so i fell asleep tonight, and woke up with a very, very, VERY bizarre dream. i often have strange dreams involving a big, open sky. usually, that sky is filled with giant alien destroyers the size of moons, swarming fighter craft, and gargantuan ‘splosions. or sometimes just really weird, organic spacecraft/beings, like the giant glowing sperm-like thing that glided around the sky until picking me out on the ground and hovering back and forth in the air in my backyard at me like a leaf that was not altogether on its way down. they are always very vivid; surreal and yet all too realistic.
here’s how this one went:
it starts off with me in adult high school again. you know, you’re back in school as an adult, and all the students are either normal high-school age, or ranging in age up to approximately your own generation. i remember getting nearly lost and realizing that if i hadn’t realized where i was going and took a correct turn, i could have seen the ol’ black metal door of the bandroom. (i owe that poor thing an apology of sorts. or three.) …but i took a right instead of going straight and i ended up in this foreign area that was not really part of my school, a sort of docking area, where everybody going in and out are meeting and going about their routines and whatnot. i meet a girl there. she is younger than me: a tall, thick girl; reminded me of a girl i worked with briefly at that last job. tons of curly dark hair. i did not know her name, but she knew me. she gave me a hug and as usual, i played along until her name and relationship to me (hopefully) would pop back into my memory.
somewhere around this point i ended up outside. it was nearing twilight, in the early evening. there was a whole throng of us watching some gyrocopter or something making maneuvers in the sky. i remembered that my ol’ pal Bill D. had signed up to do that in some kind of exhibition, or else had been signed up for it. he approacheth. i ask him how his (flying) lessons are going. he laughs and says that he had one a couple of weeks ago, but hadn’t heard anything else about it since. he doesn’t seem worried about it, and is in fact ready to just give it his best shot regardless of training or even competence level. (now Bill is an incredibly competent person at just about everything there is in life, but i’m not sure he’s ever flown a gyrocopter before, and frankly, i’m a little uneasy about his future well-being. the exhibition is in a couple of days!)
so there’s this throng of students, and we’re outside, nearish to the aforementioned ‘docking port’. we’re looking at the sky, through some skinny little trees that line the walkway. scene shift. same crowd, more or less, Bill is there i think, but suddenly we’re standing on the porch of some neighbors across the street and a few houses down from where my grandparents raised me. (the neighbors themselves don’t seem to be home).
i’m still watching the sky. at this point, it is now slightly darker out. this whole evening has been pretty overcast, with huge fluffy clouds filling the entire sky from horizon to horizon.
i see something.
the others haven’t noticed yet.
i point to the sky, and with my best “pleaseohdeargoddon’tpanicnow” voice, i shout, “you guys, something’s happening! look at the sky!” while nudging the guy in front of me.
here’s what i saw:
at a spot about 35 degrees or so south, and maybe ten degrees left (east), there is what appears to be an explosion. clouds ripple in bright white against fluffy light grey, like sea foam. the rippling continues in rhythm, like a pulse. like bathtub water that’s suddenly been disturbed. the sky was disturbed, and violently so.
the ripples, in a matter of seconds, were growing in intensity, until they started sort of plunging inward. it looked like you were viewing that famous reel of slow-motion footage of milk being splashed by a drop. only, it was upside down, and inward, and the atmosphere was the milk. the more you watched, the more painful it was to see it happening. in fact sickening, like watching the death of an ex-lover.
in a few more seconds, the ripples would be huge, truly mammoth, tubelike plungings. the sky was literally opening up. beyond the clouds was black, black night. only this was still the evening, and the clouds themselves were still sufficiently lit by the sun. this could mean only one thing.
a real panic now.
for me, anyways. everyone else scampered off in the general direction of the event, damn near soundlessly.
the plungings continued, growing in intensity until it looked as if the bottom of the cylinder of nothingness was going to touch the surface. by this point i had surmised, correctly, that what i was seeing was a tube of space, penetrating the atmosphere in a decidedly erotic rhythm. you could somehow see the atmosphere as the sides of the cylinder, with the round end like a cloud in a reservoir tip. (it’s very little reassuring to know that the Universe is using a condom while it’s completely fucking you.)
the clouds had begun to give up on themselves. they couldn’t hold. fuck the clouds; it was the ATMOSPHERE that wasn’t going to sit there and take it! right before my eyes, i saw the atmosphere going out into space, slowly seeping at first with each successive THRUST and gently easing into a full-tilt rush. the hole that had opened up now grew at an unfathomably exponential rate; and in a few seconds, the hole in the sky had gone from being something you could easily cover up with your thumb and forget about, to something you couldn’t forget with your face half-buried in Dolly Parton’s cleavage.
WHOOSH! there goes the atmosphere… and in the span of a couple dozen uneasy seconds, all was inky black sky and crystal clear, non-twinkling stars.
