Dream - At a large glowing building, after the breakdown of civilization

On Thursday, June 25, 2009, in the morning, I dreamed I was at the place where my elementary school is, but it was a big white scientific/hospital/research place/store that was very wide and several stories in some areas. It tended to be set back from the broad parking lot in steps, and on slightly higher ground. The inside tended to have a soft glow, even from the walls, and some of the objects even seemed to glow some, though some were darker. The building seemed to glow some too, as viewed from the outside, like light softly shining through slightly frosted glass. The building even had a glass-like appearance.

Some areas had books for sale or display, but they didn't look like normal books, in some places being indistinct, softly glowing, irregular somewhat flattened things, partly darkened, almost like books burned around the edges and softly glowing from within with pale light. They were mostly spaced some from each other too, setting out on long shallow glowing shelf structures with the book covers facing out, though in some cases they were a bit closer spaced and even with the spine outward. In one of the inner rooms they were behind counters, stacked more normally and looking closer to what books normally looked like, though still a little odd. I went in there a few times.

Something strange was going on, some kind of disturbance, though I think at least part of it was outside, in the outside world, and filtered through to affect what was happening in the building. It was some kind of strange disaster I think, and after a period of confusion where not much was controlled, some kind of repressive military-style control slowly settled in place, with black-dressed troopers searching for people who had committed offenses, and death was the punishment for stealing from the place, even for stealing small items. Earlier though, when the period of confusion was in effect, people did pretty much what they wanted, and there was a lot of stealing. I even came in and took a few things. It didn't seem all that important anymore not to, like things had broken down almost completely and civilization was falling apart, at least to some extent and for a while, though the people in the building maintained a little bit of control.

What I took was on the small side, a couple of things like flattened wadded heavy plastic, like the plastic used for inflatable toys. They were around the size of a closed billfold or a little smaller. I'm not sure what their function was. They were on the wall behind a counter in the area in front of a major entrance, in a recessed window-like area in the wall, which was white like most other places. The objects themselves were more of a gray-green. I carried them around for a long time, even hiding them temporarily in the building, in a place deeper in and to the right, that seemed partly a store and partly a huge bedroom, reminding me somehow of the master bedroom in my grandmother's house in Arizona, though many times its size and mostly white. I put them behind a counter there that was near the front of the room. Some books were on shelves there under the counter, arranged like books on shelves normally are. Some people were looking for me by that time, but only in a vague sort of way, not really knowing who they were looking for, just looking for someone who had taken things.

I also later got the things outside to the car. It was night. My brother was there also, and worried about me or us getting caught with it. He was also there earlier in the dream, when we were first going in the building I think, or one of the times, but we were separated most of the time from each other. Toward the end, I think I managed to get one of the things back in, to the counter near the front, and maybe put it behind the counter. I still had the other one, though, in the car I think.

There was some darkish rectangular thing mounted on a wall somewhere. It might have even been outside the building. It was maybe 15 inches high and 20 or 24 inches wide. It was smaller when I first saw it, maybe less than half that size, but it grew to the size of a desk mat, and looked much like one. It appeared to be just thin plastic, though, like the kind used in inflatable toys, and some parts were even thinner, even trash bag thinness.

I pulled off a long dark strip of it from a panel on the right end of it. The plastic I pulled off was very thin, almost like carbon paper. I was going to take it inside and try to represent it as the other item, maybe folding it up. It almost seemed like somehow it was at least akin to the missing item. We were outside now, near the car. My brother was nervous and didn't see how this was helping, and worried about me being seen doing it and being seen holding it. I was holding it up in front of me, with it hanging full length. The thing I had torn it off from was something that also belonged to the building, and so we could get into trouble for taking it, too, and even killed for it. A black garbed trooper carrying some kind of big gun in both hands was only around 15 feet away, and seemed interested in us, though only in a vaguely happily curious way. My brother kept worrying, though, about getting caught.

The dream was fairly long and had a strange feeling about it, a kind of peaceful dreaminess a lot of the time. More went on in it, but it's hard to grasp exactly what.

There seems a vague association with earlier dreams where I was outside in a broad area at night, with scattered little buildings or structures and I had to make my way from one side of the area to the other, or nearly so, sometimes going in the odd little buildings. Sometimes magic was involved in some way, and sometimes some kind of task had to be completed, sometimes that night, and sometimes people or beings were after me, and strange monsters, maybe even ogres or dragons, might be about.

Dream - After the collapse of civilization, a group of people live in an indoor mall

On Wednesday, March 25, 2009, around 9:10-11:00 PM, I dreamed I was in a large dark indoor mall, sometime after the collapse of civilization. People lived in the dark aisles of the mall and in the shops. There was a small controlling government in the mall, and another one somewhere outside in the woods. The government in the mall was very repressive. There was a strict curfew with guards patrolling in the dark with dogs, and the doors were locked and guarded to prevent people from leaving and to prevent anyone from getting in. If someone did get back in they were shot.

One time a young girl, maybe ten or twelve, managed to escape one night. She made it to the door at the end of the mall aisle, after the aisle had turned a corner, and found the door ajar with no one guarding it. Someone had gotten out before her and it hadn't yet been discovered. She went out through it. There was someone she wanted to see in the woods, a boyfriend I think. She wanted to leave the group, at least eventually, and go away with him. She managed to get back before the door was discovered, and cautiously and swiftly made her way along in the dark, keeping close to the shops. She had almost made it back to the main camp in the aisle when she was discovered. A guard found her and turned his flashlight on her. It was assumed that she had only broken the curfew. I tried to help her out a little, shining a light behind her, and saw a large dark-colored dog a few feet away, slowly sniffing its way toward her. Evidently it had been following her for a while.

The man who was the leader took her with him to one of the shops, where a particular group of people were staying. He said that she would be all right, that she needed some people to take care of her and these would do it, that nothing bad would happen to her. He went back then to where he was staying in the aisle, and was listening to a device that had something similar to a telephone headset but smaller, maybe like a radio set. He had it to one ear while listening to a young woman tell stories to him, like he did every night. I thought the voice on the headset, which was that of a young girl crying out in pain and fear and the faint sound of blows and other voices, sounded very much like the voice of the girl that had just been taken away, and I also realized that it sounded very much like the voice of the young woman who told him stories each night, only the woman's voice, because she was a little older, was smoother and a little deeper. I wondered if the young girl had somehow been brought forward through time and was now being tortured, despite what the man had said.

A few hours later, toward morning, I wandered back toward the shop where the young girl had been taken, feeling a little guilty about it and wondering if she was alright. The leader or someone sent by him came to me and showed me the store window, where I could see what looked something like her along with a bunch of other people, though I couldn't be sure it was really her no matter how hard I concentrated. She started doing a dance with the other people, a big ensemble affair, showing what she had learned and how happy she was. It looked odd sometimes, and sometimes the movements seemed jerky and the figures not quiet real, like animated puppets. I wondered, too, whether I was actually seeing through the glass or if something was being projected on the glass from the other side, and that they might be trying to disguise what had really happened to the girl. The shop window to the right side of it was doing something similar, with people dancing, though with different people or a different dance. I was shown other shop windows on the other side of the aisle, where similar things were happening, though with fewer people shown. I wondered if I should try to go in the room and look for myself to see if she was alright, but was afraid of what might happen, and was unsure if I could do anything to help the situation.

More happened earlier in the dream, but I don't remember it. (I had earlier been watching the TV show "Lost.")

Dream - Writing exercises that affected reality, and the way station to another world

On Tuesday, December 30, 2008, around 1:00-3:30 AM, I dreamed I was with a group of people who were doing increasingly negative writing exercises that seemed to affect reality, and then I went out into the night to a way station to another world.

In the dream, I was in a group that had writing exercises about end-of-the-world scenarios. Life was getting rougher and seemed to be heading toward such a thing. In the weeks ahead it seemed likely to go drastically more downhill, to really desperate times.

The exercises didn't start out as really end-of-the-world things. They were different ways things could go wrong, such as one thing or another going wrong that had a major effect on the economy, or some major disease causing an epidemic, or some war starting somewhere. People were supposed to come up with things on their own, to choose something that could have a major negative effect if it happened and then write about it. Then a new assignment would be given, to find something else, something worse, and write about that. And so the students wrote about more and more grave scenarios and outcomes, heading toward those that were more and more apocalyptic, heading toward those that would essentially destroy the fabric of civilization and perhaps send us back to some kind of dark ages or even worse.

Then the people were told to do one final exercise, writing about a possible end of the world (not that everyone would necessarily die, though that was possible, but that civilization would collapse and we would retreat, those who were left, into some kind of dark ages). The writing seemed in some way to have the ability to influence what would happen, and it seemed to have already had some kind of influence. It could not totally control what would happen. Everyone was, after all, writing their own version of things. But it seemed to have some kind of influence, pushing things in certain directions, and certain elements written about might actually happen.

Then I had to go out for some reason. It was dark and dangerous and I really didn't want to do it. I think one or two others were also going, maybe even all of them, though we were not together as a group and did not all leave at the same time. I was going north down Scottsdale Road toward McDowell. I may have initially been in a car, or maybe someone else was, but now I was on foot. A lot of other people were on foot, too. I was in the right hand lane. Cars were slowly going by on the other lanes. Initially I had had my left arm stretched out, my hand stretched toward and lightly touching a car going along beside me, perhaps partly going through an open side window of the car. In the car was someone I knew, perhaps from the group, though it could have been a family member, perhaps my father.

Ahead a little ways, a cop had stopped a car and was writing someone a ticket, evidently for speeding. On the sidewalk, closer to me, some toughs were occasionally hassling some people. They didn't seem concerned about the police stopping them. I went cautiously ahead, not wanting to get too close to the sidewalk. I thought the cop, when I got there, could provide some protection by his presence, but I wasn't entirely sure about him either. It seemed unlikely he would give me a ticket though, at least if I moved slow. I had no doubt if I walked too fast I was in danger of getting one.

I crossed McDowell with a lot of other people, moving slowly. The Don't Walk sign was flashing or perhaps was past that point, shining steadily. I went forward anyway, not wishing to take the chance of remaining behind. A short woman in late middle age and evidently without much money was in the middle of the crosswalk, moving very slowly. I hurried past her and many other people, though I tried not to move too fast, still concerned about getting a ticket. I saw a policeman on the other side of the street. It began to occur to me that he could give me a ticket for crossing against the sign, maybe even against the light. I hurried even more, trying to get to the other side and out of the crosswalk, but he was involved with some other people and didn't take any notice of me.

Across the street, I went into some small business that was right on the corner. It was well lit inside and some other people were going in there too. I think a policeman came in at some point too, but I don't know if it was the one I had seen earlier. The people were generally moving on deeper into the building, to other rooms. I thought they would continue and eventually come out somewhere else.

I thought this was someplace to get supplies, but it was also a place of safety. It was not the final destination, though, at least not for some people. For others, perhaps most, it was just a way station along the way to someplace else, to a destination that was a lot better place than where we had come from. It led to a better, mostly empty world, currently bathed in soft daylight, like early morning, a kind of frontier where people could start over. It was a happy place, with much hope in it.

Almost everyone that came in went on through to the back, eventually, I believe, going on to the other world. I think even the policeman did. The building that I was in, though, was the place I had been intending to be going. I'm not sure whether I, personally, would be going any farther than that.


In real life, the radio was on, tuned to Coast to Coast AM. The host was talking with someone about various apocalyptic scenarios, and that probably heavily influenced the dream. Then in a replay of the first hour, probably at 2:00, they were talking about something else, perhaps the economy.

Dream - Low purple clouds and disaster

Long ago, perhaps in the mid 1980s, I had a dream of very low purple clouds, low enough at times to touch. There were flashes and tornados in the clouds, I think even a disastrously large tornado or two. I think maybe a UFO or two as well. Most of the time I watched the clouds from the ground, but I think I also flew above them at times. The clouds were very threatening and seemed like a psychic phenomenon of some kind, and could somehow bring about or carry with them something that could bring about the end of the world.

Dream - Leaving Earth

Back in November of 2007, a few days into the month, I had a dream about the remaining population of Earth being rescued by extraterrestrial aliens.

Most of the population of Earth had been destroyed or had somehow died off, but how this happened is unclear. There seemed to be a lot of fog or smoke, and people tended to live in pockets that might be separated from each other by vast stretches of bare dirt. Some cities, or portions of cities, still stood, but the population in them was frequently sparse, sometimes thinly spread out and sometimes in groups near the edges.

I was with a group of people that was some distance away from a city and that was somewhat distrustful of the city, and of outsiders in general. Battles had taken place with the groups of people in and near the city and with other groups farther away, battles in an earlier and largely forgotten part of the dream.

Terrible weapons and futuristic technology had been used against us, sometimes from a great distance away, but we had somehow managed to prevent our destruction. This was in part because of an invisible barrier we had placed around our area, some kind of force field, that prevented some of the weapons from reaching us. We had not been sure that it could hold, and it was weakening as the battle progressed. In the end it was still standing, somewhat to our surprise. We had agents outside working against our various enemies, but the battle ended in part simply because the enemies' major weapons were used up.

That was in the past. Now the old animosity was ending and people were coming together in a kind of peace. It was something that happened rapidly. Word reached us, and we cautiously reached out, some of us heading toward the city. Aliens had come, aliens from outer space.

The aliens knew of the disaster, and had arrived to rescue most of the remaining people. The aliens were disguised to look like humans, but under the disguise could be very much different.

More than one alien race was involved. One type looked like reptiles with protruding heads and approximately humanlike, but overly thick, bodies. Although appearing, like the others, to be human, this type was too bulky to fit in a human disguise. Some kind of illusion accounted for at least part of its appearance. Perhaps illusion was most of the disguise for all the types.

The aliens were leaving with the people in eight days. Humans were being rapidly trained in various things, apparently mostly related to the journey, rather than what might be needed after arrival. There was no time for the people to gather much to take with them. Almost everything needed or wanted would have to be recreated after they arrived on the new world. The aliens were leaving on time, and would not wait for anyone. Some other disaster (or continuation of the current one) was going to happen soon after they left that would likely wipe out the remaining people.

There was a huge, warehouse-size room with lots of desks and people who looked human (but probably weren't) sitting behind the desks and helping the people who wanted to leave fill out various forms. The people/aliens behind the desks were very quick and businesslike. Once, in that room, I saw a guard briefly change to a reptilian entity and back to human again while having an animated discussion with someone else, probably another disguised alien. There seemed to be a big rush to get everything done, at times almost a desperate rush. People who completed the forms were hurrying through turnstiles to another area, apparently to where the spaceships were. The whole left side of the long room was filled with turnstiles. There seemed to be very little time left.

I watched what was happening, still not sure whether I wanted to go or not.

Dream - The doomsday machine

Saturday morning, October 13, 2007, I had a dream about another world in a parallel universe, a world in some ways much like ours.

In the dream, in this other universe, I had just had a birthday (in real life, my birthday was months ago), and I was taking a paper plate of brownies, wrapped in plastic, with me to eat on my trip. I was traveling by car, driving to another state to visit various military installations out in the desert. The installations were small, with small groups of people, where doomsday weapons, generally missiles of various types, were being worked on. We had been in a low-level war for a long time, against a large country on the other side of the world.

At one of the installations, people from another universe visited, appearing in a dimly lit and uneven hole in our universe. The people were dark-skinned, and looked like normal black people. They said that they, too, had been visited by aliens. They said that the aliens didn't talk much, but that the aliens did say they were from another universe or dimension and were not like us. As the visitors from another universe said that, I could see in my mind the aliens beside them.

The aliens looked like vague, three-dimensional shadows with wide, flat heads with points on the side, almost like flattened cat ears. The aliens' eyes were wide from side to side and somewhat narrowed, and glowed yellow-white with orange around the edges.

The people from another universe said that they didn't, themselves, possess the technology to come here and were just piggy-backing on the alien technology and couldn't stay long, and they soon disappeared.


At some point, I ended up in a restaurant in a small town. I was sitting at a table attached to a wall. Some other people were at the table with me. I had brought two large cloth bags with me. The bags had wide canvas straps for carrying and long zippers holding them closed. They held various things I brought with me on my trip, mainly notebooks and books and pens and pencils and various other things.

I opened the bags and began taking things out, laying them on the table and the floor. One of the things I took out was a computer, which was not something I had originally brought with me, but was something I had been given at one of the installations. It was about the size of a closed laptop computer, but it didn't have a hinged screen; the screen was built into it.

The screen display was dark, with a lit outline of an image. I was trying to adjust the display, to increase it to maximum size but not so large that the edges would be lost. The image also tried to tilt, and I had to adjust it to straighten it. It was difficult, because the controls at the bottom were very sensitive and just a touch made the screen move, and because the display was dark and the image on it didn't have straight lines or extend to the edges of the screen, which made it hard to see where the edges of the screen were.

The image on the screen was a colored outline of the United States. The image disturbed me, though, because there seemed to be something wrong with it. The outline seemed to show how the United States might look if the ocean had risen significantly and covered part of the coastline.

I finally decided it was time to leave the restaurant. I had been there a long time and it was getting late. I tried to put the things back in the cloth bags, but most of it seemed to be missing. As I looked around for it, more of it seemed to disappear. I finally left one mostly-empty bag there by the table, hoping that if someone found the missing stuff they would send it to me. I picked up the other, not very full bag, put it over my shoulder and left. Outside the restaurant it was dark. I put down the bag and fiddled with the computer display again for a while, before giving it up for later and moving on.


Sometime later, I was with a girl in a small car heading back to a town. We had evidently been out in the desert looking at some installations. I was in the passenger seat and she was driving. She was not very tall and was probably somewhere in her thirties, but it was hard to tell. She was wearing a short-sleeved lightweight dress that fell below her knees. The dress was wide, but extended out only moderately and seemed to want to hang in large folds. The dress was dirty with dust and what looked like soot, and so was she. This seemed to be normal; at least I didn't think it was anything unusual.

Outside it was daytime, though the sun wasn't very bright. The sky seemed to have a smoky haze with thin, smoky clouds. This also seemed normal. The car we were in was small and seemed to have very short fenders. From inside, I could see the tops of the front wheels. The tires were very wide and the tops were almost straight, with only a trace of tread. They seemed to be old, but I felt that new ones would not be much different.

The road we were on was dirt, and was wide and had a slight upward slope. The dirt of the road was the same color as the dirt of the desert, a pale brown, almost cream color, and seemed roughly bulldozed, with an occasional large chunk of sharp quartz rock on it. The tires didn't seem to care, though.


After we got back to town, we went in a small building with several rooms. I decided to take a nap. While I slept, the aliens communicated with the girl, with voices in her head. They told her how the conflict could be ended, how the war could finally be over. They told her how to build a doomsday machine, not a missile but something that would shoot poison gas high into the atmosphere and cover the Earth. It would take about half an hour to cover the Earth and settle down to where the people were, and another half hour to kill them. There was no cure and no antidote. Everyone would die.

She listened to the voices in her head and built the machine, while I slept on unaware. It looked somewhat like a large, very wide artillery shell, and was close to three feet tall. When it was finished, she stared at it for a while with eyes that were a little wide. Then she activated it.

An extremely dense column of air shot up, so dense that it was opaque, with ripples in the air at the edges. It continued for a while, as she watched, and then, its job done, either stopped automatically or was shut off by her.


A little while later I woke up. I had done pretty much everything I needed to do on this trip, and it was time to go home. I gathered up my bags, now fairly full again, and noticed that I still had two brownies left on the paper plate. This disturbed me somewhat, as I had intended to have them all eaten by now.

I went with the girl, then, to a local mall to have a last look around before I left. I had my bags hung over my shoulders by their straps and was still holding the paper plate with the two brownies, wondering if I should start eating them now or leave them for the trip. The mall was large and crowded with people. The ceiling was unusually low for a mall, perhaps only ten or twelve feet high, and a large grate was in it not far from us.

As I looked at the grate, blue air, clear and see-through, started flowing out of it, looking almost like flowing blue water. The girl beside me looked up at it and her eyes grew wide in panic. She began to run, crossing in front of me and going to the right, and ran rapidly off down the mall. She was soon lost in the crowd.

I didn't understand what was happening, but I knew something was wrong and ran after her. I couldn't see where she was, but I went in the direction that she had been going and where I hoped she might have gone. As I ran, I changed direction to go at a long angle across the wide aisle of the mall, and I found a door at the other side. I went through the door, though I wasn't sure whether she had gone that way or continued down the mall.


The door led to the outside, where a large, narrow triangle of landscaped ground was. It had lots of green bushes and some strange green trees that looked almost like giant broccoli sprigs six or eight feet high. Between the plants, pale ground was visible, the same ground that was everywhere else. To the left, a wide, paved road came out from under an overpass, an overpass that seemed to be an extension of the mall. The road went past me at a slight angle toward the mall, and was filled with vehicles moving very fast.

I started running to the right at an angle toward the road. I was running very fast, the figures 60 and 66 miles per hour came into my mind. I saw the bushes and trees rush past me as I ran. I felt that I could have merged with the traffic on the road, but I decided to run in the dirt beside it. Early on, I had dropped to all fours, reaching out with both hands and grabbing the earth with my fingers, pulling on it and sending a spray of it backwards as I went forward, bounding along.

As we left the landscaped area, the plants thinned out and became sparse and changed in character, becoming more like clumps of grass and occasional small bushes. The road gradually turned toward the town, or what I thought was the town. I could see it in the distance, but it was much bigger than I remembered; it was a small city. The buildings were close-spaced, with occasional tall buildings sticking up. All the buildings were a light tan color, the same color as the dirt.

I was losing energy now, though I didn't really feel tired. The vehicles had all gone ahead and the road was empty now. While they were still there, the road had become progressively less maintained, and had turned briefly into a dark gravel before becoming dirt. Now I continued alone, still by the side of the road, on hands and knees now, still reaching out both hands at once and pulling myself along.

A raised area had appeared by the road, perhaps six or eight inches high on the side by the road and perhaps half that on the other side. The somewhat-flat top was about eight inches wide, and the sides dropped off sharply from it. The raised area had a line of holes in it, a line that extended into the distance, and had uneven, eroded cracks between some of the holes. The holes appeared to have originally been a few inches across, but were now mostly filled in. Some of the dirt in the holes appeared to be relatively fresh. As I pulled myself along the raised area, I wondered if some animals might be living in the holes, and might jump out and try to get me. None did, though.

Eventually, I came to realize that the raised area with the line of holes was all that was left of an ancient wall of dried clay blocks. The clay blocks were built somewhat like concrete blocks, in that they were about the same size and had hollow areas, but the hollow areas in the clay blocks were smaller and the clay blocks didn't seem to be as tall.


I continued toward the closer-but-still-distant city, crawling on my stomach now, still pulling myself forward with both hands, fingers clawing at the hard, eroded surface of the dried clay blocks, sending more dirt into the holes. The raised area that had been a wall of blocks was down to the level of the rest of the desert now, and the only things that distinguished the dirt of the still-wide road from the dirt of the desert were the flatness of the road, the lack of vegetation on it, the occasional tire track, and the line of holes near the edge of it.

The part of me that knew what was going on wondered if somewhere, someone would realize what was happening and set off the missiles, in an attempt for revenge against an apparent attack. Wouldn't it be funny, I thought, if the atomic explosions when the missiles hit turned out to destroy the poison and allow a few people to live on. Wouldn't it be funny, I thought, if the missiles that had been intended to be doomsday weapons actually ended up saving a few people.

The part of me on the ground knew nothing about that, and didn't understand what was happening. I knew something was wrong, and that I was very weak and getting weaker. I had hoped that I could at least reach the city before I died, but I was afraid now that I might not make it. I looked at the city, still so far away, and continued to slowly crawl toward it.

Dream - Destroyer of worlds

Around the first half of September, 2006, I had a dream in which I destroyed the world. It was an accident, though. I wasn't intending to destroy the world at all. Honest.

In the dream, I was in a room that seemed to be made of metal. It was apparently a large control room of some kind, or perhaps some kind of situation room. Someone was standing to one side and slightly behind me. I have the impression that this person wore a uniform of some kind.

A rectangular screen was on the wall, like a television screen. Below it, some kind of panel ran along the wall and protruded from it slightly. There were various controls and lights on both the panel and the wall, but not a large number of them.

The screen on the wall showed a picture of the Earth. It was not a photograph, it was more like a simple map, but without grid lines. It showed the Earth as a globe, but with everything flat. The water was a different color from the land, which also had an outline around it.

Initially, and I think probably before seeing the control room, I saw a large, wide ship filled with people and heading toward Antarctica, probably from someplace in the Pacific Ocean near Africa. The ship was low in the water and did not seem to have an upper structure.

Now, however, in the control room, the ship was replaced by a large island in the picture of the Earth on the screen. The island was vaguely round though somewhat irregular, and slightly flattened on all four sides.

I was happily talking to the person near me about continental drift, and about how over a long span of time the island would move toward Antarctica. To illustrate this, I reached out and put my finger on the island on the screen and pulled it toward Antarctica.

I came to realize, then, that the picture of the Earth was somehow connected to the real Earth, that perhaps it was, in some way, the real Earth.

And that I had moved a large island, perhaps a couple of hundred miles across, a large distance, perhaps a thousand miles or so, in a fraction of a second.

I took my finger away from the screen. There was a slight pause, as if it was waiting to see if I had finished, and then time started again. The island continued moving, cutting across Antarctica, which had become centered on the map. The image of Antarctica turned red, orange and white, and I could see molten rock churning and boiling. Only the far edges of the continent stayed the original color.

The island was destroyed, but momentum kept part of it going, not as an island but as a mass of associated particles and hot gases. It headed out past Antarctica, across the ocean to South America.

The view on the map shifted, then, and I was looking at the North American continent. It was covered with a dusting of snow. The remains of the island were circling the Earth, but going from north to south, not south to north. Each time it passed over North America, a band of the snow disappeared. The cleared bands were perhaps a couple of hundred miles wide, and a new one was added every second or so. The new bands were placed to the east of the old ones. The bands were not quite parallel, and were not exactly evenly spaced. Occasionally they even crossed. A rough striped pattern was being produced, though, as the new bands were added.

I could tell that with each new band the remains of the island became fainter, being composed more and more of hot air and less and less of dust and particles, though it was already so thin from the start that it was transparent from my perspective. I could feel, though, that it was fading out.


Thinking back on the dream, the effect on the Earth was similar to what would happen if a large meteor or comet struck it. A mass extinction of life. Perhaps even a total extinction. Something that could cause an entire continent to become molten rock could certainly do that.


My fault.

Sorry.