Hypnagogia

A journey of self-discovery in a post-apocalyptic world

The world ended a long time ago. A man is still living in what is left of it, and at night he dreams of the sea.

He cannot say why. The dream comes back so often that he starts to feel it in the daytime too, a pull he has no explanation for. In the end he decides to go and look for the water, to find out whether the dream is showing him somewhere real or only something he wants.

The road is long, and the people he meets on it are worse than the emptiness.

Whether the sea has any answers for him, you will have to hear for yourself.

Nobody alive now saw it. It was so long ago that people know it only by what it left behind.

Mostly what it left is nothing. Open ground where things used to stand. Land that has had an age to recover and still has not.

Here and there something from the old world sticks up out of the dirt, rusted or half buried, and nobody can say any more what it was for.

It is a bleak country, and yet it has a beauty of its own, the kind a place has once it has been left alone long enough. Anyone who stands in the middle of it for a while starts asking what happened here, and what it means to still be here.

We knew the world would not be the same... A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Julius Robert Oppenheimer, 1945

Lately the dream comes almost every night, and it is always the same.

Water, more of it than he can see the end of, moving on its own. He wakes up tasting salt.

He thinks he saw the sea once on a screen, back when there were screens: waves rolling in and pulling back, in a room he can no longer picture. He could not swear the memory is real. He has gone over it so many times that he may have filled in the parts he wanted.

In the end it makes no difference. The dream keeps coming, and he has stopped thinking of it as a dream. It feels more like being called. He packs what little he has and sets out.

Memory makes reality...

But what do you cling to, moment to moment, if memories can simply change. What, then, is real? And if the answer is nothing, where does that leave us?

Blake Crouch, Recursion

At first there is nothing to do but walk.

The wasteland is very quiet. There are no birds and nothing mechanical anywhere. He hears his own steps and the wind moving grit across the stones, and after a while he stops hearing those too.

The scavengers come out of the ruins without warning, a whole band of them, and they come fast. He has no time to think. He turns to face them, and something he has not needed in years takes over.

It is not much of a fight. In the moonlight he sees a gap, drives his shoulder into the nearest of them and pushes through, and then he is running into the dark with no idea where he is going.

He keeps running long after the noise behind him has stopped, because he does not trust the quiet.

When his legs give out he sits down where he is. There is nothing left standing to lean against.

It takes a long time for his breathing to slow and for his hands to stop shaking. When it gets light he sees the same pale, empty country he has been crossing since he left, scarred all over by whatever happened here.

He thinks about turning back. The trouble is that there is nothing behind him to go back to. Whatever he once had is buried out here somewhere, and has been for years.

So he gets up, slowly, and keeps going.

I can't recognize the world around me, everything changed...

Desolation all around me...

There's nothing for me here. I have to go!

Then the rain comes, and it does not stop.

It falls hard and cold and turns the ground to mud that drags at his boots. Thunder rolls somewhere up ahead, and it seems to move when he moves, never getting any closer.

After a while he stops noticing that he is soaked. He falls into step with the storm, the rain and the thunder and his own feet all keeping the same time, and he covers more ground than he would have thought possible.

Somewhere in the storm he starts to feel that this road was meant for him, and that he is not quite as alone on it as he thought.

By now he is running on very little.

He stops more often. He bends over with his hands on his knees until his head clears, and then he carries on, because he knows that if he sits down properly he may not get up again.

Late in the day he sees a gull, white against the sky, riding the wind without seeming to try. Then more of them, and their cries carrying over the land.

For some time he has caught a smell on the wind and not let himself believe it. The birds settle it. He finds strength he did not know was left and covers the last stretch faster than he has moved since the day he set out.

He reaches the top of the last rise and sees it.

It is far bigger than it ever was in the dream. He stands and looks at it with his arms at his sides, and he does not try to stop the tears.

Then he walks down to the shore, kneels, and presses his forehead to the sand.

The tide comes in around his knees, very cold. He stays where he is. When the water pulls back he gets up and follows it, and keeps walking until there is no ground under his feet.

And there, under such a myriad of stars, the sea's black horizon. It's calling for me...

As a sign of respect but also of absolute despair, I kneel before the transcending sea and caress the sand with my forehead.

And as the tide rises, I feel the sea mixing up with my tears. Its taste fill all of my soul making me reach temporary light but, above all, a cold darkness.

The cold empties his head first. After that he stops feeling the weight of himself.

Light comes down through the water in long bands. The surface above him is a grey sheet, further away each time he looks, and he realises he is sinking and making no effort to stop it.

The questions come slowly, one at a time. Is he dying? Has he been asleep and dreaming ever since the first night he saw the sea? Down here, is there any difference between a place you reach and a place you imagine?

Nothing answers him. But far below, where there should only be darkness, there is a light, and it is coming up towards him.

Where am I? I'm falling down! Where am I?

I cannot see anything. Where am I?!

There's a light out there. How can I follow it?

And the light... is all... around me...