November 25, 2011

  • Like An Unexpected Song That Only I Remembered

    So, strange dream last night. Yeah, yeah, I know. That's the only thing I seem to post about on here. This one started semi-normally, involved me stuck in a building where some catastrophe was happening (kind of sad that that's normal in my dreams). As I was running down a set of steps to save a researcher, I realized that I'd done this all before, actually two nights ago in my dreams. As I opened the door, the researcher staggered out of the blood-streaked room and stammered words of thanks before freezing in place, their face going blank, and then walking back into the room and as soon as they stepped behind the door, I knew they were gone, vanished from the world, but would appear later, talking as if we'd continued our escape together. The world was broken and I broke it, for the sake of a song.

    It was such a minor thing, a song by Matthews (I vaguely remember there being more to the name. Maybe it was that Dave Matthews band?), part of the Christmas music of the season. It was 99% extant, but 1% corrupt and the universe was trying to fix the damage by making it disappear as if it had never been. Somehow, I'd cottoned to it and so I'd begun taking my 99% complete file of the song and archiving it so that it would survive the purge. In doing so, the world's past became fragmented in four directions from the time of the file's corruptions and in each of these splinter timelines, I would again go through the same set of events, trying something slightly different in a vain attempt to save the song. In the dream, I knew that I had done this hundreds of times, sometimes having to evade authorities seeking to free the world from this deadlock by hunting me down and preventing me from sending the song back. Almost every time, I evaded them due to my prior knowledge of incarnations of the world. Not always.

    Strangest part of this all? I didn't even like the song, felt that it was banal and overplayed, but it was a song and I felt that the loss of even that song was a loss of our humanity and so I had to bend all of my efforts to save it.