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I haven't been writing down my dreams regularly, so I don't remember all the details as clearly as I should, but the one last night started off neat and then got creepy.
It was set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Fairly standard fare, from what I can remember: small enclaves and tribes of humans fending for themselves as best as they could, complete breakdown of society, everything was grungy and gritty in the best Hollywood tradition. What stands out is when I stumbled across a warehouse of ancient engines predating the breakdown. Calling it a warehouse doesn't do justice to the size of the place; it was big enough to have its own horizon, and filled entirely with rectangular blocks arrayed in orderly rows like library shelves. Dust covered everything in a thick, muffling layer, and the only light was wan and sourceless. The blocks stretched up to a ceiling so high it faded into the gloom pervading the entire place. I knew instinctively that they were engines, though dream-me seemed to think that they did things as well as powered them. Each one was covered with an intricate filigree of designs darker than the concrete-grey of their outer shells, something like a cross between complex equations and fractals, that might have served as a manual or a description of what each one did. Brightly colored graffiti covered some of the designs, signatures, enigmatic epigrams, and sometimes just swaths of color, as though the vandal had purposely tried to obscure the symbols beneath.
I wandered in the narrow corridors between the engines - I think I'd fled there to escape one of the roving gangs, since the warehouse was forbidden and/or holy territory - until I heard the sound of clanks and swearing. Following the sounds to the source led me to a tiny woman dressed in mechanic's overalls, covered in grease and dust. Her hair was cropped short and stuck up in haphazard hedgehog spikes with all of the engine oil and dirt in it. She had removed the front panel from one of the engines to reveal an intricate arrangement of gears, springs, what looked like oversized circuitboards, and and wires, which looked like the source of the clanks and the reason for her profanity. Most of it looked rusted or covered in cobwebs. She switched from glaring at it to glaring at me when I came up to ask her what she was doing.
Self-evidently, she was trying to fix the engines. She'd theorized that the wasteland had formed when they stopped doing their job, whatever it was, and she wanted to restore them and theoretically the world. I offered to help and at the sound of my voice, the machine's workings started to move. They were horribly out of repair, so they did so with much rattling and grinding, but they stopped the moment I shut up. It's hard to say who was more startled, her or me. The mechanic rounded on me irritably, feeling that I'd stolen the glory of fixing the machines from her. She'd worked on them for years and never figured out what powered them, much less made them move, and now I'd come along and gotten a reaction out of them without even knowing what I was doing. I could help her fix them, she said at last. Emphasis on 'help'.
Stuff happened, and I'm sure it must have been neat, because I woke up with the sense that I was either the reincarnated engineer who'd designed the machines, his/her descendant, or the immortal engineer myself, having wiped my memory of the past who-knows-how-long for some obscure reason. The creepy part came when I noticed the first two fingers of my left hand getting stiff and numb. This was probably because I was sleeping in a funny position, but in the dream, this continued for weeks while I worked on the engines. They grew unusable and I finally peeled the skin off my index finger. It came away painlessly, a bit like old snakeskin. Beneath it, the muscles of my finger were desiccated and half-translucent. I examined it more closely and found small insects burrowed into the pad. The dream dumped the knowledge that they were parasites into my head. They were bright orange and tear-drop shaped, with mandibles like a wolf spider and a cluster of bright black eyes. I squeezed them out. The adults were tiny - four or five of them had fit in the tip of my finger - and the grubs were little more than orange dots. They fell out of their holes easily and when I looked away and then back, the skin had regenerated and I had feeling in my index finger again. My middle finger had been growing numb more slowly than my index. Now that I knew what was causing it, I took a razorblade, braced myself, and cut into the tip. I saw a flash of orange beneath, and I squeezed. The cut wasn't quite big enough for the parasite to be pushed out. The pain wasn't terrible - the finger was mostly numb, after all - it felt a bit like lancing a blister.
I woke up before I could debug my middle finger. Strangely, neither skinning my finger nor the sight of the parasites who'd burrowed into it bothered me much in the dream. It was more of an annoyance that kept me from using that hand effectively, and after all, everything regenerated once I'd pushed the parasites out. I only started getting the heeby-jeebies once I woke up and remembered them.
This is the third horrible dream I've had where disgusting things are growing on/in/eating my flesh. Thanks, subconscious. Thanks lots.
It was set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Fairly standard fare, from what I can remember: small enclaves and tribes of humans fending for themselves as best as they could, complete breakdown of society, everything was grungy and gritty in the best Hollywood tradition. What stands out is when I stumbled across a warehouse of ancient engines predating the breakdown. Calling it a warehouse doesn't do justice to the size of the place; it was big enough to have its own horizon, and filled entirely with rectangular blocks arrayed in orderly rows like library shelves. Dust covered everything in a thick, muffling layer, and the only light was wan and sourceless. The blocks stretched up to a ceiling so high it faded into the gloom pervading the entire place. I knew instinctively that they were engines, though dream-me seemed to think that they did things as well as powered them. Each one was covered with an intricate filigree of designs darker than the concrete-grey of their outer shells, something like a cross between complex equations and fractals, that might have served as a manual or a description of what each one did. Brightly colored graffiti covered some of the designs, signatures, enigmatic epigrams, and sometimes just swaths of color, as though the vandal had purposely tried to obscure the symbols beneath.
I wandered in the narrow corridors between the engines - I think I'd fled there to escape one of the roving gangs, since the warehouse was forbidden and/or holy territory - until I heard the sound of clanks and swearing. Following the sounds to the source led me to a tiny woman dressed in mechanic's overalls, covered in grease and dust. Her hair was cropped short and stuck up in haphazard hedgehog spikes with all of the engine oil and dirt in it. She had removed the front panel from one of the engines to reveal an intricate arrangement of gears, springs, what looked like oversized circuitboards, and and wires, which looked like the source of the clanks and the reason for her profanity. Most of it looked rusted or covered in cobwebs. She switched from glaring at it to glaring at me when I came up to ask her what she was doing.
Self-evidently, she was trying to fix the engines. She'd theorized that the wasteland had formed when they stopped doing their job, whatever it was, and she wanted to restore them and theoretically the world. I offered to help and at the sound of my voice, the machine's workings started to move. They were horribly out of repair, so they did so with much rattling and grinding, but they stopped the moment I shut up. It's hard to say who was more startled, her or me. The mechanic rounded on me irritably, feeling that I'd stolen the glory of fixing the machines from her. She'd worked on them for years and never figured out what powered them, much less made them move, and now I'd come along and gotten a reaction out of them without even knowing what I was doing. I could help her fix them, she said at last. Emphasis on 'help'.
Stuff happened, and I'm sure it must have been neat, because I woke up with the sense that I was either the reincarnated engineer who'd designed the machines, his/her descendant, or the immortal engineer myself, having wiped my memory of the past who-knows-how-long for some obscure reason. The creepy part came when I noticed the first two fingers of my left hand getting stiff and numb. This was probably because I was sleeping in a funny position, but in the dream, this continued for weeks while I worked on the engines. They grew unusable and I finally peeled the skin off my index finger. It came away painlessly, a bit like old snakeskin. Beneath it, the muscles of my finger were desiccated and half-translucent. I examined it more closely and found small insects burrowed into the pad. The dream dumped the knowledge that they were parasites into my head. They were bright orange and tear-drop shaped, with mandibles like a wolf spider and a cluster of bright black eyes. I squeezed them out. The adults were tiny - four or five of them had fit in the tip of my finger - and the grubs were little more than orange dots. They fell out of their holes easily and when I looked away and then back, the skin had regenerated and I had feeling in my index finger again. My middle finger had been growing numb more slowly than my index. Now that I knew what was causing it, I took a razorblade, braced myself, and cut into the tip. I saw a flash of orange beneath, and I squeezed. The cut wasn't quite big enough for the parasite to be pushed out. The pain wasn't terrible - the finger was mostly numb, after all - it felt a bit like lancing a blister.
I woke up before I could debug my middle finger. Strangely, neither skinning my finger nor the sight of the parasites who'd burrowed into it bothered me much in the dream. It was more of an annoyance that kept me from using that hand effectively, and after all, everything regenerated once I'd pushed the parasites out. I only started getting the heeby-jeebies once I woke up and remembered them.
This is the third horrible dream I've had where disgusting things are growing on/in/eating my flesh. Thanks, subconscious. Thanks lots.
