Timequake - The Dream

dread –verb
[dred]
1. to fear greatly; be in extreme apprehension of: to dread death.
2. to be reluctant to do, meet, or experience

I awoke this morning just before 7am from a very odd dream. As I mentioned on twitter, to understand my dream ‘think Timequake, with a me twist, and than you've seen inside my head’.
Timequake is the 19th novel written by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., essentially the plot line goes like this:

• The universe snaps back from 2001 to 1991


• Everyone is doomed to repeat the last 10 years on autopilot


• When time gets back to the point where it snapped back there is chaos, as everyone has to actually start doing things for themselves. After 10 years of being on autopilot you suddenly have to remember how to drive a car – and I mean like right now!

So my dream, Timequake’esque, is this:

I am at my Mom’s house for this big party. Apparently we all know this Timequake occurrence is going to happen and we’ve gathered all our loved ones together to celebrate. What’s different in my dream from the novel is this Timequake is a well-known and predicted global phenomenon where everyone, for a few short hours, is going to decrease in age by 14 years.

I spontaneously revert to a 16yr old kid, my younger 2nd cousin becomes an infant, a new friend of mine from Romania – who is meeting my family for the first time – turns into a very bratty 8yr old, and another cousin – one who shared the same age as me – somehow is transformed into a 2yr old. For some unknown reason he decreases by double the expected amount.

There is some family discussion about age, but after about an hour everyone sort of overlooks the miracle and just goes about the day preparing the meal we will later all feast on. After the couple of hours that we were told the phenomenon would last everyone starts to revert back to their normal ages. I can suddenly feel it happening with the onset of a slight pain in my knees and hips, a pain that I have grown to ignore, but the sudden onset of it is alarming. I run around to members of my family and mention this sudden aging, but no one is concerned, it is as if this is nothing for them. Within a mere 5 minutes everyone begins to age 14 years right before my eyes.

And that’s it.

I woke up.

I never found out what happened to my cousin, the one that decreased in age by 28 years. Did he revert back to a 30yr old, or did he only age until he was a 16yr old?

I thought this dream might make a good story – looking at the after effects of the phenomenon. What happened to people who had lost a limb, or survived a disease? What happened with the dead, pregnant women or children under 14?

Maybe on one of these bored and broke nights alone that I spend inside I will sit down and write the story.

Working title: Lost Children

Grab The Bookmarketer For Your Site