Dream Journal

VACATION PART I: Time-Warping to a Place with Strange Bathrooms

I headed to the front of my house to check the mail when a strange wind unlike anything I'd ever felt blew past me. The sun glinted through the leaves, casting shadows and speckles of light onto the rocky road. I narrowed my eyes at the small, pink petal that drifted down, seemingly from nowhere, and settled a distance away. I focused on it intently, and the world around it bent and bowed as though someone had just set on the world on radial zoom. I was pulled in closer to the petal and suddenly, I stood before it without moving a step.

"What the-" I mumbled upon noticing that I'd somehow warped twenty feet down the road. The trees gave a little rustle and the sun sank behind the clouds. Left in shock and awe, I glanced ahead again, determined to do it once more. I focused on a neighbor's mailbox a few feet ahead and the world around me was reduced to the blurred walls of a tunnel. 

An invisible hand gripped me around the waist and yanked me forward swiftly. I landed gracefully on my feet before the mailbox and touched it as if to confirm this were real. Its sleek, metal body touched me back and exhilaration raced up and down my veins.

I practiced again and again, each time succeeding, though at the same time, placing my target further away. I continued up the road for miles, but it never seemed to stop. The road merely continued to go on. Shades of pink from roses and other buds swirled with the elegant blues of nearby the sky as well as sheds and houses and, finally, the greens of everything else around me; shrubs, trees, the grass, the sweater of the man unfortunate enough to have passed by me while warping...

The world shot before my eyes and I began to lose track of time. Did time even pass while I was warping? I laughed as the jet of cool air blew my hair back and I floated weightlessly at an incredible speed. I didn't care.

Eventually the greens and pinks became a dull, cascading world of blues. Shades of cobalt tumbled around shades of denim, and melted together with a light grey, washing my world in a dreary pallete. I willed my body to slow upon no longer seeing the dash of beige from the rocky road ahead. The world came to a stop and like pulling my eyes away from a kaleidoscope, everything was right again. Wherever I was now, this place was dead.

The road had ended now, curved off and gone elsewhere. But along that same road, and against a cliff, a dreary sea beat against the wind-battered rocks that lined it. A cold breeze sent ashen clouds of salt and pepper drifting above, and the grass below had wilted; even the slightest touch would crumble it. Everything here was dead, even the weeds that probably once grew in the cracks that snaked up and down the sidewalk.

Sitting at the edge of the sidewalk was a tall, grey house. Much of its siding was torn or completely missing, revealing rotting, grey planks of wood. Everything about this place screamed "write me into a good horror story". Either that, or one had already been told here.

The wind caught my hair and lifted it away from the back of my neck. Until that moment, I hadn't noticed that goosebumps had risen on my skin. I turned my eyes to the sky, and a most peculiar sight: thousands- no, hundreds of thousands of balloons floated above the house. Shades of grey, white, and black twirled around each other and rose higher into the sky like the strangest storm cloud I'd ever seen. The balloons popped noiselessly one-by-one, splattering the sky in the color of paint that their latex held. They were creating the clouds.

Strings fell to the ground and broke into pieces that plinked and disappeared on the dry soil. Rain. I smiled to myself as I watched the strange phenomenon.

"You're late," said a deep voice behind me. It was the voice of a tall man with short, spiked hair. He wore a simple shirt and shorts, and didn't stand out as anyone in particular. He came closer and I knew I should have backed away, but instead, by some strange, compelling instinct, I took his hand. He smiled back at me and the world lit up.