Dreams of hail and glass

or, the moment I realised They were here

Before me was a battleground, pockmarked and bloodied, and there would have been screams, terrible screams, but I couldn’t hear them

I prefaced my first dream post—the one about catzumaki, linked below—mentioning themes that so often pepper my nights. Those recurrences that like to dance eternal in my mind.

Dreams of catzumaki

A few nights ago, one of those repeating themes came to visit, the one where [#######].

Oh, strange. Why did that [}}!{{]?

It seems I can’t give a synopsis. It THEY won’t let me. In any case, even if I could, it’d be a sort of spoiler for wh##}}!{{

Err OK, well I guess just settle in. Which is the precise opposite of what I did after this one threaded its way through me a few nights ago.

Found in the field, after it had happened. Image source: Midjourney

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The campus grounds where I study are a pristine green of manicured lawns and lush foliage, botanical patches intended to all too easily mask the concrete wastes of suburbia that infringe all sides.

It was autumn, the day that it happened. The sky was a gunmetal grey, an occasional parting cloud revealing the pale blue of summer’s departure. My last class finished, I sat by the field watching a game being played by a sports team I had no interest in except for one of the players. I won’t say his name—you might know him.

There was a light breeze, enough to make me glad of the coat upon my shoulders. I wrapped it tighter, hugging it as it hugged me, fingering the fabric as the cool whisper of season swept past. A paperback by Le Guin was in my lap, thumbed half-open at a page I hadn’t ever read. Head low, I maintained the pretence of reading whilst my eyes snatched glances at the field. A ball, goals, mud. The stampede of feet. The violence that wasn’t real though perhaps it was. It was pointless, all of it. Beaten grass and air polluted with shouts—I couldn’t handle it. The only thing my mind could do was locate that singular obsession: him, and the way he moved across the field, the long strides and dextrous movement. A confidence and flow. It hurt me, seeing that, how one person could command so much with just their presence. And yet I burned for it.

I glanced back down. It didn’t matter. I wouldn’t ever speak to him.

A group of students were nearby. They were older, or younger, I don’t know which; they were just another set, part of academia’s churn, running through, fuelled by desire and conquest. I didn’t look to them and they didn’t look to me. I was the loner by the field with the book in their lap. Why would anyone see me?

Those were the thoughts in my mind as I watched that game.

And then it began.

The air crinkled. That's the only way I can describe it. It crinkled. Like foil or like a crisp packet being scrunched, there was a crinkling through the air and it made me turn to the sky. The clouds were unchanged, still grey and with their slow transit marked against the trees. But there was a parting in them now, a larger opening.

Something moved through that sky. A small sphere, an orb of crystalline white. Just a shimmer passing through; nothing more.

How strange, I thought.

And then it was back, moving again, except not from where I saw it go but from where it had been before, right to left instead of left to right. Then it was out of frame once more, lost behind the clouds. But then it was there again, moving right to left. A crystalline sphere, edged like frosted glass. Dimensions unknown—those words came to me, unbidden.

I sat up, squinting. The crinkling was louder. Out of the corner of my eye I was aware of one of the students standing, the football team slowing, their voices stilled. But I wasn’t looking because my eyes were still there on the clouds at that gap and where now—yet again—a crystalline orb of shimmer had passed, or rather appeared and then passed. And again it happened, swifter, zipping. A small orb, for it must have been small, even without reference I sensed it was such a thing, a tiny sphere that held in it some shimmer and dance that cast the light and took the light within so that it refracted and frosted that edge like hail, like a ball that spun and curved and whistled. It was whistling now, louder, crinkling the sky.

CRACK!

On the ground. A pellet, far in the distance by a tree, hammered down and into the ground, just a smoulder of fine white emanating from the impact—

CRACK!

Another. The air colder, too, though the breeze had stopped. Everything was still, everyone had stopped, except—CRACK!—these ball-stones that came and—CRACK! CRACK!—another, more, hitting and pelting at the floor, two now near my feet leaving holes, perfect furrows where snow dust frosted and limned the grass.

Screams and yelling. Someone was hit. They were splayed on the grass, perhaps a player, the team around them—CRACK!—and I couldn’t see if it was him or not but then came another scream and to my right one of the students. Blood, lots of blood, the grass staining red and freezing red where blood had touched a hole where buried within I knew there would be a sphere, crystalline in the light, an edge suffused in iron-red and white.

The crinkling stopped. And with that halt, so too the falling orbs. Before me was a battleground, pockmarked and bloodied, and there would have been screams, terrible screams, but I couldn’t hear them because now the sky was rending with a great peal, a tear through its very fabric as a beam of light, gleaming and dark and wicked, searched and swept the field. A light that hunted.

I was on my feet, running. Sprinting away, Le Guin’s words cast to the ground and forgotten as I fled to the path away from the field but there came the light, searching and I knew—dimensions now known, my mind screamed from somewhere, the words inexplicable—it was coming, for me I knew, that beam of thick and dark and gleaming dust that swept its arcs and tore, bursting across trees as the sky too was torn, shredded, this emanation somehow there and reaching through, reaching, cloying, the beam sweeping and flooding the ground and it was so close now as I shifted left, leaping a bush and across a path, but I was too slow, the beam was there and large and larger and I felt it brush my skin, crinkling it and searing it, stilling it, numbing the flesh.

And it gulped me.

Numbed and gulped I was consumed. I was within it, sucked somewhere and somewhen, I knew, as I caught one final glance of the field now far below, that mass of flayed ground, the hail and glass and screams as I saw him, saw that it was him there, motionless, that hole through him with a small white orb at its heart.

And then They were there. All around me in the dark.

Everywhere, their eyes.

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So that was a dream. It had me waking with an awful whimper, causing my wife to shake me out of it. I don’t know whether it’s worth pondering origins, but I’m going to do so: we recently watched NOPE, which must be a clear brain-inspiration (brainspiration?) for this, but I think there’s some other drip-drip here too: the narrative of The Shards [I still haven’t discussed that] and how Bret’s character spent his time sitting in bleachers with a book and having no interest in sport. I’ve never even sat on a bleacher. I don’t really know what one is.

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