E-mail: dew@obscure.org

I only remember this in pieces. Wherever I was, it seemed that at random I would be pulled through walls as though they had no substance, as though they were illusion. I am not sure what it was that pulled me through these walls, whether a person or a force. The one instance I remember was a woman I was walking down a hall with who suddenly walked through a section of wall to my right and either yelled for me to follow her, or reached a hand back for me. My memories are foggy about the other side of the wall. I think there was a reception desk. There were people there. They were telling me there were still things I needed to do "out there" (on the other side of the wall), and that I would have to go back. It was apparent that the side of the wall I kept disappearing to was another world altogether. I think it was Heaven. There was a guy that I kept seeing. (I don't know which side of the wall he was on.) He was dressed all in black and wore a black hat. He had pale skin and a round face. I found him immensely intriguing, but never spoke to him. At one point when I saw him he grabbed me in a long hug. I was surprised, of course. We went to a more private area and sat down on the floor. I think I was holding him, simply. My hands touched something scaly on his back and examined it. A strip of skin down the right side of his back was peeling as though from a sunburn. I peeled a small section of the skin off until he told me not to. At another point I was beyond the walls again, but nowhere near the reception desk. I was in a room next to a courtyard, which I could see through a glass wall which separated the two areas. The courtyard was large, somewhat like a Greek temple with stone columns that reached upward around its perimeter. It was white, and in the center was a rectangular blue pool. There were people lounging about in the water. I was trying to explain this place to someone who was with me. (I don't know who.) Some water struck the glass wall from the pool area, and I figured it was only the people outside making waves. Then a huge bout of waves began crashing against the glass wall, the pressure strong enough to cause it to break. This was the beginning of the flood. Next I remember, I was in a hallway. There were others there, but no one that I knew. Dropping down from a doorway in the hall was an immense staircase. It descended past the earth and deeper still. Looking down, I could see the earth below, which seemed to confirm that I was in fact no longer on it, but somewhere up above it. (Again, Heaven?) Directly below I could see fields and a stretch of highway with steady traffic. The staircase curled downward from where I stood, and sometimes I could see at its end a dark, looming door with a horrible face on it. I knew, as one will at times just know things in dreams, that we all had the option to go down that staircase, but that there was a very high chance it would lead to a Bad Place. There was also a very thin chance that it would not. (Hope?) As I gazed down at the earth, the flood began. I watched the road fill with water, the waves toppling cars and slinging trucks as though they were toys. Then, strangely, a train appeared. It was a life-size version of a toy I'd had as a child - a Fisher-Price circus train. It was travelling along the highway to the left. I watched it pass by, vaguely baffled. The water and waves did not seem to impede it. In the hall behind me was a picture on the wall of a demon-like creature. Someone next to me said, "Peglegasus," and I figured that the picture had presented a riddle, and that was the man's answer. Then something small (I think it was chocolate. A chocolate bone?) appeared from the picture and drifted toward the man who had answered. I heard the demon say, "Eat." But the man was behind me, and the food-thing got stuck in my hair as it tried to drift to him. I brushed at it immediately to get it out, knowing it was bad, that the answer the man had given was wrong. I noticed a Reese's peanut butter cup floating off past my left, presumably to someone else who had answered incorrectly. And that is all that I can remember.