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Dreams Recounted
#34 | Halcyon

#34 | Halcyon

Me and a group of random individuals crowd around a teacher. The teacher's face and identity randomly change and swap to other people. Almost against the wall to our left are two tables, a ladder, and a large glass pane bordered with wood. The teacher says we are to use these items to obtain something high up on the wall.

We stack the items on each other with the glass pane on the top, we try to figure out how to climb the glass. Someone recommends using rock climbing techniques but the teacher refutes this by saying that glass is a sheer surface.

The teacher takes the glass pane down with another person holding the opposite edge and hands me the corner he is holding to me. Just as my fingers touch the wood she lets go, dropping the wood on my right foot and cracking the glass. I can tell my foot is in pain as I clutch my shoe but I don't actually feel any of it.

The others take the cracked glass to set up again and someone uses the cracks as handholds to climb up to the thing nailed to the wall. The object turns out to be a map of the room with colours and labels on each section.

The room is divided by waist high brightly colored soft plastic walls. The walls spiral and merge randomly making the room into a maze of sorts. In the dead ends on the map is the word ‘Goal’ written in different colours. The bottom right of the room, against a long window that goes across the entire wall, is the gold corner. Me and a few others are a part of the gold team. Others dispersed amongst the other colours.

The teacher comes up to us and asks where one of our teammates is. Someone says he went outside to a store to buy connections. Looking out the window I see him running up to the door, arms full of glue sticks.

Looking back to the room I now see a giant clock mounted on the back wall counting down zero. When it reaches zero we have to race to our respective goals, how I knew this I don't know.

The silence between the last seconds on the clock was palpable and three seconds before go time, we were all teleported to different spots from before, ruining all the planning we made for the best way to run. The disorientation lasted only a little longer before everyone burst out into frenzy, rushing to the goals.

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The barriers were no longer barriers but long couches covered in sand. As I am running between two couches I see that already most people got lucky and teleported close to their goals and had sat down in their goals.

Eventually I got to where I needed to be sitting down on the sand just as the clock went off again. Apparently we had a time limit. Everyone who is left standing is told by a speaker in the corner of the room to leave the room and everyone else is to stay seated.

They exit the room through a door in the middle of the wall opposite the window that leads into another room.

Entering the other room I am greeted with almost complete silence and darkness. A dim spotlight shines down in the middle of the room yet I am able to see almost perfectly. The spotlight is circular in shape but the light it shines is rectangular shaped.

In the spotlight are two small creatures that look like thicker, folded sour worms and both of them were looking at me with their beady eyes. From the darkness around me emerged a whole lot of other sour worm creatures, these ones not folded or as thick.

They don't have any intelligence or awareness as far as I know and so i start killing them off one by one. To kill them I have to cut them in half but since I didn't have a knife or anything of the sort I instead used the lid of one of the plastic containers that dotted the floor.

The plastic lid was obviously not sharp enough so I had to push the edge of the plastic into the middle of the worms and almost saw them in half, pushing left and right until the two halves separated.

With each death of the worms the room got just that little bit brighter and in the end after pulling out the last worm, except for the two bigger ones in the middle, that was stuck in one of the containers, the spotlight shut off. The room was perfectly lit even after the light was turned off and the next door opened. The door is the exact same as the one I entered through and is on the opposite wall, the two doors facing each other.

I stand up and drop the lid on the floor carelessly and head towards the exit, picking up the two monarch worms on the way forward.