BATSHIT DREAM

Everything is sludge green.  The terrain is de-forested jungle. Thick mud and deep roots slick from rain.  There is a group of us.  Half a dozen.  We carry bulky bags and heavy equipment.  I recognise one as an actor from the sitcom Community.

The going is difficult.  Visibility is bad.  We pick up the pace and call out to each other in half heard voices.  I have tunnel vision and a desperate sense of doom.

Things like tumbleweeds wound with christmas lights and filled with motherboards overtake us.  The light in the low sky changes often.  Green lightening and electric thunder.  The murky soup of mist and diffuse murmur of faux dawn.  Or dusk.

We find the dam.  Olive slime clings to the dull concrete and monsters appear in the distance.  Huge shadows in low cloud or silhouettes before the dim sun.

We work, our mumbles muffled and useless.  The quicker we work, doing i don't know what with whatever any of this stuff is, the closer the beasts come.  More tumbleweeds shoot past.  There is a palpable sense of escalation.

Our tasks dissolved into chaos.  Our hands are all thumbs and we start to run and stumble across sludge green fields giving into panic.

There is a large building just like the Richmond Holiday Inn.  I go in the revolving doors.  The receptionist is familiar in that dream way and tells me i have been doing it all wrong.  

'Do LESS', she says, 'and the alternate realities won't catch you up.'  
'You been doing TOO MUCH', she says 'there is no need for the monsters.'

We head out and slowly we wade across a river of white topped khaki.   

'Thats one thing done', she says, 'so lets wait a while.'  

We wait then wade thru deep mud that sucks our shoes and reaching the edge of a busy dual carriageway.  Again we're waiting.

Things are seeming safer but its all very tense.

'Cross the road', she says, 'and get the box in the ditch but remember do one thing at a time, do it SLOWLY.'

The road is no longer a dual carriageway, its Lampits Hill near my house and i'm standing by the farm where we used to buy potatoes by the sack when i was small.

I cross the road between traffic.  In the ditch i wait, a small box is down in the weeds.

Everything stays as it is.  The sky is uniform grey-green.  I pick up the box and i wait again.  Then i climb the verge and stand by the side of the road in the bushes and wait for a space in the hatchbacks.

There is no path here and the overgrown verge shrubs block the view up the road.  Opposite are old brown flowers on a lamppost. A tribute to the victim of a fatal accident.

I notice a pedestrian crossing right by my feet that wasn't there a second ago.  

I step out on it assuming the traffic will stop . . .