Friday, September 13, 2013

A Recurring Dream

I have a few different recurring dreams, the dreams are not exactly the same each time but simply share their essential character. Last night I dreamed (re-dreamed?) one of these dreams and before I forget it again for years or months I am going to write it down. In the dream I am an elevator operator, that may not seem remarkable but in the dream the vast majority of mankind lives in the rotting remains of huge ancient sky scrapers. These would have been buildings with bases as large as entire large cities and tens of thousands of floors. But especially as you go closer to the surface the more decayed and empty are the buildings, just huge metal supports miles tall and hundreds of feet thick.
I was born in the mid levels and was lucky enough to live in a region isolated from the general barbarism enough to have retained some semblance of civil society and engineering knowledge (isolated by way of broken connecting elevator shafts and collapsed bits of building). Those living in these mid levels have access to enough sunlight breaking through the upper levels and sides of the buildings that they can grow crops of a sort. From these mid levels you can see to the shadowy lower levels and even just adjacent levels where perfectly good sun exposed floor goes un-cultivated and warring bands fight each other over what food is available (don't ask me how they have had enough food to survive for hundreds of years, I've no idea). The people in the upper floors can be seen to have very advanced technology and lavish lifestyles, they will send troops out to stop people from destroying necessary support structures etc.
I discover an ancient disused elevator on an elevator track/shaft which is still connected to floors above. I manage to repair the elevator and am thus in this world elevated to something akin to a starship captain, I am an elevator operator! I zoom up through hundreds of floors to the nearest section, the ascent is really actually sort of nightmarish, think something akin to first person pinball, the elevator "shafts" are not really shafts in the normal sense but instead can go horizontal and vertical at a whim and thanks to your regular dream logic they like to do terrifying loopty loops. The shafts are really just 4 rails with no support of their own (funny that). To travel them you connect to them with non-sensical electric arcs which allow you to both be levitating while also being chained to the elevator rails. The dream then mostly consists of zooming around on these rails in terrifying first person, never knowing when a break in the elevator line might show up and throw me off into space, but the rails become more complete as you ascend but then there are routinely security measures which one has to avoid, outrun etc etc. I wish I could communicate more easily what the dream looks like because it is really a very visual dream and I love the images.
november is coming up, perhaps I could write a novel about a rugged elevator operator...