{"type":"stories","id":"dreams-of-falling","title":"Dreams of Falling","url":"/stories/dreams-of-falling","summary":"A man wakes every morning from the same recurring vision of apocalyptic destruction wrought by vast, incomprehensible beings — and instead of fearing it, he feels chosen.","date":"2023-02-10","tags":["Fiction","horror","cosmic","dark"],"categories":["writing"],"body":"Every morning, he wakes on the floor in a pool of sweat and a mess of sheets. Every night, the dream is the same. He stands on a cliff face looking out over a vast vista of destruction.\n\nThere is so much rubble that it outnumbers, occludes, and obscures whatever came before. Tall follies built by man collapsed in a messy, irrelevant heap of steel, concrete, and glass. There are so many bodies piled high in gory abandon, it’s impossible to discern any recognisable features or quantity. Young and old, rich and poor, important and self-important, all reduced to putrid flesh. The earth is razed, burning, pitted, and black. All of the nature we fought so hard to preserve willingly destroyed.\n\nAnd then, above it all, in it all, wading through it all. The cause of it all. Are them.\n\nThen he wakes screaming into dawn.\n\nThey say that you remember dreams of falling, to wake and find yourself in an embarrassed heap of bedding on the floor.\n\nBut he finds himself awake in fear, in panic. Like he was trying to run.\n\nDoes he fall from that sheer cliff? Does he jump? Is he pushed?\n\nHe thinks of them. They are large, horrific forms in a faraway mist of dust, debris, and destruction. He cannot see them clearly through the haze of the scene and dream. Some are formed of recognisable limbs, while others are featureless shapes that confound his comprehension.\n\nThey don’t have any weapons of destruction. It’s almost as if the people and buildings collapsed in front of them in fear and awe. As if they had been waiting for them their whole existence to fall and die.\n\nIn his first waking moments every morning, the details of the vision replaying in his mind, he frantically scribbles down fragments of detail before the visions are lost. He looks at the notes whenever he can, trying to make sense of them all, but there is no sense to be found.\n\nHe has told close friends of the recurring dream and they tell him that he should seek help. That nightmares like that aren’t healthy for a human being. That they are something he should be concerned about and “fix”. He nods in polite agreement but secretly doesn’t agree.\n\nHe doesn’t think of the dream as a nightmare. When the initial disconcertedness of waking from sleep passes, he doesn’t feel afraid but intrigued. He wants to know why the dreams plague him and what they mean. He doesn’t fear the dreams. He looks forward to them. He feels blessed. Rewarded. Chosen.\n\nHe thinks of them as a vision of what is yet to come.","links":[],"fields":{}}