Withering Away

Date: 3/1/2019

There I was, in the car. My ex, my first love, was driving — my grandmother was in the passenger seat. I was in the back cuddling with my current boyfriend, as he talked to someone else on the phone and refused to acknowledge my voice. I ended up talking to my ex the whole time. But eventually my grandmother started to become more and more talkative. In fact, by the end of the dream, she was doing all of the talking — I doubt she’s been filled with so much vigor and life source since before I was born. And as she began to talk more and more, the steering wheel began to shift towards her side until she was the one driving! The only problem with this was that she became so immersed within the conversation that at times she forgot about everything else — she would turn back to me to express her thoughts and feelings and would forget about the road, and we almost veered off several times (each time made my stomach sink lower and lower). But eventually (or inevitably, depending on how you look at things) her energy died out, and she reverted back into her silent state quicker than it had taken her to talk; but the steering wheel stayed on her side of the car. She soon fell asleep, leaving the car driverless. We fell over the railing and off the side of a bridge. What happened next was entirely in slow motion, and all the more dreadful. The car felt like it was some victim of a cosmic wash machine, spinning around and around as the rotations merged up and down into one. The most grotesque part of the whole dream was that as we fell, I was forced to look at my grandmother’s face. With each rotation downward, her jaw would extend indefinitely, growing longer and longer by the second until she vaguely resembled something human. Her skin would become wrinklier and wrinklier and her eyes became more and more shut until the jolt of the car snapped my grandmother’s jaw shut as we landed, only for it to be elongated once more as the rotations took off. The cycle of horror only ended as I woke up, disoriented and confused, in an open meadow of hills and of grass. The car was shattered into a million specs of mechanic dust, and my boyfriend and my ex were nowhere in sight. My grandmother, however, was just a quick jog away; so I gathered the strength I didn’t have and willed my way over to her body. It had been aged it seemed decades — her hair had grown down to her ankles and her fingernails spiraled out into the ground. My younger cousin was standing over her lifeless body, and I tried to approach and scream out in agony she merely touched her finger to her lips and whispered “Shhhh” as she pointed me into the direction of a pond. The pond, like everything else in the meadows at this point, was withering away. There was nothing left except for a singular fish, swimming around in the dried up pond alone and unbothered. I approached it with caution as I began to ask it the question I had always wanted to know the answer, but for some reason forgot in the moment. He somehow still replied, saying “Now you understand the futility of knowledge.” I haven’t slept since.