13:03 
Oh gods. Now my neck has seized up and I can't feel my fingers properly and my vision is going blurred.
I wish there was an emergency rolfing service, I really do. Maybe doing the washing up will help.
10:29
Feeling stiff and sore and unhappy after last night's dreams but I can't remember all of it properly. There was a part when I was trying to save one of my cousins from a serial killer. Not the first time I've been up against a serial killer in a dream, but one of the times with a more successful outcome than others. That took place in Edinburgh, and was quite difficult because my cousin thought of me as someone she used to babysit and not someone she could look to for help.
Then there was this part where S got me an interview with her company (only it wasn't the company she is currently working for, as far as I know). This was about 20 (22, IIRC) miles away, out past Evesham. She got me an interview and told me to dress smartly, and said I didn't have much time. She told me where it was and said she was going there and then because she was going to work. I jumped in the car and raced after her. She had told me that she drives fast (and recklessly) but she was not as fast as me. Even so, she knew the roads better and got there first. Halfway there I realised that I had forgotten to change, and was still wearing black combats. I cursed myself, but didn't have time to go back and get changed into something else.
There were three guys waiting in the entrance foyer of this red stone building that gave this intense sense of depth. It didn't look big from the outside, but it felt it. It was quite disturbing. I really wanted that job. The three guys were waiting to interview me, to decide if any one of them wanted me to join his team. One of them was a man called David, who was on the same course as me, specialising slightly more in physics than me, at Southampton. We recognised each other immediately. He hadn't put the name to my face. I stepped over the low table and greeted him affectionately with a kiss on the cheek, then said hello to the other two men. David was wearing a casual shirt and jeans, and told me not to worry about my dress. He said it was really up to the individual as to what he wore, and they really wanted me working for them, so it didn't matter.
It gets very difficult to remember the details and the "time line" of what happened after that. I was taken for a tour and it became immediately apparent that this place wasn't just some environmental consultancy. There was machinery in there, and it was dug down deep. But the weirdest part was through the back. There was a door that seemed to be in the external wall. I was taken through this door. There were stone steps. A hundred of them maybe, leading up to this small building almost like a temple somewhere out in Asia or China. On the right hand side of the steps was a rock face, as if the majority of the facility had simply been carved out of the rock (it didn't seem that way from inside). On the left hand side was a very long, steep drop. The wind whistled past, but felt light against the skin as long as I stayed away from the edge.
The Land was covered in trees and looked perfectly normal, until about halfway towards the horizon. Then the sky turned red, abruptly, and changed the way it felt, as well, and the Land seemed to become this red-brown shifting mass of solid light. It was very disturbing. I had a sense that the trees and the normality were a mask to disguise what was really going on.
The door of the complex opened out onto a platform at the bottom of these steps, like a landing. There was another one at the top, where the entrance to the small building was. There was a stone wall around the one at the top, so that one could lean on it looking out towards the red sky and shifting mass of solid light. In the actual platform itself there were these holes, or drains, or tunnels leading down. They were about the size of hubcaps and covered in this brilliant-shining metal that appeared white it was so bright. The metal made an almost petal shape in the cover, six circles in a round, overlapping to provide full cover.
The man who ran the company was there, and he said what they were for. It was something not good, something that made me sad - but not angry. I think it involved the deaths of people, but killing people wasn't the purpose. It was something to do with the change in the Land. Something either went into these tunnels, or something came out of them. Whatever it was, it was a process I wanted to stop, but found myself unable to contemplate it.
We stood on this platform, this man, David and I, looking at these deadly flowers in the stone beneath us and feeling the way the sky hummed where it changed colour. David seemed deflated, forlorn, as if he hadn't known what the company was doing. He looked at his boss and told him that he would therefore be pleased to clean the tunnels after they had been used. It was as if he felt obliged to help in some way, but couldn't do anything actively involved. There was a sense that he didn't have the skills for it, that he was an "older version" who wasn't quite up to the job. His boss told him "This tells me that you are a prototype with no capacity for thought outside that which you were designed to do."
We went back in then, I think we had lunch. Everything inside seemed so normal. There was a cafeteria, selling fairly decent food. I saw S at a table over the other side of the room, chatting to a couple of other women. I'm really not sure what happened next.
I think they went ahead with it. I had thought that this was a future plan, that I would have time to stop it, but it must have been done almost as soon as I went back inside, while I was having lunch and mulling over what to do about it. I was basically given no option. Afterwards the world was very different. It was quieter. Vegetation was unaffected - thicker, lusher perhaps. I saw an eagle flying over an almost deserted town that looked like Oban. People everywhere had lost their homes. There were lots of people sleeping in the streets, and where there were lots of people there was lots of grey dust. I didn't like to think about it. Lots of shops had been abandoned, and there was graffiti in the grey dust that stuck to the glass.
I really don't remember very much apart from that, other than odd details. Like someone trying to snowboard down a wet, grassy bank because there was no snow, and leaving a great brown smear where the grass was pulled up. A small girl, with long blonde hair and wide eyes, hanging onto a doll with one hand and a woman who wasn't her mother with the other, staring in blind incomprehension at a man sleeping in a an abandoned bath tub at the side of the road, as if everything was too much for her to take in. A shop, on the ground floor of a once busy street, a sign outside telling people not to sleep right in front of the shop, but both the shop and the sign were covered in dust. It was as if months, perhaps years had passed between my entering the complex and finally coming out to see the world, even though I wasn't aware of it. It wasn't that I was unaware of it either, it was just that I couldn't remember what I had been doing.
I really don't know what to make of it.
Sunday, February 18, 2001