the world was ending and a handful of people were piling onto a spaceship to escape it. but the spaceship wasn’t going to take us to a new planet, or let us continue civilization indefinitely in orbit. none of us were actually going to survive; we’d get an extra forty days after the earth was wiped out, and then the spaceship would be destroyed too. i remember standing on a rear deck of the ship, with an enormous viewing window that let me watch the earth recede as we rose away from it. i don’t often get physical sensations in my dreams but i could feel the swooping acceleration as the spaceship left the planet.
it wasn’t a secret that we weren’t going to survive; everyone knew how long we had, everyone knew what they had signed up for. even though we knew we were heading toward our death, there was a celebratory atmosphere. people laughed and made jokes as the ship left the earth. i remember, at one point, a small atrium of people sitting around casually; the atmosphere was one of a handful of friends sitting around a campfire, swapping happy stories, although there were a lot more of us than that. we were melancholy but resigned, and determined to remember happier times and be glad of them.
the dream changed, the way dreams do. the place we were in had the same vaguely cartoon sci-fi architecture, but now it was smaller - a house instead of a spaceship. there were fewer of us. i call it a house because i’m fairly certain it was laid out like one - in fact, now that i think about it, the floor plan was a bit like my grandparents’ house out in the country. a big living room and a nice kitchen and then a door around back. (remember this door, it becomes important in a moment.) the feeling in the air was different, too: tension and anticipation, each one of us waiting for someone else to be the first to -
well, we knew what the place was. it was a sort of waiting room for the afterlife.
except none of us were actually sure there was any such thing. we only knew that we couldn’t stay here forever. eventually we’d all have to go through the door around back. this door, we all knew, led to whatever happened after you die.
i remember opening the door once - you could do that, before you went through. there was light, bright light. it seemed white when you saw it straight on, but lit up my hands and the room behind me in vivid red. have you ever seen an image with the contrast turned up as high as it will go, miles past recognizability until everything is just shifting, sharply-defined splotches of bright color? it was a bit like that. i think seeing that light was the first moment i understood where i was, and where the door led.
i closed it.
i spent a lot of time looking at the door. eventually i was joined by one of my housemates, a man my age or a bit younger, slight and athletic and adventurous and brash. he was curious about what was on the other side of the door, but not to go into the light. we talked. i don’t know if i gained this knowledge from him or if i had already known it, but it transpired that the house had an outside, that was lit by that white/red light but not part of it - you could stand in the space beyond the door and be illuminated without actually passing through. it was a matter of some disagreement among my housemates exactly how safe this was.
we knew a little bit about the contents of the outside even before we opened the door. there was a raised wooden path, not leading into the light, but perpendicular to it, following the outer wall of the house. there was grass underneath it, for all the world like a suburban lawn.
he wanted to go through the door, and follow the path. i don’t think he thought he could get anywhere interesting, though. we knew, in the way you know things in dreams, that if he succeeded in following the path it would just take him in a circle around the house and back to the door. but he still wanted to try it. just to see if he could, maybe. (maybe it was like dipping your toe in a cold pool before you dive in.)
i didn’t think this was such a good idea. i still didn’t know if there was anything beyond that light.
he opened the door. this time, i could see more than just the light. there was the path, bathed in red just like i had been when i first opened the door. the grass was bright red too - it looked like the light was doing it, but green grass under bright red light should have looked black.
our discussion became an argument. the door stayed open, while we argued, and something began to rise in the air, something that wasn’t exactly noise and wasn’t exactly the rush of wind. we could still hear each other, and yet we had to shout over it.
he just wanted to sprint around the pathway, he’d run really fast, he’d be back before i knew it. he wouldn’t even close the door behind him - it’d stay hanging open from when he left to the moment he came back into the house. but i still didn’t think it was safe.
the longer the door stayed open, the longer the thing that was not wind grew stronger, the longer we stayed in that red light, the more it felt like at any moment we would - not exactly be sucked through, but somehow we would already be outside, would already have walked through the blindingly bright curtain.
eventually he’d had enough. he stepped through the door. it swung shut behind him, but the noise and the wind and the red red light remained -
anyway that’s around when i woke up.