Side effect of transcribing

I had a dream last night about the world possibly ending, with an interlude of mutilation. Some details are lost in the transition from sleeping to waking and are in [brackets]. Below, the dream:


I dream starts with the sense that something is not quite right. People are not themselves, they are behaving strangely. A man in a hospital is looking into a series of cases -- people are having out of body experiences. He's frustrated, confused, discussing it with a bright young woman on staff. "This has never happened before!" he shouts, pacing, wondering what the hell is going on. It's several days into a new year, and people are singing. "Actually," replies the young woman, "if you look back into the records you'll find that every first day of the year for the past [number] years there have been [number] people having this same type of episode." What?! His mind is blown. What the fuck is going on, and how long has it been building up to this current chaos? Flash to a compiled recording of the different patients they have seen. One voice on top of another, all singing. If you listen closely, you realize that they're all singing the same song, although these people came from all over the city and surrounding area.

My consciousness (unconsciousness) turns from the hospital (in that hovering-above-the-scene kind of way that happens in dreams, you know) and swings out into the street scene below. The soundtrack is the song that the people are singing. It's actually quite pretty, and would be enjoyable in a different situation. Right now though, it's pure chaos. The overwhelming feeling is of confusion, terror, chaos, confusion. People are running. I am running with someone I know who is overcome with the singing state that seems to be affecting some and not others. She has to sing. Not all the time; at certain times. But if I interrupt her by talking to her while she's singing, if I interrupt the singing, she goes mad (in both senses of the word). She screams at me; first unintelligible noise/chaos/static, then words, screaming that she has to do it she just has to she has to she just fucking has to, then more noise/chaos/static. Discordant abstract images of frustration -- scribbles, weird eye shapes with distorted pupils.

We are at a highway, we are crossing a highway. There is a chaotic scene in the middle, people running every which way. There are police to our right and they are shooting people. Watch the scene, find the pattern. The police are only shooting people behaving oddly. They want to pick off the singers. Some people are moving slowly, listlessly. Others show true fear in their eyes. Those are allowed to continue. The slow-movers are picked off with gunshots.

My friend/companion is, of course, one of the singers, but she's not harming anyone. She just simply has to sing or she will go crazy. She is singing right now, quietly, but I know we have to cross at a sprint in order not to attract attention. I grab her hand, knowing she may turn on me for the interruption, and force her to run. I am dragging her behind me, almost like a long red scarf, but somehow the police don't notice. We pass through. We are not shot. She comes out of the episode and is herself. She's perfectly normal and reasonable when she's herself. We walk along the side of the (bombed out?) highway, trying to find a place to sit. At first the side of the highway is nicely mowed and there are families, but we keep going. Too conspicuous. The grass is now a foot and a half high. The trees are low and scraggly. We walk past three burly young men -- wait, that's not bad. I double us back and sit by them. "Can't hurt to sit near some big guys," I say to her.

An amount of time has passed, it's hard to say in a dream, and we're talking with the guys. One of the guys is passing out some form of money -- five pieces to each of us. The money is delicate, like dark mother of pearl. It is shaped into sort of a large irregular ring shape. I look at them, entranced. They're very pretty. I put them on my thumb and bunch them all together. Joke to the young man who gave them to us that I should have more, on account of my friend (who isn't in this scene, although I have the sense that she is nearby/will return shortly). He gives me three more with serious eyes. He has very pretty dark eyes. "What are they called?" I ask him, referring to the coins/rings. "Rusa," he says to me. I have a sudden knowledge that the coins are Russian. He is Russian. "Rusa," I say back to him, rolling it over on my tongue over the almost obliterating noise of the scene going on around us, all around us, in the entire city. "Do you think the world is ending?" I or one of the guys asks. One of the guys laughs at the thought, "Yeah, should we spend all our savings?" He says exactly what I'm thinking. Better to spend it on some comforts now than have it go up, unused, when the world ends. We don't know. We keep our rusa.

I am not sure what happens next. I have an emotional memory of chaos, destruction, anguish, pain, confusion. The world may or may not be ending. In my dream I try to manually take my thoughts away from the dream. Sometimes I do this when I'm having a nightmare, and I wake myself up. This time, though, abruptly I am thinking about a hospital. A man walks in to visit some friends of his, also doctors, but they're patients. Room after room of mutilated bodies. A body with no head and blood spatters on the pillow, the spine clearly visible sticking up out of the shoulders. Another man's face is decaying. Down the hall I can see, in silhouette, a man sitting on a chair with both is feet gone, the bones of his legs sticking out. The man looks down at his own arms and he is also decaying. He is horrified. I am horrified. I wanted to turn my thoughts away from the maybe-end of the world, not to mutilated, acid burned bodies. Better go back to the dream.

I go back to the dream. I am there with the young Russian man in a small wooden room with another woman. She is tall and very pretty. She is also Russian. She's explaining [something] to us, I think something about how to survive in the end of the world. I tell her about the rusa, the uniform black backpacks the young man gave us. She smiles approvingly. She says [something] to me as she turns to leave the room. We are here in hiding. I don't know where she's going. The world may be ending.


Throughout this dream I half-woke several times, tossing and turning in the bed. I kept trying to turn away from it. I had the overwhelming sense that the details were too bright, the sounds were too loud. In the dream it seemed normal but in my half-awake attempts to physically turn myself away from it, I had the sense that the whole thing was over-saturated. Somehow that was equally disturbing as the mutilated bodies and the maybe-end of the world. When I woke up it was 5:30 am. I tried to turn my thoughts elsewhere but kept returning to the dream. That's not right. I wasn't ever able to turn away from the dream. The dream was there, vivid, over-saturated. Inez, I told myself, you have to write it, or you have to go back to sleep and let it go. Write it or let it go. Write it or let it go. My work from last night haunted me. These stories have to be written. I turned on my computer to write the dream.