Awoke this Friday morning after a particularly bizarre and unsettling dream. Parts of it felt nightmarish, other parts funny, and yet the dream was so adventurous. Gigantic waves rose up as the sky turned dark. We partied among tomorrow’s ruins with everyone we all knew earlier in life, suddenly aware terrifying alien creatures scurried quickly in the shadows. What was this crazy dream trying to tell me?
The dream didn’t start out so scary. The dreamtime seemed to be soon after my middle daughter Kate’s wedding. In real-life Kate is engaged to marry Ian the Boatman next year in the Summer of 2026. Some people in the dream were still running around in wedding attire. The dreamtime was Autumn. Had a mid-to-late Octobery feel. And the nights felt somewhere between warm and cool. With a Full Moon. So looked up Luna cycles in real-life. In the Fall of 2026 the Full Moon soars on Monday the 6th of October as the Harvest or Hunter’s Supermoon, on Wednesday the 5th of November as the Beaver Supermoon, and on Thursday the 4th of December as the Full Cold Moon Supermoon.
So many people were in this dream. There were folks I knew and know from across many walks of life and from different periods of time. There were people from every place I’ve ever lived. Even people who had passed on in real-life who I was surprised to see still alive in the dream. Family, friends, acquaintances, coworkers, classmates, fraternity brothers, ex-wives, even old girlfriends and schoolyard chums including those I got into fights with – they were all there. They were also all older adults, no one here was still a child or still dead, but more as if we were all peers, alive. We’re all about the same age in this dream. No one was elderly or very young. Twas all in the near future, could be this year, or during the Autumn of next year.
Early on while dreaming, I wondered if we were all in the Afterlife together. Did we all perish in a sudden, unexpected cataclysm where our species became extinct? And now we were in Heaven, or maybe Purgatory or some low-level, close-to-the-ground-of-Earth astral realm because everything was so post-Apocalyptic? The idea we were all in Hell, every one of us, didn’t make sense. And then we realized we were biologically all alive but in some different dimension or density or strange realm. We were unable to understand any of it. All of these people being together, alive, and at the same age, at the same time was a miracle, a Discordian miracle none of us were able to make any sense out of it.
Next we’ve broken into small groups scrambling thru different ruined houses amidst a landscape muddy and trashed from recent flooding. We look around in house after house, all of them empty, no one living there. Everyone I saw were only the people I’ve known across my 66 years of living in real-life time. Someone shouted. We stopped to listen. Monster waves bigger than tsunamis were on the way. We grabbled surfboards – they just appeared in our hands – and headed out into the bay. The water was rising quickly. Enormous waves taller than the mountains rose so high as to block out the sky. We’re calm, which surprises me within the dream. Most of us sit astride our surfboards while some swim about not wanting to be tethered to anything. The gigantic waves pass beneath us, lifting us up into the sky, then dropping us down as the water barreled ashore. We all began to freak out, and fear turns to relief and then, strangely, a sense of fun. None of us are hurt. We don’t drown. We aren’t smashed to bits. It was as if we were somehow indestructible. Again, I wondered if we were somehow in some strange realm of the Afterlife, a House of Many Rooms of which we Earth Humans all know so little.
The waters receded from flooded fields and woods. Mud is everywhere. Trees are leafless. While many trees still stand even more are bent over and shoved into piles of debris. Damaged houses and buildings are everywhere and sit crooked upon the mud with broken forests around our small towns. Some burst into flames and burn with smoke twisting up like giant snakes into the clouds.
We explore ruined homes in the glow of fires burning while we search for supplies in a jarring mix of curiosity and urgency. Some things still work, strangely enough. We still have electricity! Despite the apocalypse of the Great Flood and subsequent fires we still have working electricity. Wow.
Then we saw the alcohol. Everywhere lay or sat bottles of whiskey. Everywhere. A gazillion bottles of whiskey. Very few bottles of wine, oddly. I rarely ever drink alcohol anymore in real-life, as alcohol is a poison. I remember thinking those two thoughts to myself as I surveyed the vast assortment of alcoholic beverages. Aye, alcohol is a fucking poison and has caused far more damage, destruction, and mayhem than not, but, but, hey, I like the taste of good whiskey whisky bourbon tequila rum microbrew beer oh so weird this is so weird. Weird!
We’re all scrambling, talking, laughing, some of us have guns; pistols and revolvers, handguns mostly, no longs. No long guns, that is.
We forget about all the whiskey-whisky. The mud stinks. No one, not a single person I could remember picked up a bottle of alcohol. The End of the World is not a time to give up and die, but a time to live and renew and make life better again.
Skies run cloudy and dark. Full Moon glows behind the clouds. A sinister glow, eerie, insidious…
Feels apocalyptic, dystopian, but this apocalypse also feels too new; not the end of our world and not the end of Earth.
Within the dream I sense the dream as it begins to fracture as additional events unfold along bifurcating yet broken timelines like little dreams inside of bigger dreams.
We’re all busy preparing to jump into someone’s cars and trucks to leave to go back somewhere else. It is confusing. Chaos. Yet as orderly as smoke spiraling up into the Full Moon clouds. I stay behind with the last ones to evacuate. Everyone I know from across the expanse of my life is here, alive, and busy coming and going in the wake of the wedding and the flood and the fires.
Meanwhile I began doing an impromptu survey, one started earlier after Kate’s wedding and before the apocalypse, the same one. Went around asking different people from different generations the same question: “Which was your favorite decade to live in? Which time period of your life would you like to be living in now? As you are now, or would you rather be back at the age we were then? Up to you, doesn’t matter, just choose. OK?”
People reeled off different times. No one chose the future not yet consciously lived or somehow remembered. Everyone was afraid of the future.
Someone asked me my own question. “The Sixties!” I replied. “In reality the mid-1960s thru the mid-1970s, not as a child or teenager but as a young adult.”
It was an age of optimism with the future being one we all eagerly looked forward to as one fulfilled by more and more progress and fueled by more and more optimism. Yes, the time was also one of widespread violence and warfare, true. Those years were ripe with racism and classism. They were gross with homophobia and the sexual exploitation of liberated women. Those glory years were rank with economic and financial turbulence with both increasing prosperity and greater losses, of the fear of atom bombs & ICBMs with H-bombs and Alien invasions from outer space, of cancer and pollution…
At the same time, however, there was also so much hope and promise. There was so much joy! Such great new music and artistic creativity! Life was rich with joyful rebellion. There was far more joyful, exciting self-expression than bloody revolution. The civil war so many expected smoldered but never ignited. Too many people were too busy having fun to stay angry for long. Wasn’t just music and dance, the 60s and 70s was a creative revolution In film, fashion, painting, writing, architecture, engineering, and technology, too. In civil rights and anti-war movements and poetry. And birth control! The dream meanders as the skies began to brighten with the Full Moon pushing away the clouds and smoke.
Woke up to pee.
First coherent thought among awakening: “Ugh, always waking up to pee. Some future critic will analyze my dream journals and go, ‘Oh, Mr Bass here has underlying health problems disturbing his sleep. They interrupt his dreams.’”
And then I get out of bed, still 66 years along in life, and stepped nimbly off towards the bathroom in the dark. Oh, man, do I gotta pee. Yeah, whew!
Meanings:
What DOES this crazy, confusing dream mean? Clearly was fantastical in nature and not lucid nor real-feeling.
Nostalgia for a bygone era? The romanticization of the past, certainly. The 1960s and 70s were a dynamic and vibrant time. But one brimming with hope and optimism where one dreams big dreams regardless of the threat of national and global destruction. So unlike today where dread, fatalism, apathy, despair, and cynicism have crowded out joy and hope like weeds in an untended garden as the specter of AI run amok and the eventuality of nuclear war permeates like the smell of rot.
Within the dream were elements of Escape and Survival. Communities of family, friends, and strangers all pulled together to help each other out in the wake of disasters and cataclysms. Some dream images were clearly influenced by recently watched movies and TV shows as well as by my knowledge of Human history. There also seems to be an element of fear in this dream, a fear that my daughter’s beautiful wedding coming up might be interfered with by world events and circumstances beyond our control. Recognize this for what it is, fear as f.e.a.r., false evidence appearing real. Then take a slow deep breath, and let it all go. Instead, we’re all co-creating a wonderful, powerful new future regardless of today’s dire news. We are at choice. Just as in the dream we were at choice not to give up and quit after the floods and fires. Life goes on for all who choose to live. Love flows.
William Dudley Bass
Friday 19 September 2025
Sunday 5 October 2025
Shoreline/Seattle, Washington
USA
Cascadia
Earth
Sol
Copyright © 2025 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.