WHAT, you're still using PAPER???

Revolution 9: I have a dream today

Dreams vaporize like snow sublimating on a sidewalk. More and more I remember mine, and see a thread in them. Maybe it has always been there. I always seem to be a hopeless outsider or have no idea what is going on, though I am supposed to be playing a crucial role in the scenario (i. e. the Wildwood Flower bride, and the Alice in Wonderland actress). Last night my dreams were bleak, and I hope did not predict anything except my own melancholy and chronic sense of doom.

It was as if I was watching one of those dystopia films, in which everything slowly but surely comes unstuck. "All is changed, changed utterly," to paraphrase Yeats (I'm too lazy to look up the exact quote). "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."

This had several parts. Which came first? My husband was with me during a big part of this, which is unusual because I am usually alone. We were watching a stage play which almost seemed like a Gilbert and Sullivan comedy without the music. This was in an ornate old theatre like the Orpheum in Vancouver. One of the actors seemed particularly good and I intended to yell "Bravo!" when he took his bows. 

At this point I was sitting in the front row and Bill wasn't with me. Then I was about 1/3 or 1/2-way back in the audience, and there was a sense almost of an earthquake about to happen, though nothing was shaking. Without any words we received the knowledge that the ceiling was about to cave in and we had to get out of the theatre immediately or be crushed. 

I looked up and wondered if the ceiling was bulging and it played into my lifelong fear that heavy chandeliers in restaurants and theatres would fall on me. People began to leave, but in a fairly orderly, methodical way. I could not find my shoes and was upset. Bill said something along the lines of, you'll need them, which seemed ominous. I realized we had to leave only a few minutes before the end of the play and I would not be able to yell "Bravo!".

Then we were wandering aimlessly through a sort of wasteland, completely lost. Bill doesn't get lost easily, or panic about it, but I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that everything was about to end. At one point we were climbing up a tall tower like something in a power station, then we had to climb down again and Bill's legs hurt. I was sort of holding on to him through this. 

There were these vasts fields of dead grass and nothingness. A woman on a horse went by (and now I think of that futuristic TV show Revolution, where the power goes off all over the world and there are no cars). Then at some point I said something like, "Wait, my high school graduation is tomorrow, how will I get there?" "It will be called off. You'll have to phone the school about it." "But everyone will be calling in at once. The lines will be jammed." As we had this conversation, we were walking by the high school and it looked deserted. It resembled my school from Grade 5 (Queen Elizabeth II) where I had to be bussed all the way across town to attend the (quote-unquote) "smart kids' class".

In another part of this strange scene, I was watching TV and suddenly the program changed. It became totally nonsensical and obnoxious,almost like scrambled-up children's programming, and it was obvious that this wasn't part of the show. I realized (how?) that a woman had hacked into TV signals all over the entire world and disabled them all. I don't even know how I knew this. I just now think of the Emergency Broadcasting System and "this is only a test" announcements of my childhood, when I was totally freaked out and felt like it was the end of the world (which, with the Cuban Missile Crisis, it nearly was). 

I think I have already lost chunks of this and would have forgotten it all by now had I not scribbled down a few details. The last part I can remember now is that I was listening to a radio broadcast, and it was about my friend Glen Allen, a journalist who committed suicide in 2005. He worked in radio and it was a sort of reminiscence about his life. I began to get very interested in it and thought, "Now they'll talk about his association with Peter Gzowski." But then it cut off. No explanation, it just ended. The radio had no signal at all - it simply went dead.