THAT DAY

Nonstop rain. Fierce squalls in the night. Get up, drain the yogurt tub catching drips from my leaky window.

My friends Mark & Rich drop by. Rich talks cheerfully nonstop and soon I feel utterly exhausted. Mark's not bothered--dunno why I'm so much more affected by Rich. And once they've gone, slow to recover, too.

Patagia drops by. She wrote a quite funny poem, Nouvelle Barbie Bods, on my sculpture group The Cendancers (caution: centaur nudity). A bold rainbow appears as she reads; fades when she ends. Ha!

The clouds close in, the rain drums down...

THAT NIGHT

I live in a south-facing valley in the Santa Cruz Mountains. One day I look out the window. A big cloud looms. Cloud? It's greenish! With spherical green nodules in chains, and purplish jellyfish tentacles. That's a life-form up there. A malevolent one. I can feel it. Soon we learn it's worldwide; clouds are hostile now.

They just got tired of us, I guess.

I camp out on the coast in summer with a group. Beautiful, clear sky above and for miles, but clouds on the horizon and inland over the Bay. Visitable land, but uninhabitable! Food can be grown only by irrigation, under cloudless skies; for clouds recognize our fields and batter them down. If all else fails, they hail.

I have a friend who's an alien cat, leopard-sized. She was an exchange student here, but got stranded when the clouds crashed civilization and halted starflight--for years, certainly; maybe for our lifetimes. She sees the cloud-intelligences differently--shows me a video simulating how they look through her alien eyes, sensitive to different frequencies. Smaller grainy streaks in the cloud, not one big entity. Most of it's dumb--just water.

So what about cloudseeding? Very fine dust might force a sentient cloud to rain so much of its body down it'd either faint, lose coordination between its sentient nodes, or die outright. How much bloodloss can you survive?

Speaking of survival--one way or another, humanity will. On irrigated farms in cloudless deserts, or as fishers--they can attack ships, but not fish!--or orchardists or hunter-gatherers under tree-cover where clouds can't see... or learning how to kill clouds, and fighting a long, long war against the sky.

Survive, yes. But the boom years--the years of peace--are gone.

NOTES NEXT MORNING

• Green, purple in the sky: that brief, intense rainbow shining eerily as my friend Patagia chanted her poem.
• Alien cat sees hidden structure: not sure. Maybe she's dreaming itself? My conscious only sees surfaces, but...
• Clouds end the boom years: a theme with multiple roots:
  1. Meteorological: Relentless rain. Cabin fever. Leaky window.
  2. Calendrical: it's the winter solstice--darkest day of the year. And feels like it.
  3. Social: My friends were eager to see me, but their visits exhausted me. I feel isolated, would like to get out more, but I'm just too fragile--or introverted.
  4. Literary: as a kid I read a science fiction tale: Creation Took Eight Days. Clouds turn out to be higher beings we failed to recognize. They start taking random humans to study, experimenting on us in cloud-cages, tossing our bodies back to earth when we die. The story's last line, written in welts on his own skin by a half-mad man hoping to warn humanity via his suicide: CREATION TOOK...
  5. Medical: my chronic illness. Headache & sore joints, no diagnosis. That jellyfishy cloud echoed an earlier dream of interviewing my own cells-on-strike during a Jelly Rebellion. Turned out they hadn't been paid! Here, it's gotten worse; they've turned murderous.
  6. Economic: Republicans want deregulation; they LIKE crashes. Their plutocrat backers profit more from instability--storms--than slow steady growth. The wary class truce of the New Deal is dead. My childhood world, at relative peace, is dead. All we can do is find refuges where their storms can't batter us down.

World Dream Bank homepage - Art gallery - New stuff - Introductory sampler, best dreams, best art - On dreamwork - Books
Indexes: Subject - Author - Date - Names - Places - Art media/styles
Titles: A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - IJ - KL - M - NO - PQ - R - Sa-Sk - Sl-Sz - T - UV - WXYZ
Email: wdreamb@yahoo.com - Catalog of art, books, CDs - Behind the Curtain: FAQs, bio, site map - Kindred sites