The most compelling part of this dream was the setting. The story escapes me (largely because I waited so long to get it down), but the setting is very clear in my mind.
I was in a sprawling, muddy town, home to hundreds, maybe thousands, of people. It sat partially on a spit jutting into the western shore of a huge lake; there were docks and piers and tall, rickety service buildings that had been quickly thrown up, some of them little more than wooden frames with irregular canvas and scrap-metal walls three or four stories tall. The streets were dirt, but in the rain, cold and mist, had become thick, heavy mud, travelled by horses, bicycles and dirtbikes alongside pedestrians, stagecoach-like wagons and rickshaws, churning the ground underfoot into a quagmire. It had clearly been constructed around the remnants of an older city, and some of the derelicts of the city’s former self remained uninhabited and crumbling, stretching off into scrubby, sandy hills sparsely studded with gnarled, lonely trees. The buildings surviving from the original town stood in stained brick knots around close plazas on the land to the west of the spit, the architecture becoming more and more slapdash and recycled the closer to the waterfront I got. In the older sections of town, however, I came across the cracked and precariously standing remains of a pillared marble bank, a home built inside it, its form slumped over onto itself.
The lake was choppy, the color of mercury. It stretched to the northern and southern horizons. but the eastern shore was relatively near- foggy and steep, with high cliffs and grey, dolorous crags. The prime activity in the town seemed to be fishing, and the piers were full of boats of many sizes and shapes; some had sails, some seemed to be running on fuel that belched choking black exhaust, and many were steam. There didn’t seem to be much in the way of fuel, but I guessed there were other abandoned places and more trees on the other side.
The weather was cold and windy; when the dream first began, there had been some thin, weak sunlight swathed in cloud, but that quickly turned to leaden skies and bitter wind. The settling of dark brought frost to the air and the smoke of wood fires became thicker as people bundled into their homes or huddled in the plazas around open fires.
I got in several fistfights in this dream, not all of them successful on my end.The people in this town were mostly brusque and grim, hardened by what was clearly a rough life in an inhospitable place.
The people dressed in all manner of rude clothing. There were sheepskins, ragged flannel, cheap cotton, and denim worn paper-thin. There were broad hats with caved-in crowns, shredded mesh-back trucker hats with broken brims, a few bonnets and knit caps. Everyone wore heavy coats or layers of fraying sweaters and hides.
There was a sense of community here, but a distinct lack of welcome to anyone not of the town (like myself). There were community suppers, in which small gardeners, fishermen, and hunters gathered food together to provide for the town, accompanied by a surprisingly festive atmosphere that saw the townsfolk running diesel generators on precious fuel to power a small grid of streetlights in the central plazas of the town. There seemed to be no central government, and a marked distrust of anything “official” (extending to the binding and detainment of a ragged gaggle of men in camouflage at the hands of some stubble-faced, flint-eyed fishermen), and it occurred to me that whatever had driven the people who lived in this town together- whether a war, a climactic catastrophe, or simply the collapse of world economies- had also given them a fierce hatred and deep mistrust of government. The town seemed to work together rather than being directed by a hierarchy of administration and law-enforcement, and I didn’t notice any division of class; there were no “nice” parts of town, nor did there seem to be any ghettos.
I don’t know what happened here. I’m not sure what made the place so cold (it was apparently July when I was there), or what had happened to the old town the new one had been built upon. This place seemed to have been a last-ditch gathering of forces and resources for survival.
Then I woke up.
