I realised I was dreaming when I didn’t see any background around me anymore. I wasn’t alone here though: a group of small humanoid figures was dancing their wild dance in front of me around a campfire that flickered frantically with a lot of missing pixels. They seemed to be naked but without visible genitals, and they had neither hair nor a clear nose or ears. There was something unearthly about the dance, and at the same time it felt old, Pagan and human as well as alien and maybe even demonic. As if they were obeying an ancient power that I had no connection with. Or maybe I was just going mad.

Suddenly the fire disappeared completely, flickered out, and the tiny humanoids started spiralling and whirling around in all directions like a swarm of dervishes on LSD. A light hiss in the background seemed to pop like the noises of a scratched LP. I watched the aliens for a while and tried to find a pattern to their dance, but I was looking in vain for repetition that I couldn’t find and just made me more confused in the end. I was a complete stranger here, and so was my humanity, or what was left of that.

My head felt heavy and my own body felt absent, as if I were merely a flickering ghost myself. Who were these people? And what was I doing here? I probably was just a dream so it didn’t really have to make sense, but what if this wasn’t a normal dream? Was there a message somewhere? Or was that just a dumb superstition?

Meanwhile the dancing little greys around me seemed to go up in the background more and more, as if my attention belonged elsewhere.

Suddenly my new friend Evelith was standing there in front of me me, filling up my view. The little humanoid dancers faded even further into the non-existent background, although they didn’t disappear completely. Just like with the aliens I couldn’t say whether she was naked or clothed but I didn’t seem to care. It wasn’t that relevant here and now. What bothered me though was that I felt quite naked myself, and in a strange way transparent in more than one layer, as if everyone here had Röntgen-vision and could look right into me.

It wasn’t really my body that I was ashamed of, but rather something deeper, my soul or the lack thereof, and I was completely unable to hide it. She could see everything of me, and I wanted that to stop. She didn’t turn away though, she just looked at me with an amused smile on her lips. Here golden eyes seemed to be able to read me in such a way that she understood me better than I understood myself. I felt ugly and unworthy.

I stood there frozen, petrified even for an unquantifiable time in a fluid space. I really needed to run away, shrink into nothingness and fly away at the same time but I couldn’t move my limbs. And all the time she was there, looking right through my shields with a faint smile. She just stood there with no movement but her relaxed breath, and kept me captive in her look. There was nothing I could do but endure, and hope that she wouldn't be grossed out by what she saw. Her perfect caramel-coloured skin and dark hair seemed to glow in the dark. And all the time the aliens kept on dancing in weird patterns around us in the background, in more dimensions that I thought existed.

And then the world changed. The hiss in the background disappeared with the aliens and the woman in front of me started to change in appearance. Her skin became paler, her hair went from almost straight black hair to messy brown curls, and her eyes went to blue. Her body was much fuller now, and it seemed to tower above me as if I were a dwarf, and the woman was a giant.

I felt I knew this person, but it seemed even more unreal that she would be here. She belonged to another time, another place, in another life. A picture arose in my mind, something from long ago, when we both were a lot younger. In a lost time when I still felt more or less alive. In a time that humanity had still some humanity left. A time that was lost completely now.

I had to turn my eyes from her because I couldn’t look at her radiance. She looked very alive, and very human, and very female, emanating a deep energy that I had completely forgotten until I had met Evelith a few hours ago. Something that demanded respect. I felt like the shadow of a ghost standing in front of a goddess of purity that could turn on the light which would rightly erase me from the room.

And then I knew her name.

“B… Berla? Is that you” I asked at the apparition, not knowing if I was even worthy enough to address a being like her.

She smiled.

“So you do remember me?” She asked. Immediately she was human again, but I still felt uneasy being with her. The woman that I had cruelly dumped years ago seemed to measure me with her eyes, uncertain whether it would be worth it to even talk to me. ”Even though you abandoned me so long ago and coldly threw me away me as both a friend and a potential lover.” I looked at her and I realised that it wasn’t the Berla I had known, but a new Berla, much stronger much more mature than I could remember her. The feeling of being unworthy to even address her came back. I felt even more embarrassed now with her in front of me than I had with Evelith, and I still had no place to hide at all, to escape my past, to escape from myself. I was like a flickering electronic ghost while she was quite solid in her presence and being. She was more real even than my vanishing eyes could bear, and it felt as if she could blow me out like a smoldering candle with just one light breath if she wanted.

I started pleading.

“Berla!

I’m sorry!

Please!

I was wrong.

I’m only realising now.

I was sucked in by my job and the infoscreen.

I was losing my humanity already.

I’m sorry!”

She wasn’t impressed, but she didn’t seem hostile either.

“I know.

You were very stupid.

I’ll hope you get a new chance at being human.

But the past is the past.

And I’m a married woman and a mother now.

No-one can know what would have happened.”

She didn't answer. I stared at her. In my head her story had ended when I had seen her for the last time, but that was just my own stupidity. Not everyone was stuck like I was.

Meanwhile my dream was changing again. She snapped her fingers and blinked with her eyes. For a second my eyes had been looking at the stretchmarks on her naked belly, and now she stood there, fully clothed in strange clothes. It seemed I was wearing clothes too myself now, but I knew she could still see through them. Se wasn’t alone anymore, and stood there in front of me with a fierce dark-skinned man next to her. Several children moved around them. Everything was dazzling and I probably flickered myself like a holographic ghost with no energy source. I felt myself fading away in her radiant presence.

Things were going too fast, and I needed more time to process everything that I had experienced, and to come to terms with the conclusions that were imposing themselves on me. Berla, my first and only girlfriend, alive, was supposed to stand before me with a husband and children, and clothed like I had never seen before in The City, or even on the screen.

What was the meaning of this? Was there any? Why did I even expect a dream to have meaning? I was just dreaming, not? hings like that didn’t even exist. Not in The City. Not in the year 144 AU.

“My little community here behind the wall is being attacked by prez Emon’s feral killerbots. We’ve been able to defend ourselves until now, but they keep learning and getting stronger. You are the only living being in the city that I am still connected to, and it seems you’re indeed awaking. If you want to unite those who want to live, please do remember us too. We can teach you what you people in the City have forgotten, and you can help us with some needed technology to save our lives. And there might be other descendants of the survivors of the great war for the Earth willing to reconcile behind the wall.”

The words arrived, but I didn’t seem to take them in. I was afraid of all those people, and of myself being a naked flickering ghost. All the layers of my being laid visible, and they were ugly. I was hardly human, and a traitor to my species and life itself, and a miserable wretch in general.

“When the time is there you will remember this dream.” She said. "If there is enough humanity left in you that is..."

I looked away from her face, and my eyes went to the others. Most of the people around her didn’t seem to even notice me. Her husband didn’t even want to look at me. Only the oldest kid, a girl of maybe ten years old or so in a green dress, pierced me with her dark eyes in a questioning way, as if looking straight through my heart.

“‘Kame hjal biri, fik”, she whispered in a language that I didn’t understand.

Suddenly they all disappeared, except for Berla herself who had changed again, and before I knew what was happening a bald man in the uniform or a general stood before me, laughing like a maniac. I recognised him from the posters I’d seen all my life as none but president Emon himself. He wasn’t alone though, for suddenly I was surrounded by the aforementioned killerbots. They danced around me in psychotic circles just a the aliens had done; and they shot green beams at me. With every hit I felt like I was fading away more, becoming thinner and thinner and finally dissolving into a rain of electric sparks, just as the background itself did. The whole dreamword itself dissolved into a nirvana of pure non-existence the second that I left it.

*

I opened my eyes and was relieved to find myself awake, although I had no idea where I was. I wasn’t my own room but in a strange world of very dim twilight. The pain in my back told me that it was still lying on Evelith’s old couch. And indeed, I realised that I had been hearing her calm breath all along. It was a very strange sensation for me, being so close to another human being at night.

Listening to the rhythmic sound of her breath for a while made me quiet again, and this time I fell into a refreshing dreamless sleep.