The End of the World

Date: 9/22/2018

For real-life context: I got sick before falling asleep. Horrible headache, persistent stomach pain, indigestion, fever, all that. I often get sick like this without a clear rhyme or reason, but the pain is rarely as intense as it was last night. It was all only just barely starting to subside by the time I got to sleep. I blame that sickness and pain for this dream. That, and watching The Meg before bed, which gave me at least one of my celebrity guest stars for this dream. Also, some of the writing here is a bit influenced by sleepiness and isn’t as articulate as I’d usually like. My apologies. Alt Title: Bombs in the Water This dream was weird. Weird and uncomfortable and painful and bad. There was a war. A war over technology. It was improving rapidly on both sides. “Our” side did something amazing with AI, and our opponents wanted it. Some Jason Statham/Hugh Jackman hybrid was our hero. The country singer judge from American Idol was our general. There was a big battle on top of a high tech hotel. On the roof. There was a huge pool there. The fighting happened in the pool as well as on land and it felt awful. Something really confusing happened. Jason Jackman hit his head, I think. The AI talked to him about it. He fought on. He won. He went down into the hotel and celebrated. We planned for the next battle. Our general told us that we had to resolve the next big battle before Thursday, cause he was a judge on AGT and “That’s America’s Got Talent night. I can’t miss my America’s Got Talent night; you understand?” By this time the AI’s voice had been getting through. It was saying something about the end of the world. Loss of life. A time of desperation. A last hope. Our general put an arm over Jason Jackman’s shoulder when he talked about AGT. His face and voice became distorted. Threatening. Ominous. The general’s face melted away and revealed circuits and metal like a Terminator robot. He wouldn’t stop smiling, with metal teeth now. We could not fail him. He was threatening us. We were suddenly somewhere else in the hotel. It was tilting. Swaying. There were big machines, like cranes just large enough to fit inside buildings rather than outside them. They were everywhere, and they scared Jason Jackman. They made him feel like all was lost. He fought people in the hotel. Gravity turned off or warped a few times. He got a bloody nose in one fight. The AI’s voice got stronger. It told us to wake up. We had to wake up, even if we couldn’t do anything anymore. The machines changed. The landscape changed. Everything wobbled and washed away like a mirage. Some large structures turned into towering, giant Listerene bottles and then melted into nothing at all. There was chaos. The battle outside Jason Jackman’s false dream of victory was going poorly. The opponent was dropping nukes in the pool. Or bombs, at least. Everyone was shouting at everyone else to do something, anything, whatever we could to get safe. Run away. Get under cover. Get and/or stay in the water to avoid being directly fried on land. I was a separate person now, not just a ghost possessing Jason Jackman. I could still feel what he felt, tho, so I guess I was possessing him a little. We both got in the water. Things were tough for Jason Jackman cause of his head injury. He kept hallucinating just a bit. He couldn’t tell if the first few bombs were real. The biggest was in the water, all the others were on land. People died in huge numbers on land, and a few in the water too. Many were just visiting the hotel on vacation, and had nothing to do with our war. Jason Jackman jumped into the pool, to try and use the water as a buffer. I was already there. We knew the next big bomb was coming. The fear and anticipation in my stomach was terrible. The whole world was ending, and it hurt. Physically, just knowing it was happening hurt me. Then the next big bomb did drop. The water was filled with swirling clumps of fire as the bomb burned too hot to be immediately put out by the pool itself. I went into the fetal position, hands over my ears and eyes mostly shut. I let the shockwave rock me until I just lightly brushed the wall of the pool. The water felt so hot. I could feel it burning around me. Just inches from me, it was so hot it boiled. I could feel that heat spread though the water and just barely start to burn me. I felt as if I could feel the people it was boiling and shaking to death along the way. Jason Jackman swam so deep to get out of its way that he was starting to have trouble breathing. The Listerene bottles wobbled in his vision again, watching him from outside the pool. His nose was bleeding, but it also wasn’t. Our general stood beside the pool and looked down into it, watching us endure the bomb with his hands in his pocket and his cowboy hat on his head and an expression of utter calm. I felt the bomb’s explosion expanding. The heat creeping in. I felt sick from something else, too. The AI has told us there was some kind of radiation in these bombs, which is why we’d referred to them as nukes the first time. I felt some kind of poison, some kind of radiating substance that may have been traditional radioactive material or might not have. A bioweapon, maybe. I felt all of it. Heat. Pressure. Poison. Dread. The war was over. The good guys were losing. I’m not sure if I died — or was about to before I woke up — but I remember Jason Jackman feeing angry and hopeless and lost in the chaos of the fight and thinking “hopefully some of these people in the pool will drown before they can be killed by the bombs. Or live to see what our world will become. Maybe I’ll go that way, too.” The AI was still determined to help him win. He was the key, in some way, and so was I. We were some kind of human/AI hybrid or bridge of some kind. We were important. The AI was distressed that we would be damaged or killed or kidnapped in the chaos. I was unnerved that the AI who had been telling us to fight all this time actually felt distressed. I smelled chlorine and felt the bomb all in that one moment. As I was bracing myself to be fried, either moments before it happened or as it was taking place and I was being killed, I woke up. I hate this dream. I hate it. The feeling from the bomb lingered for too long when I woke up, and now I’m still uncomfortable and vaguely feel like I’m gonna hallucinate if I don’t either wake my body up the rest of the way or let myself fall back to sleep fully. I feel bad. I almost died. I hate this. Screw off, brain. I didn’t need that dream. I didn’t need any of it.