Weird dream

[jhameia]

OK, so while I was trying to resist waking up this morning, I had this really weird dream.

I dreamed that I was now suddenly 100 years in the future.

And it doesn't look a whole lot different? But it felt different, for sure.

For example, there are still the big buildings and offices built during the post-industrial era. But there aren't as many shops. Food appears to have been farmed or caught on subsistence basis. Well, with some extra, because I remember coming downstairs to a party... it was like being at a hawker restaurant, except it's a community thing and nobody's buying with cash, exactly.

I also remember a conversation about how there's no more Japanese food, and someone suggested going fishing to get some sashimi. It rather ended up with a lot of prawns in a bucket, and someone caught some eel. Homecooked unagi is.... not the same, but it was okay! And I also clued in to the fact that I was NOT the only person to have woken up after a substantial amount of time, here, because that group of fishers was led by someone who obviously knew what sushi, at least, outside of Japan, was supposed to look like.

The roads pretty much looked the same (was I in Hamilton? Halifax?) as did the basic infrastructure of a post-industrial town. But I got the sense that there were.... fewer people. And just about no cars.

But! In this world, there were still colleges and universities! There was one just like three blocks away from where I was living, and I apparently got an acceptance letter to Trinity College (maybe it was Toronto) and there was, next to it, its Off-Campus branch (which is supposed to be cheaper?) so I rolled in to talk to the advising office (right by the front door) and the nice dude up front (Asian!) told me it didn't actually matter which branch, but that I prolly should just use my acceptance letter into Trinity.

There were computers in this age, yo, which makes me think whatever happened was biological. But! It wasn't the same internet as the internet we know now! There was apparently very little in the way of social media, although, we could still access a lot of general information from the last one hundred years. And there's some record-keeping, some computing, but it's not the hardcore industry it used to be, and they were rebuilding "connectivity technologies."

Which means there's been a disconnect around the world and it's not a global village anymore, and apparently the first few years after this happened, some folk ran around like headless chickens terrified at the crash that was going to happen. And it did happen. And well, one hundred years later, there it was.

There was also some drama! Because I apparently recognized some lady from the past, and she was up to no good, taking over the Off-Campus school and trying to combine it with Trinity college, which entailed rejecting some very qualified students, and refusing funding to others. I don't remember the exact details, but I saw people trailing her demanding to know why, and she was giving her Reasonable Explanations, and I just bore down on her to yell at her that no, she couldn't do the same thing she did one hundred years ago, it wasn't cool then, and it's still not cool now. And people looked her up on the internetz, saw that what I was saying was true, and for some reason they hadn't thought to record-check her, apparently, when she appeared out of nowhere with these stellar credentials of running an Old Boys' School.

So she and her husband, whom she made the dean of some other apartment, were going to be taken somewhere where the university population (students and staff and faculty!) would hear the facts and then decide whether or not she could keep her job.

Thus feeling satisfied, I wanted to go home and have a nap, but I ran into Jarvis, a Halifax friend! And we were pleased to see each other had survived the apocalypse! Whatever happened. And he'd been backpacking through the hills for the last few years, and visited some cottage or another? And that one hundred years on, it was still standing, a lot of our stuff (our being, us two and some other friends who had visited the cottage a lot) was still there. Now he was back in town because he had to return a library book, late one hundred years, but hey. So I directed him to the nearest library on Locke Street.

I woke up a bit after that, feeling really disoriented.

I don't even remember what degree I was trying to apply to =(

----

It's a really interesting dream because
a) I'm trying to apply for PhD programs and still deciding. UBC profs and Riverside profs have contacted me expressing interest (Riverside prof, in particular, is pretty confident Riverside is perfect for me. "What's your second language?" "I don't really have one? Basic Malay and Arabic?" "We have two profs who teach those languages! You'll be fine.").
b) Occupy Wall Street is really exhausting to follow.
c) I'm actually writing a post-apocalyptic novel next. It's steampunk by way of low-resource, long-lasting, "unrefined" tech but it's set two thousand years in the future, so the world isn't as recognizable as this one. But! There is a device in which a subset of humans have revealed themselves to be something like immortal, due to a mutation in their genes that only occurs in one of every ten offspring they have. They can go into torpor for long periods of time (necessary, sometimes, for emotional health), just like I apparently did in my dream, and age at a much slower pace.
d) I actually had a date with Jarvis once that was more like a friendly dinner and I decided no, not my type.
e) There is, in fact, a library branch like a few blocks away, on Locke Street.

So yeah.

Comments

[karcy.livejournal.com]

That is...quite a good dream.