Dreamlog: Sellafield
Vivid dreams seem to go in groups. This was last night's. A 'metafictional' dream.
I'm in a second-hand bookstore browsing books by an American horror writer, Stephen King I think though later I think the work feels more like Dean Koontz. He's written an experimental sort of epic series, off and on over the years, revolving around a young urban drifter who has become an avatar of the Eternal Warrior, fighting a running duel across time against the avatar of Death / Fate. The books are short, like young adult novels or the original Green Mile chapter books, and released on a very intermittent schedule, full of retcons (literally, as sometimes a sequel will go back a few decades in time and change events, or rework the same event multiple times).
For some reason the series has mostly focused on the English nuclear installation at Windscale/Sellafield. I have a single vivid impression of a 'snapshot' from the story, framed like a comic panel or movie frame: a telephone pole, with a sign reading SELLAFIELD pointing down the road, and a closed circuit camera with a red 'recording' light.
Yeah, I have no idea. Except that I was watching clips of 'The Highlander' on Youtube the night before.
Dreamlog: The Bridgehead
Exhausted, a long sleep in on Saturday morning produced another "travelling dream".
I am travelling, by car rather than air this time, and have stopped en route to my final destination at the home of friends. I have a sense that it is something like a shared house or camp or intentional community rather than an individual home.
I am keen to continue my drive, but it is late at night and my friends convince me that I'll be safer to stay with them overnight. I agree and later as we are sitting after dinner watching rain on the windows outside, and I realise that I am really very tired, I think what a good idea this was and that perhaps I will spend the rest of my trip here at the community instead of continuing on.
Later (the next day? over the next week?) I explore outside the community with the others, and I find it has been built on an abandoned industrial facility with a military vibe. A river runs through it and the complex has been built over the river like a dam, and tunnelled down underground. There are unexplored levels and a sense that there still remain automated defences left after the war that left this facility abandoned; at one point a child gets too inquisitive and we have to intervene to keep them safe from the machine-gun turret. I look across the river through the windows of the white square concrete building; I have walked through this with the others, we even I think had a dinner inside there. It was fitted out like a classroom, factory or machine shop, with basement plant rooms still intact, but empty places where desks stood.
But for all the remaining danger the complex does not feel threatening, merely empty, and ready for new development. There is hope, a new beginning. The Troubles are over and this place has become one of many bridgeheads into a new world.
