I Dream of Romance, and Horror

            I dreamed I was cuddling with SO on the futon couch in my house. My young red-haired freckled friend was depressed. She was pregnant with her second child. (?) She wasn't raising the first, having given the baby up for adoption. When I asked what had happened, her sister chimed in that "She had a celebratory 'moment' with her last director."

            S blushed and buried her head, "I was so stupid."

            ""Emotional. Expressive, it's one of the things I've always liked about you. I am envious though"

            She was crying. I told her that I still loved her and she could stay with me. I also mentioned that if she wanted to "celebrate" she'd better be prepared to keep celebrating. That at least got a sobby giggle out of her.

            Further discussion revealed that her director "friend" was pressuring her to have an abortion. She didn't want to, hadn't with the first baby, wasn't planning on it with the second baby.

            The dream progressed into the future, and S miscarried a couple of days later. It was sad for her, and a relief for her former boss. She still decided to move into the house with me though, at least until her next job.

 

            The next dream was more of a nightmare / horror movie style. I was working for a company that was doing some sort of teleportation device research. I was monitoring a test that was happening on a navel vessel at sea. The testing agents were in voice communication with me, and I was monitoring the testing apparatus via various data probes and video monitors. I had several engineers in the control room with me. We were in a monitoring facility in San Diego. The test proceeded, then things started jumping all over the place, images on the monitors shifted and turned sideways. On one monitor I saw one of our technicians reach over to right the camera, then half of him vanished, we could see his insides, all working.  I could hear someone throwing up behind me. He righted the camera and went out into the test area, setting up other equipment that had been knocked over, his invisible half still able to pick things up and move them. He hadn't seemed to notice, yet.

I switched to another view of his workstation, He was still working away, half invisible until he noticed that he was invisible, partly. He screamed when he looked down at his insides.

            "Shut the test down, " I radioed them, but there was no response. "Override the Tele-window, now." My engineers started shutting things down.

            Suddenly the rest of the techs aboard the ship vanished, and they didn't seem to be working on anything any more. Soon pieces of equipment vanished followed by other engineers and even sailors aboard the ship were being reported as vanishing. The probes began to fail and my boss burst into the control room, asking "what the hell is going on?"

            "I don't know yet, we're recording the data as it comes in, the readings will have to be analyzed it's all happening too fast to tell right now. I've already shut down the teleportation window."

            "The window isn't shutting down fully, I still show activity." One of my engineers reported shakily.

            "Damn, see if they can cut the power from shipboard."

            One of the cameras vanished, but it was still sending a signal. I pulled it up onto the main screen. We were looking into a fog bank, there were dark smoky looking smears in the fog, hints of treelike structures in the haze, one smear approached the monitor, merging with it and appearing to come right through the screen at us.

            "We hunger." came across the audio just before I shut the monitor down. The last thing I saw looked like a bloody human staggering out of the fog.

            A chill wind blew through the room. Everyone grew silent. I could hear more people vomiting around me.

            After several hours of trying to figure out what our date meant, we decided to stay at my parent's house as a group, we were just to weirded out to go and stay in separate rooms at the hotel, which was in Escondido.

            Mom made dinner for my crew and we got everyone settled for a couple of hours rest until we could go back to work.

            I awoke a few hours later. The tips of my fingers on the right hand tingled. I looked at them. They were invisible, I could see the cross-section of all my fingers. Bone muscle and tendons, all of it visible, no blood or anything. I woke my brother; he was missing his calf muscle and part of his foot.

            "I can still feel it, I just can't see it."

            We started waking everyone in the house. The closer they were to the television the more of them was invisible. I made them all move to the back of the house and, sure enough, the invisibility shifted to the closest person to the TV, me. I suddenly had the urge, uncontrollable, to run.

            I turned and started running, all of me fading into nothingness. I could see my limbs pumping; I was a black smear, hungry, suddenly. The TV beckoned, I ran for it not having enough friction to be moving hardly at all.

            I slowly approached the TV, even though I was running as fast as I could. The TV was a static filled image of a foggy forest with leafless trees barely visible in the distance. It looked like there might be human bodies slumped around the bases of the trees. I couldn't control myself and I dove through the TV screen.

            "No!" I shouted and somehow pulled myself through the TV and out the back of the chimney. I seemed to be taking form again and climbed to the top of the chimney. Once there I shouted down the flue "Hello, I'm out her on the roof."

            When I turned to look I realized the location was the same, but the homes and vehicles I could see were very Sid Mead futuristic. Even the house I was on had changed. The chimney was the same, but the walls and roof were made of curving glass. I could see my family in the home below me. They looked very surprised to see me.

            Mom was slender, and looked like she did in her early thirties. Her friend N was there as were a couple of my aunts, also all young looking.

            Mom recognized me and ran to the back door to let me in.

            There were hugs all around. "You look the same as when you vanished almost 50 years ago. (This would make my mom about 120 I thought.)

            "What happened?" I asked.

            "We're so glad you're alive." said one of my aunts.

            "Look how distinguished you look," said N.

            "He already married one N," Mom interrupted her.

            "N, is she..."

            "No, dad either, they were gone too soon. The dead had to stay dead."

            "I was," I sat down, very confused. "I'd thought I'd shifted into another dimension."

            "We don't think so. You were on the chimney all this time, according to your company. We didn't know if you'd ever make it back, so we kept the chimney together, just in case." Then she broke down crying and kept hugging me.

            I realized I was really hungry. Then I realized, they were all young again, and I wasn't. I then realized they all had a little black smear following them around, living off of them.  Without whatever treatments were keeping them young, my smear was killing me.

           

Ad astra per technica,

FF