I spoke with a man who purchased an eBay item from me. Somehow, this involved a webcam video chat as well. It was his step-son's birthday, and he needed me to hand deliver the item for it to arrive in time. I reluctantly agreed, and was further convinced by the pleading of his wife to deliver the gift to their apartment.

In the couple's apartment, which now becomes a business or office setting - I'm introduced to the son. He appears about 10 years old, and is being fussed over by his mother. The man comments to me that since he wasn't there for his step-son's 'birth', he will be there for the boy's "re birthing". Both he and the wife seem very proud of this notion. I feel alarmed.

Trying to make a fast exit, the man forcibly guides me to a room, and insists I "share this moment" with his family. The boy has a blank expression on his face, and together we're guided into a room containing from left to right, a 6 foot tall representation of a woman's face, and two domed glass units installed in the floor.

The large woman's face stretches grotesquely as it opens it's mouth, and the tongue extends straight out, which is used as a gurney of sorts. The boy, now dressed in pajamas, climbs on, lays down, and is retracted into the wall-mouth. I'm horrified by what's happening, but the step father and the boys mother proudly look on, gesturing to the 1st dome. The boy ascends from a trap door in the floor, covered in a viscous mucus or gel. His eyes are closed, and his parents take pictures. He then decends, and some time later, emerges in the second dome in a boys school uniform, all traces of 'rebirthing' gel gone. His hair is combed, and his eyes are now open. The father insists I take pictures.

Awkwardly, I raise my camera up and press the shutter button, but realize it's set to 'video', and record a few seconds accidentally. I quickly switch to a photo setting, and capture one blurry image before the boy's platform descends back into the floor. The parents walk me into the next room, and wait for their son to return from the process. When he does, he's dressed again in his casual clothing, and seems older.

The boy insists I show him the photos I took, and when I decline, he becomes impatient. I promise that I'll email them to his father as I edge my way out of their apartment/office through the kitchen.

The father insists I stay and hang out with their son - I decline, telling him that it's already late and I have other commitments. The son (who now appears to be a friend I had in high school, and is much older) escorts me out of the apartment, and though a set of security doors with his key. The apartment building seems decrepit, full of peeling wall paper leaking water and mold. The boy seems oblivious to this.
Again, he asks for me to stay. I look out one window and see the sun is shining and it's day light, and out the front doors where it's now night. Without saying another word, I leave the building and it's weirdness behind.

_____

When I woke up, I actually checked my camera to see if there was evidence of this, thinking some version of it actually happened. Luckily not. The whole process reminded me of a situation I experienced years earlier while working at Blacks Photography: a woman came in with a dog photo, and wanted it printed. I did so while she waited, and looked for a frame to pick out. She used that opportunity to try and convert me to being a Jehovah's Witnesses, and left a stack of their 'Watchtower' magazines on the counter when she picked up her picture. 

People using a financial/customer service transaction as a preface to sell their strange personal or religious values is an innately uncomfortable experience for me. It's strange that it'd manifest in my dreams in such a vivid way.

I step off a 19th Century steam engine into a desert landscape. The rock formation feel wrong, like undersea eroded stone, filled with curious gaps.

I walk toward a house built into a cliff face. It looks like the porch to my grandmothers old house, but blended into the rock. It's windows reflect the grey sky.

I enter, and notice a side doorway to my left. Outside is a primordial ocean, filled with algae. In the distance, more alien rock formations. I begin to panic. I don't know where I am, and retconned into my dreamscape are two children. One is sick, and needs help.

Though the window, I notice two beings approaching in the distance. I mistake them for dinosaurs, but realize they are pink-skinned, with hides like an elephant. They walk on reverse jointed legs, with a long neck ending in a humanoid like face. I'm frozen in terror, watching these two beings approach the front door. One looks right at me, and speaks: Hello, do you need help? 

Confused, I open the door. I ask how it can speak English, and the second being explains. They are from a parallel reality where their galactic cluster is in close proximity to Earth. While lacking contact, they know rudimentary English communication. I don't know how this is possible. They gesture to the sky, and instead explain that this world is in the process of being adapted to suit their biology. The beings offer me supplies, including tube-like respirators for myself and the two children. We are to use these during the terraforming process to avoid suffocation.

As shock-waves sounding like fireworks explode in the sky, I hold the breathing tube over my nose and mouth. One child runs off down a darkened hallway, blending into an institutional setting. A janitor watches me from the unlit hallway. The dreamscape is rapidly changing, but I want to know more about the pink, long necked creatures. I look back, and the alien landscape is gone. Outside the hallway windows is a bright light.

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 dreampt of a boat, and a group of small islands with long forgotten docks and collapsing bridges between. My small boat became wrecked in the dark, navy waters while gray, water-coloured clouds surged in the sky.

I felt a great pressure on my chest and in my mind - I sank below the waves, an a throbbing pulse filled my ears.

I stood on the sea floor - a mere 2 stories below the waters surface. A man-like Dolphin stood beside me, and gestured towards the submerged horizon. Sandy reefs, and a catacomb network of ancient stone walls stretched out in every direction.

Below the waves, everything was still. I noticed with great pleasure that I no longer needed to breathe. When I did, my lungs filled with water, but this did not cause me to choak. Instead, like the special water in The Abyss (film), I was supplied with the air I needed. I inhaled infrequently.

Feeling the familiar weightless pressure of a large body of water, I felt at peace. I wasn't dying, but instead existing in a state of limbo.

The weight of emotion and the future was replaced by the warm weight of the water - it's familiar tidal surge rocking me slightly where I stood. This dreamworld stood without preconception, and without doubt. I wanted to live in this gray world of breathable water forever.

The man-dolphin swam away into a submerged staircase leading downward. I followed it into the receding darkness.

I walked through a strange multi-denominational church, and into what appeared to be 'my' room. I was handed my mail by the churches' minister daughter. It was an envelope bearing no return address.

Inside were photographs. A picture of my Moped outside on a sunny day, another of just it's wheel in the frame. A picture of the traffic lines on pavement blurred by motion, the next photo of the same lines, but they are now twisted into circular spirals on the road.
The final pictures are blue-tinted photographs from my photo album. Familiar images of friends and myself are mixed with photos of events I don't recognize – and perhaps haven't happened yet. They all exist side by side in these images; all tinted the same shade of cyan.

Underneath all of the photos is a small business card. Where the individuals name would usually be, only the word 'Travel' exists. A street corner address, and a time are printed below.

In the dream I turn and ask my brother if he knows who did this, but neither he nor his friend Cody know. I then seek out the little girl who gave me the package. She states simply that it came in the mail.

I sit wondering what it all means on the floor of my dream, and awake.

___

I almost wish this had occurred in the real world so I could discover who sent this strange message, and what it meant. The most puzzling fact about all this is that - in a way - I sent this message to myself. Of all the people we believe to know so well, we know our inner selves least of all.

I ran through a dark, shadowed city rendered in shades of blue and gray. Small red eyes peered out from crevices, tracking me.

A thick layer of soot carpeted this town, yet I left no footprints in the ash. As I ran along the waterfront, I passed an old school building with a fenced in field. A small girl appeared at the entrance as I passed, and grabbed me around the waist. A ripple of light arched across our forms, and we were both gone.

I now stood in the same place, but the gray and blue shading of the world seemed peeled away. That area sat like a malevolent rift at the edge of this school.

The girl explained this was a sanctuary against the darkness beyond. This school seemed like an unfamiliar hybrid of cathedral holy site, and a girls grade school. The world was now in vibrant colour.

I was shown the recreation area, which was as large as a soccer field and filled with children. Beside this field was a river, separated from the school by a fence. Leading up the school was a floating staircase, assembled from blessed wooden planks, and gold. Inside, the building, the hallways were all brightly lit, and a calming shade of beige. Down a series of winding, blind-corner hallways, was a sleeping area. I rested here until I heard screams echo in from outside. I rushed toward the water front area, to see a series of the red eyed creatures breaching the sanctuary. It was the emotional willpower of the children that held the dark creatures at bay, but I could sense them failing. Colour was beginning to drain from the sky. Patches of grass, and the children themselves began to desaturate before my eyes. Another, older child grabbed my arm, and pointed toward the building. I understood without words that that sanctuary was lost - and I needed to escape.

Running out of the fallen sanctuary, back into the gray world. Down a highway overpass, on to a main road clogged with both ash and snow. Two people danced atop a car, a man and a woman. Both wore a flickering assortment of gask and filter masks. They pointed toward the highway below. A writhing mass of the red eyed creatures rode a rusted, hulking vehicle of some kind down the road. Mounted on the vehicles front was a snow plow, and it caused a tidal-arch of snow, grit, and soot to swirl and quake in it's wake.

I ran to the vehicle, and climbed on top as it passed. I pushed the deamons aside, and they payed me no mind. I reached the front of the deamon-plow, and rode like a flowing wave the arch of snow on my stomach. Soon, the highway blended into a dark train system. The screech of rails filled the packed cabin. The world outside was still soot grey, but we were no longer in a city. The rickety subway-style train passed swampland that was once suburbs - flooded skeletons of houses, with only their rooftops and sidebeams intact.

The people on the train seemed intent on getting to the front, so I followed. We seemed to descend downward through four levels of cars, stacked upon one another. Once I reached the furthest car, I saw the driver. They sat looking out at non-existent tracks, rocketing their vehicle and passengers toward the colourless horizon.

I walked down a dry gravel road on a warm fall afternoon. Birch trees lined each side, their white bark peeling and waving in the non-existent wind.

To my right, another path opens, and leads up a hill whose steep incline was over 45 degrees. Climbing up this hill, I grasp ruddy weeds and old gnarled tree roots that protrude from the tan coloured dirt path.

As I reached the hills' top, the ground sloped downward until it reached a winding stream littered with stepping stone rocks. On my right side, the birch tree forest, to my left, the stream. Beyond this was a swath of grass covered land which divided this world from the featureless ocean and gray-blue horizon.

The bank of the steam was populated by Komodo dragons who sluggishly meandered about. However, I was approached by a komodo dragon whose body was covered with neon-orange spines, not unlike a porcupine. Down the stream, and across various stones and shallows I ran from this creature. One of my boots became stuck in the mud, but I left it behind.

It was here I realized this place was exceedingly familiar.

Behind me existed a distorted version of Champlain College, and beyond it, what was once a swamp in another dream.

I now stood on the swath of land which divided the stream from the ocean. On this grassy area existed a rectangular gazebo. From the ceiling of this structure hung doll parts - arms, legs, torsos, and the occasional unblinking plastic head.

A series of wind chimes, each with their own pull-string, hung at the entrance. Behind them, a little
black girl whose hair was gathered into two fuzzy pigtails. The wooden flooring of this ghezbeoh was covered in long dried blood, instilling me with a sense of dread.

"Why does this place disassemble people?" the little girl asked. I climbed atop a fallen tree, and looked at the wind chimes. I knew that pulling them in the wrong order would mean dismemberment. A blue fog seemed to be rolling in from the forest, drifting across the river toward the gazebo.

"Because," I replied "Sometimes people need to be taken apart know who they truly are." The girl looked at me an nodded, then turned toward the horizon. The blue fog was thick now, reaching past the stream and over the gazebo. I sat down on the fallen birch tree and let it envelop me.