Apocalypses, Cosmic, Artistic and Personal

I dreamed last night I was in a sort of wild party, where a woman came up to me and said “You have to post the dreams from last night, they were way better than this.”

 

Uh, okay.

 

Woke right up, of course. Sometimes, I just don’t get my brain.

 

So here we go… night before last, I was on a planetoid, far on the edge of the solar system. The Sun’s expansion had reached the point that it was slowing the earth’s orbit and had flayed the atmosphere and oceans long ago from its now molten surface. I was monitoring, via wormhole “radio” the progress of one of our large science colonies, they had moved in for a close recon of the earth and moon, documenting the final throes of the continental melting process as well as “dipping” in to recover valuable materials.

 

While they were there, they were also making observations from inside the sun (remote probes.) What they reported was very disturbing, the sun was acting in a violently unstable fashion, as though something massive had collided with it. The decision was made to bring them back via emergency wormhole drive, as it appeared that the planet they were using as a shield was also behaving in a potentially dangerous fashion.

 

As the city sized ship emerged from the wormhole, I witnessed hundreds of small craft and emergency pods ejecting from the ship. It didn’t take long to figure out why. The sun had sent a filament through the wormhole, and it was tearing its way out towards the great craft. I watched, helpless, as the plasma engulfed the flying city and reduced it to silent flaming cinders, and then nothingness. The wormhole widened, and I suddenly realized, the plasma would keep flowing, because, contrary to what we thought we understood, the wormhole was not collapsing. It was as if we had filled up a high pressure hose directly from the surface of the sun out to the orbit of Neptune.  Initial calculations showed that we only had a matter of hours before the stream of plasma played across our little planetoid, incinerating everything on the surface.  Ships were being scrambled, but I knew that only a tiny fraction of the population would escape.

 

The streamer was still very pretty.

 

The second dream of the night found me surrounded by people who were wrapping their city in plastic wrap as an “art” protest. It wasn’t long before there were riot-geared police involved and massive beat-downs and arrests. I kept trying to explain that this wasn’t the way to do this, but no one was listening. Soon everything was chaos and I knew that my only hope of riding the “event” out was to get myself into one of the buildings that had already been wrapped. I was trying to save one of my former students, but she was determined to get her own roll of pallet wrap and wrap up stuff. It seemed like some sort of mania had taken hold, and I finally managed to find an edge I could lift up and crawl under to get into an old abandoned car park that happened to be adjacent to a small “Spanish” grocery store. I figured that I wouldn’t starve, at least.

 

The third dream took place entirely in my little red car. The passenger seat was gone, and instead there was a plastic chest of drawers full of tins of cat food and tuna and refried beans. There was a litter pan in the back of the car, and a huge pair of water jugs, one of which was attached by tubing to a huge tarp that covered the entire car and several feet around, its edges held up by various mismatched tent poles and broken pop-up frames. I had a generator connected to the car’s main battery, but it was very obviously pedal powered. I recognized the now reused frame of my old ten speed. I don’t know where I was, or where the cat had gone, but I knew he’d be back, maybe having hunted down his own dinner, maybe not.

 

My only light was from a wind up flashlight radio, its finish completely worn down to black greasy looking plastic and a computer screen, an “All in one” budget deal that had seen better days. I was struggling to keep up with some sort of forum arguments when I realized exactly how horrible my existence was. I looked around, the only sign of civilization my little encampment and a distant cell tower. I realized that I had no idea where I was actually located, or where the nearest stores or banks might be. I couldn’t even tell which way I had driven in, the whole clearing was overgrown with thick mustard and tall grasses. I couldn’t even say how long I had been here, or how I’d come to this place. In truth, I wasn’t even sure of my name, so opened up a new browser tab to log into my bank to see what it was.