Souls' Hope
We were only given a 14 day warning, but by that time we could see the ships from the sky, anyway. No one knew who they were, where they were from, why they'd come. No contact had been made, other than visual. According to the press, their ships did not look threatening, so they must have been friendly. Yeah, right. Then why were our weapons deployed on the fourth day before it happened? Why did our weapons do nothing? On the second day from countdown, the governments were desperate enough to try the nuclear bombs, even though they were too close to keep some countries from being exposed to the radiation. Still, nothing. No reaction.
And then it happened. Like a tidal wave, they chased the night sky across the earth. I think most of us were asleep, so we were unaware of what they did. I'm glad I was asleep, so that when I awoke I thought I was still dreaming. But the smell. It was like a field of death, condensed, that was shoved into my face. And it was dark, and constricting, and a horrible pressure was pushing against me in waves. I was inside something! I had been eaten alive!
My terror must have caused the disassociation, or perhaps it was a mechanism within the alien itself. I don't know. I remember trying to scream and writhe, then feeling a terrible snap-like force pull me in half. It was the most painful thing I have ever experienced. I have never been pregnant, but I imagine it was similar to the entire sum of pain felt during labor, and it hit me in one blinding moment. And then I was outside, but I was not. I was free, but trapped. I could not see, I could feel nothing, as I floated within a dimension that did not exist, and my terror grew. Time could not be measured because nothing temporal happened. The only thing that was real was my fright, but there was no way to respond to it. I had no body, no sensation, no movement, no awareness.
But, after who knows how long, a dull, faded light appeared. I clung to it, was hungry for it, and the harder I pressed my (self?) to it the brighter it became and grew until shadows began to appear within it. Then there was color, and the shadows began to move, and dull whispers revealed themselves. My spirit bounced and cried. Finally, there was something to react to.
Perhaps I was dead. I still had no tactile sensation and I could not feel or see any part of me that might have resembled my own body. But once the lights and shadows and sounds began to organize themselves, I realized I was in my own room, the very room I had fallen asleep in the night before.
There was something in my bed. It wasn't me. My vision was still blurry but I knew it wasn't me. I bounced backward. I tried to close my eyes but I didn't have any eyes to close. I bounced backward even farther, and faster, until I was outside my room and in the family living room. It was empty, except for the usual furniture and a little lamp next to the couch that had never been there before. Then the lamp bounced. Then it grew brighter, and became red, and started bouncing toward me. I tried to bounce backward but that put me back into my bedroom with the something that was was starting to stir in my bed. I bounced back into the living room and the little light that I had thought was a lamp had turned blue.
Was it someone else like me?
To be continued...
(This post is actually an experiment to put a dream I had onto e-paper. I'm afraid it isn't very good, though. The pacing is strange. The reader has no time to react before he/she is thrown into a new situation. It is exactly what my dream was like, but it just doesn't work well on e-paper. When I have time (between sleep and nursing school), I will rewrite this section of the story and create a new post. I just wanted to get the idea out there before it faded in my memory.)