Readings I Recommend

  • Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
  • Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
  • Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  • Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris
  • It's Beginning to Hurt by James Lasdun
  • The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
  • The Man Who was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton
  • Identity by Milan Kundera
  • A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
  • Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

Additional Blogs I Recommend

Monday, January 11, 2010

January 11; 6AM

Setting: A high school in the 1980's
Protagonist: Me

I wasn't a very "cool" kid, but I did always know what the cool kids did; They went to the nightclub. This one in particular was called "Night Shine" and it was adjoining the school building and had only been open a few years. Night Shine was the hottest thing in town for high schoolers and on Fridays, that's where everyone would be. That is, everyone except for me. Instead, I would spend my time in the library reading literature and historical texts. One day, I stumbled upon a book that referenced the history of the high school and discovered that the space Night Shine occupied had once been a biology and research lab. Nothing I found, however, mentioned what this lab contained or why it was shut down. In fact, all the documentation stopped at a certain time, as if it just disappeared. I decided to do some research of my own. I gathered all the information I could regarding the research lab and any photos that corresponded to the articles I found. One image that intrigued me was one of a column of butterflies that were strung together on single strings of thin fishing wire. They were hung from the ceiling and formed a ring around a sort of pillar of light.
The following night, I started looking around the nightclub knowing that it would be really slow on a school night. According to the pictures I had, there was a large portion of the old laboratory that was sealed off by a wall to the nightclub, which blended into the adjacent walls. However, the room did not extend into any other rooms surrounding it either. At some point, I found a way to get into the space by crawling into one of the air vents that led right into the room.
Once inside, I found an entire research laboratory that had been completely abandoned by the high school decades prior. From what I could tell, some of the equipment had recently been used. Since it was so dark, and I wasn't sure if anyone saw me crawl in, I decided to gather as much information as I could, pulling together books and writing logs that I could go over once I left.
The dream skips here and I am back at the nightclub later in the week, on a Friday just after a pep rally. It is packed, and for some reason I'm carrying my bike on my back, like a backpack, making it very difficult for me to get into the venue. It switches to third person here, and I am not able to understand why I'm so anxious to get back in or what my motives are. Once I'm back in the laboratory, I notice that someone has walled up a part of it that was not walled up prior, but the mortar was still wet so I attempt to break it down. In doing so, the other walls that supported it crumbled and the crowd in the nightclub panicked, causing a stampede out the door. All the chemicals from the aquariums spilled out causing crowd lagging behind to pass out. Once they cleared out all the people, I went back in the nightclub and the only image I remember is the column of light with the strings of butterflies, now exposed due to the columns in the club falling apart.
What I discovered in the conclusion of the dream was that some official in the school was trying to create the perfect creature that would take over mankind and rule the earth. He or she was continuing an experiment started years prior, where they mutated animals that were to be extinct and extracted a poison from the butterflies that could kill thousands of people at once.
The last scene of the dream was of a boy, set today, in the same school. The whole dream was some sort of connected memory from the protagonist to this adolescent. It ended with the boy standing in front of the old, broken sign that read "Night Shine".