The Filthy Future

I dreamt last night of the future. Not any prophesy, mind you, just that's when it took place in the dream.

At the house I grew up in, I looked out the window of my childhood bedroom, but instead of seeing my neighbors' houses and the Arizona hills, I saw a river, and skyscrapers on the other bank. A hundred skyscrapers, tall and looming on the distant West bank. The river was filthy. Not a natural filth, this was no brown Colorado river. It was sludge, and trash, and pollution. The whole surface was littered with plastic wrappers, and foam cups, and every imaginable "disposable". It wasn't water you would want to touch. I'm not sure how much it was even water.

I went to a wrecking and salvage yard. Everything was rusted and falling apart. There was an old helicopter there, like the ones used by local news stations, only it was in gross disrepair. I thought maybe my friend Dan would be interested in it.

In this dream, I was a scientist, working on sustainable living practices. Somehow, I don't know if I had developed this or somebody else, but due to the lack of real and potable food, somebody had developed a "corn-flakes" type food that was made with ground rat bones and flesh. I suppose rodents may have been one of the only readily accessible sources of nutrition.

Everything was dead or dying. Civilization was falling apart and rotting in the grave it had dug for itself. I wonder if my old neighbor Jason thinks this is where we are headed?

In the midst of this, I somehow became privy to a "second chance" that was being developed. I was shown into a reinforced geodesic dome that had been erected by some group set on creating a haven from the rot. It was enormous, big enough to where I couldn't really see the other side, big enough to take in a small town. Inside, it was clean, and growing, and green and alive. There were buildings, yes, but they weren't skyscrapers, but looked like Spanish villas, with a pale white or beige stucco exterior, and tiled rust-red roofs. The structures weren't arranged in any efficient grid, but were scattered and casually strewn. There were plants everywhere, green and blooming.

There was a fat couple I was there with. They had just gotten there too, though I don't know how you maintain such a size when you have nothing but rat-flakes to subsist off of.

It was awful and wonderful, in that order.

Why do I have such dreams? This isn't the first one I've had like this, these sweeping visions of a fading and falling future. They're not visions of the actual future, but the potential extremes.

I had one this summer, where there had been a terrorist attack in Las Vegas. A suicide bomber had detonated a huge bomb at a famous theater there. Not a real theater, but it was called something like "Pedro's Mexican Theater". Sounds familiar. It killed 200,000 people in the immediate blast area.

My part of the dream took place in the aftermath, when commerce had stopped and the government was in essence powerless and dissolved. We were again in the house I grew up in. It was my immediate family, but we had taken in others as well, people who couldn't take care of themselves. I remember an old woman and abandoned children being there.

You know the food storage you had tucked away in the closet under the stairs growing up? The canned wheat and whole dried eggs and rice and beans you thought you'd never eat? We were eating that. My Mom was managing the rations, and all the lights were out.

I have these nightmares sometimes. Many of my dreams are at least mild nightmares. There were a couple this summer that I didn't record here because they weren't mild at all.

Well, there you have it. The confessions of my subconscious imagination, my looming doom and gloom gray matter, my muttering sci-fi mind. Maybe it's early-onset-dimentia.