(no subject)
As usual, the beginning happened far too long ago (that is, in dream time) for me to remember exactly what happened. All I know is that the world was in ruins. I and my roommates-- all seven of them-- wandered the broken cities and deserted fields of upstate New York for some hours, or even days, perhaps battling strange monstrous results of the apocalypse before we came upon the building. It was strange and dilapidated. The part I most remember resembled a barn of sorts, with several large rooms lined with drifts of hay and haunted by broken farm equipment. It was in some disrepair but would serve as an adequate shelter, though the large barn doors were missing and left us vulnerable to the dangers of a dark and unpredictable world. We spent the night in the loft, a space between the ceiling and the roof, and I slept and perhaps dreamed within this dream, though not to any recollection of mine. I next remember waking up in the early hours of the morning, sitting, pacing, smoking cigarettes, and pondering this and that. The sky was a dull purple-gray color that was gradually taking on the orange hue of the morning, and I was suspicious of this fabricated and dead world in which I found myself. It wasn't until I heard snarl outside that I became truly scared, and as I looked through the small spaces in the plywood that blocked the window I saw a lion prowling the hills outside. He was but a dimly featured silhouette in the precursor to sunlight, but as he came closer I was that he had a full mane and he was huge. Perhaps the size of a bull, or even a minivan, bigger than the real lions I'd seen in zoos when I was awake or experiencing something similar to such a state of mind.
He entered the barn through the gaping doors and I suddenly realized that I was going to fall through the floorboards of the loft. So frightened was I that I did not immediately accept this; I began treading carefully toward some support beams in an adjoining room on which to hold should the floor give way, gingerly testing each step and taking care to be as silent as I could should the lion hear me and perhaps find a way through the impossibilities of the subconscious to reach me in the loft. It was just when I was within reach of the beams that the floor broke and I began to fall; I grabbed hold of one of them but it only gave way under my weight as though it were made of toothpicks. I fell and landed hard in one of the rooms below, and could hear the lion rumbling on the other side of one of many dividing walls that separated the space of the barn into large rooms.
He came through a doorway and stood against the dawn sky, as he stood in one of the larger openings that lead outside. Though he blocked my only possible exit it would have been an ultimately fruitless escape; he moved with the swiftness and grace of the great cats of Africa despite his size. As he came toward me-- slowly at first, then with quickening pace-- I thought fast and came to the glorious though uncertain revelation that this was in fact a dream, and that I had consciously manipulated my dreams before. It was uncertain, because my fear was great and I had never used any such powers to escape such a danger before, and though I was aware that nothing was real in this world I was too far immersed in it to awaken without considerable time-consuming mental effort. He stopped short and stood on his hind legs to maul me, and I instantly believed and knew that I had acquired super-human strength. I grabbed his paws and held them at bay, and threw him off. We grappled in such a way for some time before I managed to throw him to the side, exposing the side of his face. With a mighty blow I punched him and sent him sailing threw the barn door out into the night sky. He twisted and turned in the dawn sky, turning over and over and howling in dismay, farther and farther into a fabricated stratosphere until he vanished in the distance. I had won, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
At this point, I awoke, but not to a world in which superhuman strength and giant lions were impossible, although they certainly seemed so. It was a similar world, one with people living more or less ordinary lives and attending ordinary schools or ordinary work, and spoke at some length to one of my roommates of my recent reverie. She referred me to a dream interpretation pamphlet (ironically part of a dream itself) which contained text. I could read and perceive each individual word, each individual letter, and this was an experience which I took for granted but which was new to me; ordinarily I cannot read so much as a wristwatch in dreams, or if I do read, the ideas are projected and fabricated in my head from texts that ultimately contain gibberish or forgotten characters. The pamphlet defined lions of being representative of "the male power," whose meaning I can only speculate. I contemplated this for some time, and perhaps arrived at some forgotten conclusion before I awoke once again, this time into the world I described formerly.
It was midday, although I was aware of years having past-- years of toil and the half-remembered experiences we assemble in our minds to conveniently summarize great stretches of time. I was chastised by my roommates for awaking so late and proceeded to perform some chores around our house, which had either grown or had simply hidden some of its parts to us.
Part two to come soon; Erin's computer is almost out of battery.