I rarely have nightmares, but when I do, they come in sagas. A couple nights ago it was dusk and I was paddling on a surfboard towards an island half a mile away. The water was oily, yellow with the sunset. I could feel the sharks swimming enormously below me.
Last night, the world was gripped by an amazing plague. Profound orgies of violence, everyone's faces mutant, horselike. Flesh unbounded, warping capriciously and arbitrarily, consuming itself in fountains of gore as I watched. A taste of Hell.
The only part that really disturbed me was my resignation to it, its feeling of inevitability. Because in the dream the horror was the unseen, inherent consequence of living on the planet for as long as we have.
An enormous part of me thinks the normative force of the universe is holocaust; tracks, unblinkingly, the monsters circling beneath the surface. Sometimes I am very, very afraid of the next twenty years.
I wandered away into "the Infected Forest," vertical pillars of wood in engulfing darkness. Silent. Alone.
