Fever Dream

The only good thing about a fever is the weird dreams they produce. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to remember a one, until last night — and my fever is much abated, so this might not qualify, but it was awfully vivid.

All I’ve retained is this final scene. There was an epic, convoluted backstory that I can’t recall for the life of me.

Envision a landscape of massive multi-colored cones, tall as mountains. Each cone is in fact a gargantuan skyscraper, an arcology, with a metropolis hidden inside.

There we sat, my friends and I, perched high on the side of a cone, for each cone was steeply stair-stepped. The cones thus appeared to be formed of thousands of rings, steeply racked. Each step was about three feet tall, but only a foot deep, and a slightly different shade than the ring above or below it.

I’m not sure what we were doing there, having a picnic I suppose, and enjoying the view, which was tremendous. There was a general spirit of celebration, tied up with the events that found us there, the backstory I can’t remember.

One of our party, a young woman I didn’t particularly care for, had fallen asleep. As we talked and laughed and sang songs, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that she was slipping over the edge.

Before any of us could spring to her aid, she had fallen to the next step, and the next, and the next. She was awake and flailing now, but unable to stop her fall. We watched in horror as she slid down a thousand layers of the cone.

Then she hit some kind of wire threshing mechanism, invisible from our distance, and we saw her limbs and head all fly in separate directions.

It was awful. That’s when I woke up. And I thought to myself, “I didn’t like her, but she deserved far better than that.”