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Friday, December 13, 2002
15:53 
Chromed dragon inna bun
I've been having a lot of weird dreams recently. There was the one a few nights ago - four of us, in a team, in some sort of underground facility that had become rundown. Some of the passages were blocked off by fallen rubble. The walls were coloured a sort of off-white and medicinal green at the bottom. It looked like a prison or hospital. Towards the end of the dream the four of us found ourselves at a crossroads, knowing that down each of the passageways lay an obstacle of some sort. We took it in turn to go down each passageway. When it was my turn, I knew what was down there, knew the place somehow, and had really been hoping that someone else would find a way. It was quite a long passageway that gradually became dark, and then there was fear. It was just fear, lots of fear, terrifying. I found myself running back towards the others, unable to help myself, screaming, saying "900 ghosts. There are 900 ghosts down there."
Then, the night before last, I had this long, rambling dream, during which I was filling up a clapped out Suzuki GP100 at a petrol station that looked like the one we used to have in Upper Largo and discovering I had a flat tyre, when a barn owl swooped down and grabbed hold of my bottom lip. For some bizarre reason I was convinced that I had something stuck there and it only wanted to get it off and eat it, but it grabbed hold and started tearing flesh, and I had to get Frood to pull it off.
Last night's was a very long and complex dream involving more than one location and a chain of events, the people in the dream remaining the same throughout each of the separate occasions, but there is one section that is particularly vivid.
I was one of a vast swarm of dragons, investigating a new place, a new world. We were all silver, shiny, metallic. We had scales, but we looked as though we were made of polished steel or silver. The world was almost entirely covered in water, an azure blue sea. The sky was a delicate shade of sapphire, with only the slightest hint of high-altitude haze.
In the sea there were these elongated white islands, pure white. When we swooped down to look at them, however, we discovered that they were not islands. They were underneath the surface of the water, perhaps 20m down. The water was so clear and the islands so white they looked as though they were on the surface.
I was one of those sent down to take a look. We dived below the surface, breath holding barely an issue, and swam down as though we were still flying. The surface was granular. They seemed to be some sort of mineral precipitate, perhaps salt. They were the colour of chalk, but crunchy on the surface like icy snow. I creeped to the edge and looked over, expecting the structure to be thick. It wasn't. It was very, very thing, so thin I felt I could easily take hold of the edge and break a piece off. I looked around to see others of my kind also investigating other structures. They were spaced about 50 m apart, of similar but not precisely equal shapes and sizes. Holding onto the edge, I stuck my head over the side and looked underneath, feeling that momentary disorientation as your balance organs tell you that you are upside down and they don't like it. I was also a little concerned by water going up my nose.
Underneath the structure was a peaty-looking anoxic layer. There was a brown substance on the bottom of the structure, that was drifting down away from the mineral and turning the water yellow in a vast column that started to diffuse at greater depths. There was something repellant about it, as there is about brown, washed up jellyfish, but I told myself that it was just anaerobic activity causing it, and pushed myself over the side and underneath to take a closer look.
That's when I realised I had made a mistake. The brown substance had changed the water density so that it was no longer able to support me. I couldn't get back up again, was sinking slowly, unable to make any headway to denser water. I saw others of my kind in the same predicament under other structures, some of them floating spine down, legs in the air, as if they had simply given up. There was no way I could warn any of the others who had not yet fallen into the trap.
As I sank lower everything turned to a dark green, and gradually I ran out of breath and started to drown.
Nice, eh?
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