kind of like a prison. We weren’t supposed to be there. My job was to circumvent a computer-based lock, but the trick I used was a long metal rod, a mechanical exploit that bypassed all the fancy electrics. I felt pretty proud of the idea. We five were supposed to wait outside until something happened. We’d know it when we saw it. I leaned against the fence and started scribbling notes for a poem I was writing. Yes, I know that’s crazy, but I was writing a poem in my dream. If I had started writing down the dream earlier, I bet I could have remembered what it was about too. I remember that I was worried I wouldn’t be able to read my hand-writing because it was so dark. I looked up from my little black notebook and found the other guys on my team were gone. I was worried that I’d missed the cue.

Just then dozens of men in work shirts and khakis started filing up out of this building in a big hurry. The building was one story tall so the sense I had was that these guys were coming up from rooms underground. Maybe they were prisoners. Maybe factory workers though they “felt” like tough and clever guys, equal parts Marines and engineers. They ran down this corridor then out to the street where there were a lot of cars parked. Each guy knew which car he was heading to. They were rather strange vehicles by the way, half panel truck and half station wagon, weird looking with no windows. Each car could fit maybe 10 guys. I panicked because I thought we were going to take a helicopter out of here. I hadn’t expected cars and didn’t know what to do. I grabbed one of the guys running past me and he said to come along, that they’d find room for me. But there wasn’t any room for me in any of the wagons. I knew it was just a minute or two until the sirens would ring, and I’d be caught. The wagon-cars started racing down the road and I tried to run along behind them. I kept up pretty well.

It was a residential city neighborhood and I watched the car I was going to get in drive away down a street, only to hear it shot full of holes by machine guns. I thought that was pretty crazy, shooting machine guns in a residential neighborhood but there was no chance anyone survived. I ran the other way. I started to like my odds, figuring I could escape through the residential brownstones to escape the trigger-happy officials who were hunting us down. Worse case, I could go back to the woods that were across from the stone building we’d broken into. I’d be safe so long as they didn’t send out dogs. And just then I ran into two motion-sensor machine guns that had been positioned at an intersection. Who the hell puts motion-sensor controlled machine guns at a residential intersection? They pinned me down with crossfire and I couldn’t move, though I didn’t have the sense that I was hit. I hid behind a leafless bush, just some bare branches, trying hard not to move but totally exposed if the murderous officials came looking. It started to dawn on me that no one lived in this neighborhood, that maybe no one lived anywhere anymore. Those may have been the last humans living anywhere, those guys living underground. I hoped at least some of them escaped. Whatever set up those mechanized machine guns to strafe an intersection wasn’t interested in keeping a neighborhood safe. They would only be satisfied by killing every single one of us.

(Male) This was a dream that had a whole world attached to it, all these things I just knew about this world which makes it rather hard to tell as a straight story.

The whole dream was set in the future, a time when it rained all the time and people seemed to live inside all the time under this really flat, gray light. The world was like a honeycomb of hallways, very institutional-feeling. Everybody wore these very drab gray jumpsuits that seemed to be very fragile, easily torn but then again very easily replaced. What’s coming to mind is that they must have been made out of recycled paper fibres but no one in the dream actually said that.

We were at war with this other society but what was strange was that both societies lived in the same hallways. The only way the different armies could be discerned was by their weapons. Get this: the weapons looked like water balloons but they had a tough enough skin that they could be stacked. There was one hallway that was stacked floor to ceiling with these water balloons. But the other army had their own water balloons, the only difference is that one army had balloons that were red while the other army had balloons that were blue. The weapons had the only bright colors in the whole place.

Since both societies basically looked like each other, we were suspicious of basically everyone all the time. The only way to really tell what side someone was on is if they were carrying a weapon. Through a passing conversation with a friend I knew and trusted, I learned that I had had some surgery as part of a very old military program, something that implanted a weapon inside me. I didn’t like the sound of that, though I thought it would be good to know once and for all which side I was on, which society I really belonged to. He mentioned an “address” which of course was a room number because no one went outside anymore.

I tried to get to the address. I didn’t know what to expect. Would the doctors remove the weapon? Would they program me to explode like a water balloon? Would I find the room empty and abandoned? While I was getting there, I must have made certain army officials suspicious of me. I had to run away from them, down the unfamiliar, indistinct corridors, turning here and there. Finally I got to the room and explained my situation to the doctors. They beat me up and kicked me when I collapsed on the floor. I tried to ask if they weren’t afraid that the weapon would detonate but all they said was “Ungrateful.”

Finally they dragged me over to an operating table. “We’ll take out the weapon. Then we’ll ship you off-world to a mining colony. How do you like that?”

The next thing I knew I was outside, running through the rain. It sizzled, stung a little, as it hit my skin. It was very dark. I ducked into an alley. There was another man there with a long black beard and a woman with snarled blond hair. They had had money once but had wasted it all and so now, they were escaping.