I am floating in the middle of an ocean and everything is calm and beautiful. Stunningly beautiful, unnaturally clean, it is a clear, crisp and gentle day, the ocean is of a very pure and relaxing blue as it rocks my body up and down, I am floating easily, effortlessly, as if I were in a small, invisible raft, but I am not, I am in the water. The sky is clear and visibility is remarkably clear, there is just enough cloud cover to dull the sun's rays to the extent that I can look in all directions without any need to squint. Nothing is happening. There are no plants, no ships, no fish. Nothing. It is simply beautiful.
An unknown period of time passes, time doesn't seem to mean anything here, and I am being lifted, slowly and gently, by some invisible, unfelt force into the sky.
As I am rising I see the coast come over the horizon, it is nothing but picturesque, mountainous sand dunes rolling calmly into the sea. They are clearly separate from the ocean, but the sense of a border that a coastline usually makes known is not there. The water and the land are sperate, but intertwined, symbiotes, not opponants.
The dunes are beautiful, clean, pure, remarkable to behold, but, like the ocean, there is no sign of life; no animals roam, there are no trees, no other foliage, no man- or creature-made or manipulated material anywhere to be seen, and by now I am so high into the atmosphere I can see roughly one third of the planet. And there is nothing but water, sand, rock and dirt. No life, no signs of former life.
I am out of the atmosphere and while still gentle, the force is propelling me from the planet at a much faster and steadily increasing rate. The planet is a basketball to my eye, now an orange, I am serenely calm and simply watching as I sail away. The planet is an American dime and now I start to freak out, I had apparently forgotten something and now remembered, I try to weigh myself down but continue to sail away through space and now the planet is a mass-manufactured plastic bead in size, I ball up my fists and strain to sink myself down to the planet, I try to yell and with an extreme effort manage to let a desperate, "I'm not done, yet!" escape my throat. The force snaps and I am hurled violently back into the ocean from which I was plucked. I sink and sink for a seeming eternity until I fall out the bottom of the lifeless ocean and hit sand dunes (somehow).
I am on my back, staring up at a burning sun and covered in dust. Dispite the burning sun, clear skies and the fact that I am in a desert at what passes for mid-day, the air around me is comfortably chilled.
Nothing is happening, and I am too stunned from my unexplained journey to move.
A man then comes over a near-by dune, he is staggering slightly, as one who has trudged forth for days without rest or nourishment, he is rather tall, thin, and appears to have a slight limp. Despite this his presense is a very powerful one. The man is dressed in an ancient, cracked, stained and dust-covered brown leather jacket that reaches somewhere between his knees and ankles, his hat is of material of a similar nature and is a sort of cross between a cowboy hat and a fedora. His boots are very well worn and also of similar material and repair. He is wearing jeans that appear to have never been washed in weeks of constant desert wandering. He has no bags. A medium sized, black, somewhat shaggy dog trudges along at his side.
The man shuffles and skates down the dune, kicking up much dust as he reaches the bottom and collapses exhaustingly but comfortably to rest against the side. We are but ten feet from each other. He looks at me, he is me. He is unsurprised. He opens his mouth to speak. I wake up.
For a split second I sense and then catch a glimpse of a strange creature in a corner where the ceiling meets the wall of the room, as the creature vanishes.
I realize it was a dream and close my eyes, there is a strange whitish, blurry dot in the upper right hand corner of my closed eyes, the dot is emitting some sort of force that compels me to allow it to pull me towards it. I feel myself being pulled towards the white dot in the same way the earlier force had pulled me from the planet. I am now close enough to look into the dot, the dot is a hole in a sky and as I peer through I see a land covered is a dismal winter. It is very cold and what was once snow has frozen into grey, muddy ice. My eye is hovering over a devastated mid-sized city, empty but for a long line of disheveled, malnourished and miserable Humans, many of them maimed, trudging slowly north and bundled in filthy grey rags. My vison glides forward across this line for a time before I sense a feeling of devastation within myself, which weighs me down and drags me back to concious waking.
The same strange creature is momentarily in the corner, the creature is amused. Stays just long enough to make his presense known, and vanishes.
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