Dreamscape: Torn Apart Together (1)

This was a weird morning dream...

I awoke from an insulin-induced semi-lucid dream state waving my arms around as I was teaching Carrie's son, Joaquin, and his older sister (two years older but still in elementary school), English. It wasn't just a general lesson; I was giving pointers on how to make the spoken language more natural by stressing the "big words" (words with content) and de-stressing the "little words" (prepositions, between-words, unimportant words). There was a teacher in the room and she was using a nearly exhausted whiteboard market, but she was writing on the solid paper Japanese fusuma doors that partitioned the rooms from the closets. Yes, this took place in "Japan", and yes, the kids were speaking and communicating in Japanese, or half-Japanese, or neo-Japanese or something...

The school was a mess; it was actually closed down and everything was torn up, overturned, ripped apart, blown to smithereens, in ashes, or non-existent. We were actually using just one of the upper floors of the school as most of the lower levels had been totally destroyed by permanent flooding, so badly that there never was any receding, or any access to the levels by anything other than fish, and other "creatures" of the deep".... Even the levels we could use were covered in rot, mildew, slime, sludge from where the seas had receded some. Not much had survived "The Great Flood" which had put Japan, and most of the land mass of the earth permanently under sea water...

Yes, this was the future, the future after consecutive cataclysmic catastrophes that tore through all of our civilizations around the world, wreaking havoc, killing hundreds of millions, uprooting hundreds of millions more, destroying entire civilizations, forcing us all to live a "Road Warrior" existence, something feudal, something akin to "Waterworld" where the main commodity, the most precious and most scarce resource had become... fresh water.

Everyone was battling for the water; there were water wars going on all around the globe. We in our "wis-dumb" made the critical error of trying to focus our technology on replacing fossil fuels with bio-fuels when we should have been thinking about developing technologies that would easily convert salt water, a growing resource, into potable water, a rapidly dwindling resource in the 21st century.

There were sharks swimming through the lower levels of most buildings, along with many other strange and unknown creatures that had decided to come up from the depths of the deepest darkest unknown parts of the trenches in the seas and oceans. Many of them were "Cthulu-like" nightmares both in form, and in character, and some claimed that they were the ancient races of Atlantis come back to take what they believed was rightfully theirs. They were dark, deadly, dangerous and many a person would disappear in the night, never to be seen or heard from again. It was a terrifying time.

Our technology, having taken a giant leap backward prevented us from going too deep to explore, or conquer, or even to defend so we were much more vulnerable than ever before. Finally we had stopped being the top predator, and had become one of the prey. We were forced to live and die near the surface of the seas, dependent upon them for navigation and commerce, and fearful of them at the same time. Even those who attempted to break away and move inland were never able to survive completely away from the oceans that became known as "The Giver". The giver of life.... the giver of death....

And of course as the human race continued to try to survive from being preyed upon, having the nature that we have, we were also continually at war with one another in an attempt to expand, to take, to conquer the weak, or the sick in order to expand our need for greed, our need for more, our desire to take all...

To be continued...