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Wednesday, November 13, 2002
14:36 
More weird dreams
I had something of an unpleasant dream last night. Although I tried to head back for dinosaur land and pick up where I left off, the way was thick and sticky and the closest I could get was this angry, anxious look from the little old lady who had told me "All flesh is grass". Apparently there were higher priorities.
The place I ended up was very different from last night's excursion. I was staying on a boat (I do this a lot, I have friends in all sorts of places and a lot of them live on boats. I like boats), in this marshy, swampy, estuarine area with lots of trees and weeds in the water. It might have been a very large lake rather than the sea, as the water didn't seem particularly brackish. At one point I had to swim out and rescue a small child, the full Bronze Lifesaving Award wellie. The family was very English, very posh, and had chartered the boat they were sailing. They didn't really know much about it, and not enough to keep their 4 year old from straying into dangerous territory on deck.
I stayed there a few days, and made friends with a very quiet mother, daughter and son who were moored a few berths over. They were very withdrawn, although politely friendly enough. They didn't come up to the bar with us, or attend the beach barbie, or anything else. They lived on a converted fishing boat that reminded me of a boat I used to know out on the West Coast called Eala Bhan (White Swan, pron. 'Yella Van' - I hadn't realised she'd been sold).
I eventually found out that the other son, the brother of the younger two, was an astronaut. He was currently the sole crew member on an orbiting vessel designed for communications and monitoring, not like the International Space Station at all. Something had gone wrong and the life support systems were failing, as were the communications. There was nothing they could do to get him out, and he knew it and his family knew it. They were spending as much time talking to him as they could, because, by the time I found out, he only had a few hours left.
It was desperately painful to see them, as they huddled together round this screen that wasn't much bigger than a small computer monitor, tears streaking their face. I can't remember details of the conversation, but the son seemed determined to keep it focused on banal things like what he'd been doing and what the weather was like and whether they had got the sealing fixed on the for'ard hatchway. There was a lot of static, and I remember going outside to see if I could boost the signal, to let them talk to each other until the batteries ran out rather than letting them be forced into silence by the movement of his space ship around the planet blocking communications.
I couldn't think of any way to get him back. I knew I could have gone there, and come back, but I couldn't move him because he was part of that world and I wasn't.
Tuesday, November 12, 2002
14:20
All flesh is grass
This one was particularly weird because I kept waking up but each time I went back to sleep I was just where I'd left off, but with someone tapping his foot impatiently like I'd just drifted off and stopped paying attention.
I was sent to this place that had a constructed society. In other words, at some point in their past they had decided what would make their world and way of life perfect, and had set about instigating measures to ensure that this would happen, whether there were any dissenters or not. The landscape was arid, with bright white-yellow sandy islands, perfect blue sea and azure blue sky. There was very little vegetation, but it wasn't particularly hot by human standards. There were no particulates in the air, no haze. Everything had perfect clarity. The architecture was minimalist rather than simple - there was something deeply contrived about it. The people were universally anal retentive, obsessive-compulsive, and had their heads shoved so far up their arses they could count the bends in their small intestine. It was painfully perfect.
One of them had gone a bit mad, even by their standards. He was some weirdo scientist, a sort of Dr Moreau or Frankenstein figure, who had this mega-complex some way from the main centres of inhabitation. I didn't really get to see him, but I have an impression of a greying, slightly hunched figure with facial hair (no one I saw other than him had facial hair), grey robes that were slightly spoiled and a distracting way of looking at the floor when he spoke to you.
I can't remember what the job actually was, and am having my doubts about the simplicity of it now anyway. There were three of us, initially, although we seemed to be subject to a degree of winnowing that left only me (maybe the others had day jobs to go to). We were shown this part of the mad bloke's premises, downstairs in either the basement or on the ground floor. There was a room the size and shape of a school gym hall, and with similar decor, even down to there being a couple of sets of climbing bars on the walls. On the far side of the gym was a pair of wooden doors, with vertical planking and a bar catch as you would find on a fire escape. Inside this gym hall, round the edges, were somewhere between a dozen and a score people. These people looked human, as if he had collected a quantity of bag ladies, drunks and tramps, and put them in this hall for some reason. They were curled up in sleeping bags, or in cardboard boxes, all of them dirty and dishevelled. They stared at us blankly, with wide eyes full of incomprehension, as if they were all away in their own little worlds.
The only time there was any reaction was when the wooden doors were open, when they shrank back against the walls and looked terrified. The little old lady who had shown us down there asked me to go fetch something from outside, it might have been a bucket of water from a standpipe just to the left of the doors. It was quite scary just crossing the room, with all those lost people in there. It was quite dim and dingy. On the outside of the door was this internal landscape. It was too big to be indoors, but completely different from the world outside. It was cool and damp, with grass and rocky outcrops, rather like Dartmoor, but more artificial. The light was gloomy, and I had to switch on the exterior light. The switch was a small metal thing that looked like a valve, that had to be turned. Then a pair of exterior lights came on and threw a dim glow that reached perhaps 10 feet from the doors, across a small concrete yard.
That's when I saw the dinosaur. It looked like a velociraptor, perhaps, or something similar but with a narrower head. It was perhaps 300 m away and had heard the door opening, was scenting the air. It was the colour of the moor, a sort of greyish green colour with hints of yellow like liverwort. I got back inside pretty damn quick.
It was when we turned to leave that the old lady said "Oh dear. You've left the lights on. We can't go leaving the lights on."
I hadn't switched the lights off when coming back in, or closed the door properly. The last thing I wanted to do was go back out there, but go back out I had to, and the dinosaur was much, much closer. I switched the lights off and scrambled back inside as quickly as I could. As I went back to the others, who were by the main door, I passed this little old lady, wrapped up in a puffy jacket that was too small for her and one of those lacy woolen hats. She grasped my ankle, whispering "All flesh is grass," fiercely at me.
Some other stuff happened then, and I lost my two companions, woke up a couple of times, met this other guy who was dark and had a lot of presence, was faintly mesmeric and wore dark blue. Eventually I found myself on the wrong side of someone, and locked in the gym hall with the drunks and the bag ladies. The only way out was past the dinosaurs. That's when I discovered that, on the walls, on the white panels above the climbing bars, someone had written something in red paint that was somehow only visible with the doors shut and the lights low.
"No flesh shall be spared."
"All flesh is grass."
I had to get up to go to work about then, but the job ticket is still open. The people in the gym hall seemed human, the rest of the world's inhabitants did not. I'm wondering now if one of ours had already passed through that way, and what the writing meant.
"No flesh shall be saved" is a quote from Mark 13, which is Jesus' prophecies of the end times. It's quite odd. Having read through the text of that set of passages, it seems to be saying that the end will come, like it or not, it's nothing to do with God, but God will be nice and make the end times last not quite so long on behalf of His elected chosen. The way I read it, God can only make it shorter for everyone, or no one, and so will make it shorter for everyone just so that His chosen few don't have it so tough. Presumably it's easier to manipulate planetary climate than the local weather conditions for a bunch of Israelites or something. Of course, "no flesh shall be spared" is a tagline from the film Hardware, which is one of my all-time favourites. Had you spotted that the robot in the film is the Mark 13?
"All flesh is grass" is from Isaiah 40, and seems to say that flesh withers and dies because the Holy Ghost breathes His foetid exhalation upon it:6 The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field:
7 The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the LORD bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass.
8 The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever. I suspect that this passage isn't talking about God's halitosis, but I have trouble understanding adverts as well.
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