A stillness hung in the entryway, with a dusty, unlit chandelier above. A raised coffin, piled high with linens stood in the center on the well worn red rug. The runner ran from the front door, and back down the hallway, receding into darkness. I recognized this place, this house. Further down the hallway was the kitchen and a living room of some kind from another place, another dream.

To my left was a different hallway I’d never explored before. It was lit by light streaming in through open windows in each of the rooms. The back wall of the hallway was filled with sliding closet cupboards and hardwood.

A man had died, but he was only a boy. My parents were gathering linens to wrap his body in and lay him on top of this coffin-like canoe so he could be moved. Two layers down, was a tapestry-style woven blanket with Transformers on it. Old and faded, it had raised reliefs of the robot faces cut from longer wool, the edge in blue and white. “You can’t lay a body on this.” I said and pulled it off, scrolling the blanket for myself. The man’s body was placed on the blankets, and wrapped lightly by my mother. She and my father waited for someone to arrive, and I walked off down the hallway.

In the first of three rooms, light streamed in on two bunk bends, and toys littered every shelf and surface. Small Lego buildings and figures stood silently on shelves with their dog-eared, faded boxes behind them “Only at K-Mart!” many exclaimed. Old Transformer figures laid in toy bins, and on shelves.
The man had been autistic, but with the mind of a child. He had lived in this place with his family for thirty or forty years, and this had been his playroom. The whole house was abandoned now, as that man had no heirs or other family. 

I searched through the room, excited to explore what was. It felt okay to collect these objects, as their owner had since moved on. The light outside had changed, and the sun was setting. The walls dimmed, and mildew grew, as if the house had stood unattended for years in a day. 

* * *

In the hallway, the body was gone, as were my parents. I walked along the hallway, and heard noise at the far end of the hall. I glanced into the 2^nd room that contained a children’s style bed and nightstands, and entered the large wooden door beside it – locking it behind me.

It was a room the size of my father’s old classrooms at Sacred Heart elementary school – tall ceiling, rectangular. This one had carpet, and was filled with sofas lining the room, and a large television on the right wall. Beside the television were inset cabinets and a door. Pressing the cabinets allowed runners to slide out – each contained hanging newspapers, ‘Cracked’ and ‘People’ magazines, among many others. I walked up the 4-steps leading to a room behind the television wall to find a bathroom/kitchenette. Dirty dishes lay unwashed in sinks long abandoned. I opened the cupboards, finding only bandages, Listerine, and various cups and plates. I exited the second set of four stairs leading back into the room.

It was night now, and no light shone through the windows. Suburban streetlights cast their eerie glow through the curtains, striping shadows across the dusty furniture. More noise from the hallway, sending a jolt of alarm through my mind. I exit the hallway, and examine the far wall’s closet cupboards, but they’re empty inside, just like the hallway. I return to the toy room, and open a small plastic drawer on top of a cabinet. It contains meticulously organized accessories for old Transformer toys. I begin to pick these up to bring with me, away from this place. More noise in the hallway, this time closer.

I exit the playroom to find a group of 5 people rushing down the hallway. One woman carries two old-style wood/metal school chairs. The others have backs and backpacks full of stolen objects. One man with dirty long brown hair and a beard stops, and slams me into the wall with both hands against my shoulders. “These are MY ruins now, what’re you doing here?” he demands. “Who cares man? Just let it be – we got what we wanted, let’s go” one of the other men says. I start to explain that I knew the man who lived here, but I realize that was a long time ago. The walls are rotted and water damaged now, and the carpet is thick with bootprints. Time has passed while I explored, but not at its normal rate.

The group of scavengers moves off, and out the front door into the long night. The raised relief blanket, with its Optimus Prime robot face on it still lays scrolled up against the wall. Holding it, I sit on the raised stoop in front of the hallway closets and wonder where I belong.

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 in an open field during the fall, next to a grove of birch trees. A man holds me at gunpoint, and a police officer escalates the confrontation  The hostage man struggles physically with the cop, and his gun goes off, directly into my head. For the first time in a dream, I die.

I'm in an office building without windows. Beige walls, yellow counter tops, with 1990's era computers and CRT-monitors arranged on desks. I believe I'm at work, and sit down to operate one of the humming machines. I'm confused, as weeks seem to have passed, and all my files are gone. Nothing seems right.

I go into a break room, lit by harsh florescent lighting. The room is eerily silent. A girl is sitting down to eat lunch, and I move to join her. I can't hold a fork, or chopsticks to grasp the noodles. My ears buzz, and vision blurs whenever I try and interact with anything. I focus, and the vertigo goes away, allowing me to eat lunch with my chopsticks. The girl silently ignores me. I look away, and back - she's gone. Hours have passed on the wall clock. The food I was eating seemingly never existed.

I return to the computer, and attempt to move files around. An Asian man, wearing a white short sleeved dress shirt and tie approaches me. He looks remarkably like 'Harold' from the film 'Harold & Kumar'. He explains that I'm dead. 

Disbelieving, he shows me a series of work orders, each with elements missing from them.
"Were do you think this stuff goes?" he remarks. "We quietly manipulate the manifests, shaping the company - controlling the world."

"Ghosts?" I ask. He opens a concealed wall panel, removing a box, and showing me pieces that were repurposed or hidden away for future use. He holds up a set of brightly colored splice-cables. "Dye-set fiber optics. It slows down data transmission, lets us monitor things, and change what we need. I'm just low level. The old ones are pulling all the strings."

I look closely at the monitor screen, seeing two drives that didn't exist before. One labeled "Data", and the other "Dump". "We need to purge those drives. She's starting to see things." He pauses. "Your stunt at lunch didn't help."

The clock jumps again, yet the man and I are still in the same positions we were before. 
"Wh-what... why am I here? Didn't -" I stammer. 

"Die? Yeah. That sucks." He says. "The Older Ones put you here, to keep things running smoothly. Keep feeding them information, deleting other information. You and I help them manage the low-level business stuff." 

"What about lunch?" I ask. "I ate food. I... moved things around."  

The man walks over to a bank of server machines, and looks at the blinking lights. They seem to slow as he observes them. "You wanted to eat food, so your mind filled in the blanks. None of that happened. Nothing does, not for us. Not anymore."

A harsh, gray light began to filter in under the door. The man begins to panic. "Quickly! Dump those data drives. We can't let anyone find those. They'll know about us, about what happens after!" I try to move the mouse on the computer, but everything moves backwards, in reverse. My ears are buzzing, and the world becomes a blur.

_____

I awoke in the middle of the night, thinking about what happened in my dream. There was another aspect to the dream, but after the blur and buzzing in my ears, I have no memories.

In retrospect, I realized what my mind constructed was the idea of soul enslavement: using ghosts to power and shape not only one business, but global finance, politics, war, and the world. The Older Ones, perhaps were ancient ghosts. Of who, or what I don't know. The only knowledge I gleaned between the panic, and the blur was this: they silently shaped our world, but to unknown ends.

Empty buildings, grey and dark are all around. I walk with a man who has dwarfism and two middle aged men. We all appear confused. The dwarf's cellphone isn't working, and flickers along with the neon street signs. We take refuge in a pharmacy, and are startled by discovering an animal testing lab in the back.

Biological hazard signs label most cages and workspaces. One man knocks over a tray of beakers, and another is scratched by an animal within the cage. The two men become noticeably sick. The dwarf and I leave quickly, and run off into the darkened city streets as one of the infected men begins to attack the other.

At the docks, people waiting to evacuate on military submarines, I'm the last to make it on before the hatch shuts. I don't see the dwarf anywhere.

I'm let off into a dark forest, jets flying overhead. An alien computer complex sits among the trees, an organic hexagon. Surrounding it are glowing singularities of light. I'm driven past them, and gape in horror - as people run past or though these spheres of light, they're pulled up and toward them, like the swirling of water down a drain. As the reach the foci, they burst into pieces, or are completely turned to ash.
These spheres don't move, acting like violent street lights in the wilderness.

I'm told to find an entrance to this complex, to deliver notice to the computer. It demands raw energy from all nuclear plants on Earth. I crawl down a long corridor, and emerge within a large rectangular room. At the far end sits a glowing eye. It communicates without speaking, and takes what energy it wants. A glowing fustian square descends from the ceiling, representing the power it's taken on. It's not enough - and I'm afraid. We haven't met it's demands, and we're unable to.

It shows me that it doesn't matter - it's existed in this world for hundreds of years - it exists outside time. It shows me a scene in Korea -- noblemen are riding a train. Before, they died in a crash. Now, a blond woman -- a circularium agent of the machine -- stands up and makes a small change onboard, altering the future outcome. These men all live, and eventually build reactors where none existed before. It comments that their lives are as controlled as a "Disney pet", serving no other purpose but the machines.

What the machine wanted with the power, I never found out. It releases me, and I exit back into the forest. It's empty, with a heavy blue fog creeping around the trees.

I stood on a cobblestone path at twilight, around me was a sparse Forrest. I remembered it reminded me of something from an old fairy tale. I walked, but flickers of motion that would abruptly vanish distracted me.

A deep sound that began above 20hz, but quickly fell below, and crippled me. Like an air raid siren you feel, but don't hear, the assault continued as the world shifted. I stood through the same Forrest, but I was surrounded by plague victims - blackened and dying, the ran towards wooden steps that led up the hillside. Pursuing them were armed men in hazard suits and frighteningly anonymous gas masks.

I wrapped my blue wool coat  tightly around myself, and ran up the stairs. At the top was a ridge and the sky filled with stars. A ship unlike any I'd ever seen stood docked to the stairwell. It was
constructed from many copper pipes, canvas and other materials.

Looking vaugley like a creation of Jules Verne, it was suspended in the air by two vast, oblong balloons. Through the scuffed glass of a nearby window, a man wearing a long brown coat and tousled hair screamed at me. I turned toward him as he pounded on the window and screamed again "It's a Time Crash! Get out! Run! -"

Another wave of deep bass descended, shuttering the outline of the ship. A great pressure built up behind my eyes, and I stumbled. Time and perception fractured, showing me the events of 50, or perhaps 70 years from now, jumbled with the present. The hazard teams, the quiet gray Forrest, the diseased people fleeing, the empty cobblestone path - the conflicting epochs shuttered and froze, fracturing and skipping into an indistinct haze.

* * *

I laid in a large freight elevator, slumped against the wall. The lift came to a stop, and opened on to a boardwalk lit by a deep red sunset. I searched for the man in the brown coat, but the boardwalk was empty.

Standing on the wooden sidewalk, I looked into the horizon until black dots swam around my eyes.

* * *

I walked amidst foggy streets and empty yawning homes made of aged, almost blue plank wood. I was looking for a place to rent.

The streets were empty of people and sound, but there were lights on in a three story building on the street corner. The second floor opened on to 3/4 rooftop deck, fenced in with chicken wire, while the third floors windows were dark.

I was with a group of friends - faceless and indistinct, they drifted down the hall, led by an elderly woman describing the fixtures and appliances this house offered. I walked up a steep, rickety set of steps to the second floor - opening on to the 3/4 second floor deck.

There didn't appear to be any way to the third floor. Curious, I climbed on the railing, careful not to fall by gripping the chicken wire. I reached the third floor after locating a seam where the wire was not completely affixed to the ceiling above.

Entering through a window, an old man sat in a worn rocking chair in a long, narrow room. In the dim light, this room connected to another larger room facing the front of the house.

"Things don't always come back the way you want" the man said sadly. He looked at two encircled rings on the floor in front of the door. They looked like two circular gears set into the old wood finished floorboards. An identical ring assembly was laid into the floor of the larger room at it's center.

I realized something troubling. From the outside of the building, there was no larger room. There was only this small, one room apartment atop this old building.

Looking through the doorway, the light shifted, drawing odd shadows in ways that light should not behave. I touched the doorway, and realized it was solid - a mirror. Abruptly, the rings on the floor began rotating in place and the sound of gears moving filled the room from below.

The world went askew, and straightened. I stood in the larger room, now lit with grey light. An identical old man sat in his chair, and mumbled something I couldn't hear.

_____
Though recollection becomes fuzzy from this point onward, I learn that the gear assembly is actually a gateway between parallel worlds. However, physics and the interaction of matter isn't consistent between each universe. Amino acid chains and protean don't react the same way in one world as the next. The old man and his wife had two children who were heavily disabled.

Upon sending them through this gateway for medical help, their DNA now recombined to correct missing strands - two horrors emerged instead.

What was a normal human being in one universe became an ogre in another. Violent, and looking very much like the disfigured guy from "The Goonies", I ran through this confusing parallel dreamworld, trying to escape a bestial creature damaged by its transition from one world to the next.

_____

As I awoke, a compressed epilogue of some kind was produced - showing me that this house and the work within were part of a larger war between worlds. The creation of terrible creatures, produced by the forced transition from the physics of one place to another. A vision of a single warlord, adorned in bronze armor, inlaid with the familiar gear-motif stood atop a concrete barricade, and released unmitigated horrors upon another opposing side of disfigured, but still visibly human soldiers. Wearing the hazard suit-armor of the semi-humans, I fled this conflict - up a set of stairs, through a door, and into the blue mist.