List of Dreams

Seed for SeedComp 2023.

This is not a game. It's a list of fifteen dreams and nightmares I've had (~2900 words). Accordingly most are random, nonsensical, and sometimes horrifying. Not very well-written as far as stories go. Would be fun if anyone manages to work them into something coherent. Use as many or few as you'd like.

Contains death, horror, typical nightmare contents.

Last updated 01/05/2023, with minor edits to wording.

The text of the document is below, so downloading it is unnecessary.

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1.

Escaping the end of the world. Was part of a group of strangers, led through a tunnel full of deadly gas. Complete darkness, illuminated only by our flashlights. Air was limited. Had to hurry or you would suffocate.

The tunnel was full of the paralyzed corpses of those who'd run out of air. Had to squeeze past their bodies. Caught glimpses of dead gasping faces in the beam of my flashlight.

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2.

The world had ended. Remember walking through an abandoned suburb at sunset. Sky was eerie, almost unnatural shade of yellow, with a hint of dark smoke. Ominous red horizon, color of melted steel. Sun sinking away.

The neighborhood had once been decent, full of two-story, three-garage Colonial houses with brick inlays and decorative window shutters. Now many houses were half-collapsed, windows broken. Shattered glass paved the sidewalks.

Had to get inside before nightfall, in an area that would be impervious to break-in attempts or heavy pressure from outside. Found a small room as shelter, with one door and one window. Floor caked with dust and debris. By then it was almost night. Entered and barricaded the area best as I could, heaving piles of debris in front of the door.

Outside, the monsters that had caused the apocalypse roamed free. They would always knock on your door before trying to enter. You could never acknowledge them, let alone open the door. Better to stay silent. That would give them a greater chance of leaving.

I slept in fits and starts. Woke to knocking several times, but there was nothing. Woke once to see misshapen faces and hands pressing into the windows. The monsters resembled life-size Barbie dolls. Unnaturally tall and skinny, with legs that tapered off to a point, and necks like sticks. They stared through the windows at me, unblinking, but didn’t come in.

Stayed in the shelter for a long time. Daylight was risky, but at night the monsters were far more plentiful and aggressive. No one knew where they came from or what they wanted. Anybody who knew was dead. Had to stay in the shelter for several days, maybe half a week, before the coast was clear enough for me to leave.

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3.

In the middle of a field stood something like a transmission tower.

It wasn't supposed to exist. It was too much height packed into too small a space. The top stretched so far up that even looking created a camera lens distortion on your vision, a forced perspective. Taller than any other building in the world.

I told a friend about the tower. We decided to reach the top and record it, in the vein of Youtubers who scale buildings and post GoPro recordings.

We arrived during daylight hours. We brought packs of equipment, including food and hammocks to rest in. To climb, we grabbed the metal bars and hauled ourselves up. The proportions of the tower shifted as we climbed. I remember being maybe a quarter of the way up. Looking up and down, space curved. The dimensions were never correct.

We never made it to the top. We might have died. At one point I saw the impossible distance in both directions and realized we'd never succeed or make our way back.

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4.

Company of fishermen, operating on the outskirts of a post-apocalyptic city. Catching fish with their bare hands, or with nets. On boats or diving into the water.

Three of us were trapped in an underwater cave, thronged with spikes and rusted machinery. Only one could hold his breath long enough to swim back to the crew. The others drowned and were forgotten. Quickly replaced.

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5.

A utopian dream. Hyperrealistic VR had been invented. Dimensional transition and dream traveling were also involved.

I toured many worlds, knowing I was guaranteed to be perceived as a minor figure who nontheless belonged. Places were set up for me at meetings, though nobody had met me.

Rooms or worlds I went to: X-ray chamber, where a doctor berated me for opening the door at the wrong time and receiving a dose of radiation. Dentist's office. Zoom company meeting, everyone sported brightly colored masks. VR company meeting where I entered a dream within a dream, lost track of how many layers there were. Luxury resort spa, rosewater and petals.

Only woke up because I wanted to check back on myself in the real world. Was worried how I was doing.

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6.

A flat, empty field, bordered by forest. Tranquil, pastoral, and completely isolated. We were the only living animals there.

There was a giant fly in the sky. It was impossibly big: the size of skyscrapers, or cities. It started off distant, but the longer you stayed, the closer it got. If it reached you, something terrible would happen.

The fly was facing away from us. It had its back and wings towards us, as if perched on an invisible wall we couldn't see. Its head pointed up. It would writhe and wave its limbs around, but it never flew away, only perched there getting closer and closer.

At one point we were all in its shadow. It covered an entire side of the world. It dwarfed us. If you turned in that direction, you would only see trees, field, and fly.

Remember running as it got closer. Don't know if we escaped.

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7.

Post-apocalyptic dream. Entire cities of empty skyscrapers. Everything looked normal from the outside, but when you entered, you were in a cavernous, forty-story room with nothing inside but dust.

Remember standing inside one of them, dirt and dust swirling around me. Above me hung the metal skeletons of the building, columns of steel stretching into a gray sky. The vast dimensions made every sound echo, and you could always hear the wind. The only light came from the windows, since everything else had been destroyed, and it gave the building a dim, pale, dusty, effect.

Something about the calamity made the ground inhospitable. The rich lived in the sky, in housing built inside the tops of hollow skyscrapers. Workers would add a stable floor to an empty building. Once a single floor of a skyscraper was filled up, they would build a new floor below. This created upside-down buildings where you'd construct the top floor first and go down. The oldest buildings almost reached the ground.

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8.

Dream of a Second Dimension (SD).

Do things right, and the world will shift. Colors bleed from the walls and cover everything in a bright sheen, as if turning reality's saturation value to the max. Dimensions subtly warp and twist. Walls and floors no longer line up. There are no 90-degree angles or sharp, clean lines in the SD; all rooms are slightly askew.

The SD carries an overall feeling of confusion, exacerbated by the fact that it is difficult to focus on anything inside. Things distort until you can't track what you are seeing.

Was standing in the bathroom when the shift happened. Opened the door a crack. The hallway was an eye-watering bright orange, as if someone had drenched it in buckets of paint. The walls and floor, too, had the texture of paint. Colors rippled across them.

In the bathroom, paintings hung on the walls, surrounded by exquisite frames. The mirror reflected nonexistent objects: faces on the floor, a winged toilet that hopped around the room, birdlike.

The Dimension had no 'outside'. It was a never-ending series of enormous rooms and hallways. At one point I was stalked by a dog-like creature covered in dripping orange. Escaped it and returned to my home dimension safely.

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9.

Futuristic dystopia. We were part of a caste of mass-produced slaves. When our job was done, we would go onto an assembly line, give away our weapons and tools, and be shot.

The assembly line was a great black churning conveyor belt carrying us through the air, in the bowels of an immense factory, where neither ground, sky or sunlight were to be seen. Remember entering the cave at the end, where the guards stood, waiting for us to hand them our materials.

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10.

Walking with my father. Had an old film camera around my neck. Held it up and looked through the viewfinder at the landscape around us.

We were near a forest. Sky was overcast, and whorls of mist drifted through the trees, obscuring the horizon. Everything looked distant and insubstantial. Beyond a certain point, my vision faded into the fog, and there was only white. The occasional faint beam of sunlight managed to poke through the clouds, casting pale light through the leaves, but besides that there was little illumination.

The grass was ankle-height, lush, perfectly cropped. Dewy blades under my heel. A series of old transmission towers leaned out from the dirt. Took several photos, amazed at the intersection of light, leaves, and wires stretching into the mist.

Walked for several minutes. After some time we reached the inside of the old forest, which had grown uninhibited by human activity and was now thick with foliage, branches thickened by age dripping from the canopy. All draped with vines. To the left was the ocean, wave after wave of deep blue crashing onto a tiny sand strip.

One of the most distinctive memories is the smell. I remember the sharp tang of ocean air and salt in the breeze, the rich sweetness of leaves, and beneath it all a musky undertone of earth.

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11.

The apocalypse. When the storm came, and the bus broke down, it was the end of the end. We had nowhere left to run. We would die.

Nobody panicked. We were doomed from the start, anyway. Instead, we sat in our seats and waited. After a while, people stopped pretending that the bus was still moving and we were still going somewhere. They removed their seatbelts.

Outside the window, the sky was dark, swirling with a vortex of black clouds. The rain pattered against the windowpanes. Inside, we exchanged small talk and waited.

Others had died already. We would open the door, letting rain and fresh wind spill into the bus, and pile their corpses outside. Some buried them and made small graves, sitting vigil until their time, too, ran out.

The sky was a shade of dark gray. Rain and storm clouds. I felt disconnected to it all, almost eager to die. The event I had dreaded and anticipated in equal measure had finally come. For me, the world was no longer worth anything.

I sat with my friends, under a dark sky and a dim light, watching the rain fall gray upon the streets. I died painlessly.

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12.

Standing on a rooftop hundreds of stories up, staring at an impossibly twisting array of metal wires and poles, a support structure for the building opposite me. Had to climb it. The first death-defying leap took me thirty feet across the abyss and twelve feet up. Grabbed onto a pole and felt the rest of the structure clang with the impact, metal reverberating upon metal. Grabbed another pole, then another, adjusted my footing, and made my way up bit by bit. The rest of the city stretched below me, rooftop under rooftop under rooftop. Thousands of streetlights and searchlights flashed, interspersed with the polygonal silhouettes of half-lit skyscrapers.

Reached the top in several minutes, or several hours, or several seconds. Planted my feet on the final bar and stood. Freezing night air whipped past my face, but it could never unbalance me. No human had stepped ever foot here before.

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13.

A recurring fever dream I had years ago. Hard to describe. Most dreams are, but this is more a combination of feelings and sensations, coupled with a vague knowledge of events, than anything concrete.

I associate the dream with a large cloth. Blanket covering you as you sleep. Each stage of the dream is associated with a type of cloth, or the progression of the cloth as it changes over time.

The beginning of the dream is peaceful. A large, white cloth. A warm breeze. Peace and happiness. The cloth is perfectly smooth and unblemished, like silk or velvet. This is important.

As the dream progresses, there’s whispering. Starts off quiet, not too bothersome. Though the quiet is better. No way to make out what they’re saying; it’s a chorus of indecipherable voices.

Then the whispering gets louder. Goes from indecipherable whispering to indecipherable speaking. The noises are sharp and loud. Something is wrong.

The cloth corrupts. Splotches of black spread across the surface of the fabric. Wrinkles form on the formerly smooth, beautiful cloth. Hundreds, thousands, millions of wrinkles, like aluminum foil. Too many to count.

Then the screaming starts. A chorus of indecipherable screams.

Though I can’t understand the words, I still understand the emotion. Hatred. Terrible, all-encompassing. Feels like the only noise that’s ever existed.

Rising sense of panic. Something is going horribly wrong and you can’t do anything about it. Heartbeat thudding in my ears. Might leap out of my throat and kill me.

Compared best to the feeling you get when a mob of people are fighting and there’s nothing you can do to stop them. Watching a crowd go insane. Hitting each other, grappling on the ground, snarling and wailing like animals, tearing at clothes and belongings.

There’s no reason for them to argue.

But there is a mass of screaming people larger than the entire planet. You are the only one calm, not participating, out of billions. A wall of wailing faces surrounding you. You are the only one who doesn’t understand. Why are they screaming at each other? Everything could be perfect. Everyone would be happy if they could stop and try to remember why they’re fighting. But they just keep screaming.

As things progress, the cloth gets closer. Though there was nothing else in the first place. No space even to traverse without the cloth occupying some part of it. The cloth is the universe. The screaming is the universe and the universe is nothing but endless screaming. The universe has been irrevocably ruined. Some pure and wonderful part of it has been stripped away, never to return. The cloth gets closer and closer still, until it is the only thing your eyes can see, and it is you and you are the whole world and everything has been ruined forever.

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14.

Pedaling on a bike at nighttime. Passed enormous stacks of radios, box-like, all different shapes and colors and sizes. Somebody had tried to arrange them neatly, some stacks larger than others, but a few had fallen off and now lay haphazard on the ground. Their lights blinked on and off, shining in the dark.

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15.

Dying over and over again in different ways. Wasn't scared. Only going through the motions in a detached manner.

The one death I remember took place in an abandoned city. Was walking down a wide, flat street the size of a highway. On both sides of the street were tall, gray skyscrapers.

The city was flooded, covering the street in water. Not dirty or brown like normal floodwater. It resembled lake water, crystal clear.

The water on the street was low at first. Gently lapping at my shoes. As I ran down the street, the water got deeper, turning vivid blue. The sky darkened. There might have been thunder.

At one point, the water was at my knees. The small, gentle waves disappeared. Now they were taller than me. Every few seconds they crashed into me with force that left me gasping for air. Every wave went higher than the previous.

I wouldn't make it to my destination in time. I made for the skyscrapers at the road's edge. The waves grew larger, and the water rose. Was almost to the side of the road, where I would be safe, when my feet slipped. Cold shock ran through me as I plunged down. Realized I'd fallen into a sinkhole, created by water weakening the structure of the road. Everything went black.