It’s night, and I am outside. Surrounding me are the ruins of old stone buildings with their skeletal timbers jutting upward toward a dark sky. The landscape feels like the property of my old house, before it was renovated. There’s a chill in the air, despite the torchlight that illuminates a few points in the distance.

There’s a group of frightened people waiting to the left of a cellar doorway. I step over the shambles of a wooden farm fence, and find that they’re arming themselves with makeshift weapons. Pipes with large bolts, kitchen blades, Molotov cocktails, and other less intimidating things. 

A man rushes over, and presses a grenade into my hand. “They’re coming!” The crazed look in his eyes frightens me more than his dire prediction. “He shouts to no one in particular, “Get ready!”. People gather on the lawn, facing this cellar door. The doors are missing, revealing concrete stairs that descend down into a dark hallway beneath the ruins of a large house. I recognize this as the ruins of my old home.

Undead emerge from the cellar steps into the torchlight. I’ve released the grenade, and tossed it down the stairwell. The explosion sends shards of concrete everywhere, and as I fall down I lose my glasses. Scrambling to retrieve them, the world devolves into blurs of movement, and torchlight.

People sound like they’re panicking, and attempting to run while other attack the undead. I see struggling forms falling to the ground, and back away while still laying on the ground.  In the darkness, I retreat away from the cellar door, toward the road. Still without my glasses, I find a heavy steel pipe weapon nearby. Up the stairs and toward me move a woman and child, both dead. A man takes down the woman, and with startling speed, the child bares its small teeth as it rushes toward me.

*  *  *

The rest is a blur. By the time I can hear anything beyond a high pitch whistle in my ears, I realize that I am covered in blood, and slumped on my knees next to an oak tree. I feel like I'm in shock, and have a deep sense of vertigo. Gradually, I regain my composure. 

To the right of the house is another ruin, but one that has a door and first floor but no roof. Side stepping the corpses the litter the ground, I walk over to the house and sort through the garbage can next to the doorway. I hope to find something useful. Inside, I find a box-cutter, an empty DVD case, and a bubble envelope. An old man stops me as I back away from the can, and explains that he “put them there for a reason”, then returns the objects to the garbage. 

I walk through the door, and up a short flight of stairs. I am standing in a kitchen that has a window facing the road. I turn on the kitchen faucet, but realize it’s too short; a stubby bathroom design. The water doesn't reach the sink. Instead, it pools all over the dusty counter top. 

My father is standing nearby, reading pages from a binder. It looks like he’s seen battle, and his pants and shirt are tons and frayed at the knees and elbows. “I need to get out of here”, I tell him. He explains that he’s going ahead to Quebec to locate a safe zone for the family to move to, but he needs me to stay here to watch out for the family while he’s gone.

I can’t do this though. It’s his responsibility to look after the family, not mine. The dream reasoning blends with reality as I realize that I am moving overseas for work, and I can’t stay behind. The sounds of the undead echo off in the distance as my father remarks “Do what you need to do.” He turns back to studying his binder of papers.

I don't want to abandon my parents to the threats outside, but I know that my presence here can't stop what's coming. I walk outside into the night, but there’s no longer any torches lit. Looking out over the ruins of the house, and the featureless sky above, I feel a deep sense of dread.

I walk through a deserted matrix of shops and store fronts while the skyline of a dark metropolis looms in the distance. The city is familiar, and I know that I've visit it before in a dream long past.

The cobblestone paved roads are grey, and faded neon signs blink nearby. The streets feels like an area of Japan, or perhaps Hong Kong; having an aged quality about them, but lacking the grime and gum-stained sideways of most western cities. A small number of Asian shoppers wander about in the distance, too far away to make out. I meet an elderly version of an 80's/90's action movie star as he waits on the side walk. We walk quietly through an open air mall area build into the side of a building. The squared hallways are deserted, with many of the shops closed. The old man's knees hurt, so we stop for a time and sit on a bench. The air is cool, like an air conditioner; lacking any hint of moisture. The old man coughs, and tells me anecdotes of his life. I listen, but can't remember any details of what he says. Focusing so intently on what is said, I forget what came before.

As we exit the empty shopping alleyways, I see a large black freight truck parked beside the curb which we both get inside. As we both get in, I'm still uncertain of why he's walking around with me, or why we're now flying in a helicopter.

We ascend, leave the grey streets below. There are hills between this small shopping district and the sky scrapers that line the western horizon. No one is flying the helicopter, as both the old man and myself sit as passengers. Together, we watch the horizon.

I'm in a car driving down a heavily wooded highway. Cars are abandoned by the roadside every so often, and there are people with backpacks walking in both directions ahead. 

We exit into a clearing next to the forest to avoid the scattered wrecks of abandoned cars that clog the road . My driver is a woman who speaks very little. She gestures that I get out of the car with my belongings in front of an old wooden house. There are two others, but she gestures to this one in particular. 

I exit the vehicle, and she pulls away. I go inside, and other people notice this. A man starts running across the lightly gravelled front yard toward me. I run inside, and down a small set of stairs. At the midway point on the stairs is a sealed hatch-door. I get inside, and press it closed. The man throws his whole weight against the door, while another behind him hit it with a sledgehammer. They're desperate to get in. 

I tumble backwards down the remaining set of stairs as other people flood in. Men, woman, children. There's a few infants too, carried by their mothers. As the last of them enter, the door is hastily sealed with the inside valve. It reminds me of doors on a submarine, or fallout shelter. I look around, and realize it's the latter: a single long room, stretching back 300 meters is lined with tables and lockers. Canned and preserved food lines the shelves. To the right is a small hallway with two public wash-rooms. There's an argument among some of the people - I was going to let them die by sealing that door early. I didn't know what was going on. The room shakes, and light flicker. I know what's going on now. 

I open my small carry on suitcase to see a few dress shirts and pants and an old notebook. Inside the notebook are torn pieces of pink and beige silk laid between blank pages. The people around me busy themselves settling in while creating a feast from the provisions available. Soon, everyone is sitting around a long fold out table eating mashed potatoes, meat, and apple pie. I sit beside an attractive brown haired girl as she chats about where she grew up. My grandmother sits in a comfortable chair knitting as Stan Lee sits at the end of the table, serving himself more potatoes. "Aren't you glad you let other people in?" he comments. "It would be a terrible thing to be locked down here alone". 

*   *   *

The scene snaps in an instant. I'm alone in this bunker, standing in my underwear, wearing a plastic Halloween mask. There's no overhead electric light, but through the dimness of the emergency light bulb, I see a table mockingly set for 12 people. From the time I entered the wooden building, I experienced a hallucination powered by the madness of being sealed in a bunker alone during the apocalypse. 
I stand at the table, and gaze back into the room's receding darkness; listening to the silence above.

I'm standing in the ruins of the old elementary school my father worked at in the 1990s, looking out the front doors. The skies outside are a dusty yellow hue, and very silent. The school foyer blends into that of an condo apartment I once dreamed about years before. There's an open elevator directly behind me. It's doors are open, with the cables exposed as they descend into the darkness below.

There's a podium in front of me, with a draft of a film script I believe I've written. I'm going over it, making notes in the margins using the pencil. At the back of the script, there's pencil sketches of set designs, and characters. I don't know who drew these pictures. I'm fascinated by how difficult it is to write - I cannot draw letters in a straight line. I focus on individual words, but they become like symbols - an "R" is still an "R" as I see it, but I don't recognize it as such until I reflect on the dream later.

The films' tag line is "War, war changed." I realize in-dream this is a take off on the Fallout series tagline, "War, war never changes." Titled "The Psychic Wars", I realize in-dream this is another reference - this time to the old Blue Oyster Cult song "Veterans of the Psychic Wars".

The premise is that in the near future, the world suffers an alien invasion. It begins over Latin America with Ender's Game-like dogfights in the skies. The invaders strategy is curious: nine out of every ten people are unharmed in these cities. Yet, one in every ten humans their ships target become catatonic. They stop responding to stimuli - living in a perpetual waking-dream state.  

The film script revolves around battles in Latin America, with a cast of Spanish speaking (subtitled) actors initially in battle in the skies over Chile and Mexico. However, the focus of the story is more on the effects it has throughout the world.

As the war spreads to other continents, globally cultures change. While most South American nations become palliative-care paradises to manage "the Afflicted" ("los Afligidos"), other countries view them as cursed, or waking dead. These nations exterminate those affected rather than caring for them.
Amidst the chaos, an object is detected by an observatory travelling as it travels toward our solar system; appearing only as an absence of light. It is assumed to be another wave in the invasion attacks. 

The reveal at the end of the story is sad: as the object reaches earth, the other nine-tenths of our surviving population go mad. A Lovecraftian elder god reaches our world and feasts. The alien "invaders" were attempting to prepare our species for a "psychic war".

As "the afflicted" battle an elder god in the dreamlands, their bodies are butchered by those driven mad in the waking world. The story follows the drama of the original Latin cast - some in the waking world, gripped by violent insanity, while others are in the dreamlands, battling the Lovecraftian horror. It's a losing battle: without enough "afflicted" world wide, the battle takes too long. Those in the waking world murder those who sleep before they can stop the Cthulhuian entity. We're lost as a species.

There’s a train station shaped like a long half cylinder, devoid of other people. I've been here before in another dream, but on a different platform. The trains pull up into the station from the outside, and depart for places unknown. I'm lost in the levels of escalators, and the place is hauntingly empty. A grey tone saturates everything around me, and the air feels like the early morning - crisp, and cool. I find my way to a train, and it departs from the station.

I arrive in cobble stone streets that remind me of my old college area. I ascend steps to the main area where there would be a bridge, but there is none. Instead, a street lined with tall trees on either side. The sound of a horses' hooves fill the air, and a man riding a horse approaches. As he comes closer, I can see he's a corpse, but still alive. His wife and child are bound to him with rope, but both are long dead. Trailing behind the horse, also attached by rope is ...

“Dead eyes see no future” I tell myself as I flee into a nearby building. In the real world, this was a set of offices for my college. In this dreamworld, the hallway angle down sharply and is paved with cobblestone. On either side are small food service businesses with takeout windows. People stumble about, drunk, or out of their minds. I have the strongest sense of vertigo, and cannot stand. I topple forward...

I was meeting someone, or perhaps I will be meeting someone. In this place, it’s hard to think in a linear direction. I'm drawn to an office or perhaps bar space on stilts. The stairs are individually cut circular logs ascending to the door-frame. I enter the office, and a panicked man recruits me to pretend I'm a lawyer. Confused, I comply, and set at the back of the room near the window. There's an exchange with another man who enters, then both men leave.

There's a woman sitting at the back of the room with me. She is fascinating, and enigmatic. I can't figure out what her job is until she admits that she provides breast milk, and presents her large breasts to me. I'm encourage to grip them - when I do with both hands, milk seeps out in spurts. This woman draws me in, and provides this milk to me. It's horrifying, and inescapable. The dreamworld outside is chaos, but she reassures me with her presence. She finishes, and gives me her card to contact her, but no name...

I walk outside near the water. This path is the one that continues from where I saw the rotting man atop the horse earlier. The road blends into a memory of surrounding I have from Little Lake Park in my home town - the road curving left as it follows the shallow lake water. I gaze across the water, and see a gazebo in the distance. The outline of a small child silently observes me through the haze. 


I wander along the water, but I can't think of anything else but the woman. I return to the building I met her in, card in hand. Another person is there - a younger girl in her late teens. She has a disconnected look in her eyes that alarms me. I sit down next to her, and ask if she knows this woman - offering the card. She glances at it, and resumes her 1000-yard state.  "I do, but there's always a price." Since feeding from the mysterious woman, I feel a compulsion to…

I am led to the water, but from the opposite direction. There are multiple men here to mate with the breastfeeding woman, all entranced. They have each finished, and stand by the shore, naked and waiting something. The woman sees my approach, and greets me warmly. “You’re just in time.”

Something glides up from the depth of the water toward the surface. What looks like an alligator with the distorted head of a man emerges from the water. The men are eviscerated, with others castrate themselves before the the creature consumes them on the shoreline. The men are eerily silent. I’m frozen in fear, but the woman squeezes my shoulders and tells me it’s all okay. “They wanted this.” The younger girl stands a few feet behind us, still gazing at a fixed, unknown point in the distance…

* * *

I can not tell if my surroundings are a memory of a department store I once wandered through, or the echo of another dream: I walk through the harshly lit appliance isle, with its low ceiling and claustrophobic interiors. There’s a boy and a girl with me, both teenagers. We pass through the sliding store-front doors into a parking lot. On the far right is a Shoppers Drug Mart. We walk to the far left side of the parking lot to a police cruiser. The officer opens both drivers’ side doors, and tells us to find room inside.

The car interior is in a terrible state of disrepair. Garbage cover the floor, the seats' vinyl is ripped, and in places revealing the foam underneath. The passenger seat is cranked forward, and there’s a large amount of oily water floating on the floor in the back seat. The boy gets in the passenger side door, while and girl and I get in the back seat – careful not to let our feet submerge in the water. We wait for the officer to return. Perhaps he’s giving us a ride to where we need to be. Where do I need to be?

The boy gets tired of waiting, and discovers the keys somewhere up front. He starts up the engine, and begins driving around the parking lot, recklessly sliding into his corners. In two instances, I am certain he’ll crash the car against the wall during a tight turn, but manages to miss both buildings and people. I am angry at him, and get out of the car. The girl refuses to leave.

I walk into the Shoppers Drug Mart, and discover it’s smaller on the inside than it appeared to be. I go to the back of the store, and find a checkout. I comment about the boy and his driving to the cashier girl – a Nordic looking blond girl with dark eyebrows. She sympathizes with me. I’ am looking out the store-front, watching the boy still lurching around the parking lot in the police cruiser. I hear the blond girl’s voice over my shoulder – I turn to see that there are two of them. The girls begin speaking in fractured sentences – finishing each other’s – thoughts. They’re both gazing at the police cruiser, and say “It’s ok, he wanted this.”

* * *

I’ve returned to my grandmother’s old house in Lakefield. It’s different now – darker, with the walls and floors stripped down to the bare plywood. There are people moving around in the kitchen, unseen. In the living room, a television is on broadcasting a strange show I've never heard of. I approach the short set of stairs between the living room and the kitchen, and notice a few empty coin rolls on the ground. Covering the stairs and part of the kitchen are nickels and dimes. I kneel down on the floor, and desperately start trying to sort them out. The sound from the television behind me distorts, and the deepening sense of vertigo returns.

I sit down on the brown/white patterned chairs in the kitchen and gaze out the window. The cool early morning air calmly blows in from a formless, grey horizon. 

My mother is running a small hotel. The foyer is large, and looks like a converted orchestra hall; like something off of the titanic. Immediately behind the foyer is a single hotel room. I don't believe it odd that my mother maintains a hotel with just one room. This fact seems very normal. No one seems to visit this hotel, and I do not remember seeing my mother, although it is her business.

I'm visiting, and I'm aware that mother allows me to stay at the hotel in this room. My wardrobe of suits, dress shirts and ties hang in the sliding door closet beside the bed. I organize and reorganize the closet's multiple tiers. Perhaps for efficiency, maybe due to worry or boredom.

An old woman enters the darkened lobby, and rings the front desk bell. She wants to book a room. I (and I assume my mother, although I never see her) experience that sensation of being unprepared for a professional interaction: like the first person who shows up at a yard sale in the early morning - you feel woefully unprepared, and rush to compensate.

Leaving my clothing in the room, the woman simply walks in, and sets up in the room - closing the door behind her. I'm left standing in the darkened foyer, as the last light of day filters in through the windows.
I set up spare sheets on the sofa on the foyer right side, underneath the stairs. Echoes of structure from my high school flicker around me. A party, a situation - both those are all dreams within a dream.

The next morning, the old woman who rented the room demands breakfast, and I stumble over setting up a cafeteria meant for hundreds of people for the sole guest. Large packages of shrimp, giant bags of ketchup.

The woman leaves on errands as I clean up. Afterwards, I sit down at a glass table at the top of a staircase above the rented room. I notice the old woman left her knitting and a leather bound tome. Curious, I open the book and see "Spells, and ways of speeding up time" is the topic of the first page.

Outside, a large group of people are on the beach. It's evening, and they're concerned over how to cook an entire dismembered elephant. I offer my help, using the information containing in the old woman's book. I speed up the cooking process of the elephant in a matter of seconds, and the strange beach-goers consume the elephant whole - legs sitting on the sand like sitting logs at a campfire.

The process of speeding up the cooked flesh seems to continue long after the people consumed the elephant: the meat's accelerated time frame causes it to putrefy and rot minutes after it's been consumed. People rush away from the beach to be sick somewhere, except a single man sitting by the campfire. He smiles, and offers me some of the french fries he'd been eating instead.

I'm standing in line at a coffee/sandwich shop late at night near the airport. The line stretches around a wall divider and around a rack of post cards and souvenirs. There's only one guy running the register and making the food, so the line progresses slowly. I recognize him as a bearded employee from the Silver Snail. 

I'm talking idly to a woman in line about "...if you were asked to total up all of what you spent in your lifetime on anything, it'd look ridiculous..." She nods in agreement. The line moves up, and I'm near the wall divider, looking at the wall menu. I decide, then look outside through the glass window-front. 

The night is dark and foggy. The door is propped open, letting the cool night air inside. The air feels strange, like there's a pressure in your ears, and behind your eyes. Everyone seems irritated. A short Asian guy in a brown trench coat (who looks like an actor from 'The Tomorrow People') is fed up with waiting in line, despite being 2 people away from being served. I get to the register, and the man tiredly asks me what I want. I order Ramyen for $2, and a bottle of water for another $1. He rushes off to make the food, muttering how he hates when he has to do the cooking.

Everything goes silent, leaving a tone whistling in my ears. Outside in the distance, large rectangular puffs of air in a formation 'blow' from left to right - creating fog-less voids in the air. The lights flicker. Some people notice, while others are too wrapped up with what they're doing. A distant airport loudspeaker echoes a coded all-call: "Echo, Tango, Bravo. All is clear, all is bright. I repeat, All is clear, all is bright." That catches some peoples' attention, as they trade confused looks. I leave the line-up, and have a rising sense of panic.

A large silver-grey frame folds out of the fog in mid-air. One exists in the shop, a dim reflection of a larger version outside outside where the puffs of rectangular air once appeared. The frame exists at an impossible angle, like watching an object from two sides simultaneously. Inside the crooked silver frames are knitted grey overlays, shifting like living crochet. The frames expand, shift, and alter. Air begins rushing from the room, from everywhere. 

People look onward in shock, and begin to back away. The frames then collapse inward, creating a void in air pressure. The result is like explosive decompression from an air plane in reverse - pulling everyone and everything toward them in an earth shaking rumble.

I'm outside, running through the foggy night. A brassy-chord echoes off the tarmac, a sound like the lowest possible note. There's a pressure behind my eyes as a round the corner of a large concrete sign. Three other people are braced against that concrete as the next wave hits - signs, cars, and people are hurled up and past us towards the nearest void. I'm pulled against the wall, smashing my head against the concrete and passing out.

* * * 

When I awake, the other three people are gone. I can only see a smear of blood on the concrete sign beside me, and rubble strewn nearby. The night seems darker with no star light and the fog gone. I stumble toward a shuttle-bus loading platform and  see an airport television screen. It's still attached to it's housing. The screen is fractured, but shows a live news feed from the control tower - a large jet with a blue stripe down the side is attempting to land on the runway. Masses of people are running along the tarmac toward the plane's docking area. The next scene is one of madness: someone jerkily pans past a pyramid of people - all climbing atop one another. A woman in a dress is at the top, and leaps off toward the plane as it lands.  She misses, and disappears into the mass of humans below her. Horrified, I back away. I don't know what's happening. 

I enter a steel door into the underground mall connected to the airport. Thousands of people are milling around - many have dried blood around their eyes and ears. I descend down level by level until I'm in the waiting area. People appear more agitated, and are attacking one another for reasons not clear to me. I crouch down, and make my way toward an VIP waiting area. This connects to a rail-shuttle leading to the tarmac. There's two other people doing the same, and appear to have the same level of caution as I do. An Italian man in his 40s gestures for us to move toward an empty stairwell. He leads us through an emergency exit - ending with a steel door he unlocks. We exit into a service hallway adjacent to the VIP area. I excitedly move down the hallway - there's no one here but us. The others hang back, unsure of what they're find. I round a corner, and see a man in sunglasses and a black suit dead on the floor. His gun is missing, as are a few of his fingers. Blood decorates the hallway. Taking the other junction, I can see the masses outside through a frosted window. These people look glassy-eyed and ragged, and are hurriedly filing into the VIP staging area.

I run back to where the Italian man was waiting, but he and the other are gone. In the darkness of the airport terminal, everything again goes silent. The air pressure changes, and in terror I know what's coming.