An Apocalyptic Dream

A Story by Reese

A dream I awoke from.

In the dream, it started off as with someone else. A woman dressed with puffed-up sleeves more like in the 19th century, walked upon a bricked mansion, wide open space with tall pine trees lined. The dream happened so fast like a trailer in a movie. In this version side of the dream, the woman was pregnant and couldn't decide whether to tell the father of the unborn child about it. Her aunt stood beside her telling her with some sort of advice.

And suddenly, the dream switched with the woman running towards a marching soldiers. Soldiers with a worn-out look, tired, dirty faces, some older men had dead eyes. And there was one young man, full with hopeful eyes, shining, smiling with his comrades as if a joke had just been told.

There she saw the young smiling man she made love with. Her belly full, she ran towards him, the young man caught her sight and stood up looking down on her belly with a confused gaze. As they approached, she hugged the young man and told him about their unborn child. The young man smiled and promised to come back alive.

But I knew, in the dream, as I was watching, these enemies were nothing human.

The dream then switched. It was mine now. My world, my own version of reality. I was walking onto a wide almost empty, carless street, and towards a narrow pathway like an alley, that led to some kind of classrooms that people had been living in. And there was this spot, a corner spot where when you are poor, you tend to make a makeshift bathroom for yourself.

For as to why I was there in the first place, I simply made a relief. A long relief in the bowels that I started to notice that people were watching. A girl then called out to me on the side, asking something whether the bathroom on my side was available or occupied. Now as the people who kept looking at me a while ago, I felt uncomfortable. That shameful feeling.

I knew, in the dream, I was almost done with my business. I hurried out of that place and got back to the wide almost empty street. There were people here on and about. The familiar place when I was a child, the stores, the bakery, and newly added small stalls below their homes.

The sky was that of a grey. The kind of grey when it was about to rain. But in the dream, there had no chill in it, the cold that you experience when there would be rain, nor the earthy scent you smell before raindrops come crashing down to earth. It was the chill, the horror kind of grey clouds that surrounds the earth.

Suddenly, a voice echoed, an announcement somewhere, sounded everywhere.

And I started running home. In this setting in my dream, I was in the same street when I was a child, and then it switched mid-way to where I was now.

The dream switched to when I was back home, breathless. It's funny how dreams don't make it so specific as to how you go to one place to another. You just switch, and switch, like a movie.

The voice that sounded earlier when I was on the street, came announcing again. It was telling us to prepare a food.

The last food that we wanted to enjoy.

I started cooking then. The same ingredients that my mother bought in the real world. An ingredient for spaghetti. Except, there was no chicken. I marinated the chicken and then fried it. Meanwhile, my mother was in the loo. In this house of ours, the kitchen was adjacent to the bathroom. She could see what I was doing and she told me to fry the other two chickens. My dog was there too, being his usual self, an adorable annoyance.

And after that, I never knew what happened as I awoke. Breathless as usual, heart racing, the dream flashing in my memory. It made me think, to this minute as I write this sentence, about that photograph of the last selfie an AI produced.