Dinkaltranen

It looked like this but not bad and full of shadows and, well, grey. Very dark even.

I have been very ill. I don’t enjoy it. But I enjoy dreams. Didn’t enjoy the last one. Each of these dreams took place one night after the other, not all in the same night.

Dream 1:

I travelled to Sweden with my father. We stayed with a friend and his parents. For some reason we couldn’t hang around much, I presume because my father and I were doing work, and we spent much of the dream getting lost on country roads. I bought a gift for my friend some kind of carved object, but wanted to ‘improve it’, but forgot to give it to them in the end, as well as forgetting to take my laundry with me when I left. I only realised this after we arrived in LA, at which point I was trying to figure out how to get the gift back to him, get my laundry back before I left LA, and figure out which of my friends in the US I could conceivably visit with 3 and a half hours free each day. The gift is returned, the clothes arrive… after I have returned home to my home country. I was unable to find anyone to travel to visit, nor was willing to visit me.

Dream 2:

Stephen Fry is over at our childhood home, playing chess with my sister in the downstairs office. They have been playing chess for pretty much the entire day, and each time I come along with food or to use the bathroom I find little has changed, it is agonisingly slow. Eventually, I make a very dry Hamlet reference (Denmark is a prison) while leaving the room after bringing them food and drink, closing the door in utter disappointment. Stephen Fry finishes swallowing his drink in a rush, and responds with the next line in the play just as I close the door. I come back in and we sit down, and we continue to basically recite various sections of the play to one another until I wake up, the last being:

“What a pleasant thing to lie between a woman’s legs.”

“What is, my lord?”

“Nothing.”

Dream 3:

I am living in a rural part of the country with a family that isn’t mine(as in, they are my family in the dream, but not my actual family), including a younger brother, and an older sister. We work on a farm and a cult has moved into the area after purchasing an abandoned farm. They are having parties that are disturbing the locals, but otherwise keep to themselves. Initially the ‘cult’ was just a family, with whom my family were at first on friendly terms with because we were within spotting distance of their farm. They had a few daughters a few years older than us, and my brother developed a crush on one of them. We hang out and occasionally flirt, do work together, etc. Sometimes we see weird stuff around their property or behind ajar doors or through windows, drawings, patterns, strings of numbers. We spy on it with binoculars too.

More and more people move in, and eventually the townspeople have enough of this and the weird parties that cause booms that cascade across the landscape. My brother and I ask to be invited to one of these parties, and Crush says yes. There’s a lot of drugs and strangers, at least 100 people which is more than half the population of the town, and both brother and I get drunk. Crush looks after me, and then seduces or coerces me into sex in a strangely intimate way while I am blackout drunk.

The two town police show up to tell everybody to fucking stop and see what’s going on, and my brother and I sneak home. We both get in a ton of trouble, Dad notices I smell like sex. Brother learns that I’ve cuckolded him when I am forced to explain myself, but my attempts to explain that I didn’t initiate it and even attempted to prevent it was largely ignored. Brother becomes deeply depressed. The parties stop, but people still steadily trickle in.

The general town are invited for a festival in a few weeks, as an offer of peace, along with a massive donation to the town as they are selling the farmstead and leaving. Almost everyone bites. Little to our knowledge the two policemen are already dead after catching a cult member breaking into the town hall stealing resident-records a few days ago. There’s no koolaid, but the jig is quickly revealed, and rifles come out taking everyone hostage. People are tied to posts previously used for festival tents. I ask Crush why she is doing this, why any of this is happening, and she starts to talk about how her father is trying to visit The Gray King and that “it’s very expensive to go visit him.” all in the tone that one would talk about taking a trip on holiday.

This entire time people are being asked for their date of birth and moved to different stakes based on that. This takes the entire night. Crush is dry heaving, so are many of the female cult members, and I for some reason recognise this as morning sickness. I ask her to help me leave, and she agrees. She lets me go, I find my brother and try to get him to leave with me, but he seems resigned. I can't find anyone else. I sneak out of the perimeter and manage to find a rifle left in a harvester in a wheat field, but have to shoot twice to dissuade people who are chasing me through the fields of wheat. While running I trip and sprain my ankle.

Eventually I arrive back at my home. The phone lines are cut, not at the individual line, but at some point higher up the line. I have put together that they are attempting some kind of ritualistic murder suicide, which will take place tonight. I am already awake for 24 hours, and I am weighing up options. Burn everything to the ground? How do I get close? Pulling fuel out of farm vehicles and crawling through the wheat in trips, leaving gasoline as I go. How do I save people? Debating who to shoot with my 3 remaining bullets. I use binoculars and the scope of my rifle to see through the farmhouse’s windows and see that there is mathematics based on dates of birth with names. Most females members of the cult have a + 80 value next to them. From this I gather that the ritual is some kind of formula based on potential life, and the +80 is expected life of an average human being, as some of them are pregnant.

As the time draws near, I lie in wait, set the harvester trawling towards the farmhouse, and when people come out to investigate, ignite the gasoline, creating a circle of fire which the guards are outside of. The fire grows, and begins to burn people. I think about my family burning to death and have a panic attack knowing that this is probably the only way to save the most people. The cultists put out the fires on the civilians, and begin the ritual, while I sneak closer. I shoot the cult leader in the head as he goes to stab a baby that has red string reaching to every sacrifice, including members of the cult. Pandemonium erupts. I kill two more guards inside the perimeter, and more fires are breaking out, people are screaming, burning, the harvester is on fire and crashing through the wooden fencing. I go to grab the baby, and my hand is stabbed through by Crush, she has cut the red string around her hand already. Instantly, everyone tied with string to the baby explodes in viscera. The sky begins to fill with infinite flickering black eyes, and then the world is gone.

Crush and I are now somewhere else. A silent, dead world filled with fog. “The Grey Space” she states. I try to kill her, pulling the knife out of my hand. She tells me she saved my life, and that we have been granted one wish for our sacrifice. We must find The Gray King if we want to be sent home. Everything, including us, is without colour. The only light is emitted by a shimmery black disc in the sky, barely visible through the clouds, and light itself seems to warp around everything, like looking at the first drawings of a black hole. The only guidance we have are a series of ancient looking obelisks. The ground looks glassy, but constructed. It reminds me of the exterior of a spaceship. It’s more likely the streets of an ancient city. There is no noise here outside of our footsteps.

We finally come to an impossibly large set of steps that Crush and I have to help each other up, which is hard when one of you is pregnant and the other has a screwed up ankle and a stabbed hand. It takes us what feels like a day, but it’s impossible to tell how much time has passed: the ‘moon’ never moves. But this is where the obelisks lead, and eventually we find what I can only describe as a throne room which is truly mountainous, olympian. At the end of the room, staring at us with gigantic eyes that remind me of lakes in the rain, black, but flickering with raindrop impacts. They look vaguely humanoid, and somehow my intuition tells me they are female, but they wear armour that looks like a series of gigantic steam engines. Walking towards them takes impossibly long. Eventually, Crush stops me, and we kneel. I feel like there is an incredible magnetism towards the ‘King’, but I do not look. I do not hear a voice in my head, but rather the intuition that I must speak what I wish for.

I wish to be sent back to where we came. The black eyes begin to crawl out of the shadows, and envelop Crush and I.

We are returned in a fantastical forest by a trickling stream. There is plenty of foraging options nearby, and after three days of no food and sleep I build us the simplest shelter I can and collect food. Every time I look at Crush I feel revolted, knowing what she did to me, to my family. We rest for a few days, mostly without speaking. Finally, we decide it is time to leave and look for civilisation. We keep finding ourselves back where we started, despite me marking trees and doing many things to indicate the direction away from where we started. I realise, somehow, intuitively, that we are Adam and Eve at the beginning of time, despite me not believing in biblical history. I tell Crush and she affirms the theory. We improve our shelter, while I try not to think about the baby that is probably mine in Crush’s body. I ask her if it’s mine. She says it is.

I wake up and throw up over the side of my bed.

I still have a fever, on my week off too. I think I got sick twice in a row, once from external sources, then from my housemate.

Last post for a while as this one interrupted an unofficial break. Responsibilities, money, and time are all coming crashing down right now. I don’t feel like I spend a huge amount of time editing anything I write, but I feel immensely put off by the idea of writing anything for a bit even before finishing writing down this dream. I feel different and not in a good way, and not just because I’ve spent a week dying.

If it wasn’t for that last dream this would have never have made it outside of my personal journal. In general I would like to write more short stories and ‘essays’, and this dream feels like the making of a novel, minus a few elements. So maybe I’ll work on that a bit. Guess you’ve been spoiled on it for now.

Just kidding, I’ll write a third of it and get bored of it just like I do with all my writing.