recording a dream I had last weekend

[the_siobhan]

The continent we lived on was a rough egg shape if you ignored the usual inlets, ridges, and islands around the coasts. The smaller end pointed south. The continental plate it sat on had an edge that lined up with the west coast so there was a line of young mountains that curved between land and water. Viewed from space you could see a thick band that cut the egg in half about two-thirds of the way down. An enormous thick double wall. North of the wall and along its entire length you could see the signs of human settlement. There were patches of farmland but mostly it consisted of cities running together into a thick band of urban and industrial development along the temperate zone of the continent. The distinctive grey of the cities ran north into the green in trails and fingers. The northernmost part of the continent grew increasingly sparsely populated and ended with a cap of white.

Below the wall it was the yellow-green of open plains. The southernmost tip ended in desert. The only city in the southern half hung below the wall in a giant perfect circle, slightly offset from the centre. That's where I lived. We called it The City. We were very literal people.

There were also villages and other small settlements but they were much more spread out so there was nothing you could have easily identified from flyover height. Most of the people who lived outside the wall[1] lived in The City. I don't have any idea of numbers but there were maybe a couple million of us.

There were houses for larger groups that cohabited, but since I lived alone I had an apartment in a high-rise. Here this meant a smallish private room with space for a bed, a wardrobe and a small desk. There was an attached toilet room with a sink and I shared access to a couple of large shower and bathing rooms at the end of the hall. I ate meals in a dining room on the ground floor or picked up food from one of the open kitchens located around the neighbourhood.

I didn't own an alarm clock. Whenever I decided it was time for me to do some work I walked to the University and spent a couple of hours going through the previous day's numbers and building analysis reports. That done I would get on one of the bicycles parked outside and ride it out of town. The transition from The City to surrounding countryside was abrupt, as I soon as I passed the ring road I was surrounded by open fields. There were farms across the road from the building where I stopped, but the site itself was surrounded by grassland. There were horses here, semi-wild, that hung around for food and water and the salt lick. They would come for shelter during winter storms or for a safe place to give birth. We handled and brushed them, taught them to view humans as a source of treats and petting, halter-trained them all and selected the friendliest and most docile to be trained to saddle and bridle or to pull carts. They were our transportation when we needed to visit small settlements and villages outside of The City and a group of riders and carts would usually have a shifting cloud of horses tagging along side out of curiosity.

And that was how I spent almost all my time, getting covered in straw and horse sweat, getting nipped at by foals and my toes stepped on and a couple of times a year going on trips with a group of people where we rode for days and slept under the stars. My 12 year-old self would have thought this was heaven.

My 49 year-old self thinks this was heaven because I never once cooked. Or shopped for food. Or tried to figure out what to do with thing X and thing Y because that's all we have in the house and I don't want to go to the store right now and I should really use up thing C because it's about to go bad. Somebody else did all that. Somebody who liked doing it. Lots of somebodys in fact. And other somebodys did the washing up. I wasn't even sure where the food came from. Every green space in the city was filled with vegetable gardens and orchards; there were hothouses on the roof of every building and pots of herbs hanging on the outside of every sunny window. I knew that grains were grown on the farms outside The City and that there were chickens and goats in the parks and that when we brought supplies in our carts to the ranchers out on the plains that we often returned with slabs of beef packed in mobile freezers. How it was allotted and prepared and showed up on my plate was so totally not my problem I just never thought about it. It was awesome. My contribution was that I helped deal with the trash. We hauled to a central area where we sorted and cleaned the recycleables and all the organic material was fed into the composters and turned into topsoil [3].

Because there was no money there was almost no stuff. No televisions or video games. No cell phones or laptops. I didn't need a big room because I was almost never there except to sleep and my possessions consisted of a few small items that I had made or that had been given to me by lovers, some notebooks and my clothes. If I wanted books I got them from the University. Same thing with computer access. The City had a trade balance with the North which allowed us access to things we couldn't grow or manufacture ourselves. (The records I compiled at the University were one of the ways we kept track of that balance) At one point some Narns came by asking to trade with us for access to some mineral we had in the south but all they could offer us in exchange was money. We suggested that we would like to trade with them but that they should come back when they thought of something we had more use for.

The University was also the closest thing we had to a government centre and that was where we gathered to make decisions. That was where I found out that the North wanted to buy some research from us. Specialists in The City spent a lot more time on "pure" research than their counterparts in the North and somebody had come up with something interesting to one of the corporations. The researcher had no idea how much value his work would have to the company so it was suggested that somebody who kept track of the financial end go with him to help figure it out. A couple of us volunteered and our names were sent North.

Travel between North and South wasn't restricted but it was controlled to prevent theft in both directions. The area next to the wall was the poor side of town for that particular Northern city so I basically walked out of the stately buildings and wide gardens (with vegetable plots) of the University and into a slum with people sleeping in the doorways. It was the most jarring contrast possible. A car was waiting for us on the other side.

Of course the company went to great lengths to lavish luxury on us. I figured it was intended both to woo away our researcher and to confuse those of us doing the financial negotiations. I was pretty safe from being confused because I remembered was life was like before the City so I was well aware of what I had given up to live there[4]. The researcher could have elected to leave - we wouldn't have tried to stop him. Others before him had although most of them had eventually returned when the pressure of performance on demand finally got to them. This guy was a lot younger though, one of the generations who had been born and raised in The City. He found the North not so much appealing as completely alien and baffling. It took him days to finally accept the idea that the pretty shiny girls at the company parties were actually being paid to be there.

Those are the things I remember most clearly about my time in the North, the dark wet streets of the slum and the bright, loud, glittering parties. The company people were nice but they didn't seem to be able to wrap their heads around not wanting things. They kept showing me their watches and phones and pictures of their houses and cars as if that would convince me. What I remember of my life in the South is the smell of the horses and lying in my sleeping bag looking at the stars and sitting around a bonfire in the park with my neighbours drinking a home made beer.



[1]When I went north I found out that the people there also said they lived "outside the wall".
[2]Apparently I had still spent time working at my current job since I remembered that the bank was where I learned how to do this stuff.
[3]I used to do this for my volunteer shift at some of the pagan festivals I used to go to. A friend was involved in the child care and offered to get me a spot there or in the kitchen instead and I assured him that I would much rather contribute by hauling garbage.
[4]Which from my view appeared to be alarm clocks and cooking.


Inspired no doubt by The Dispossessed and by the tyranny of alarm clocks and by having to sort through way too many boxes of stuff.

Comments

[mschaos]

man I wish I could remember my dreams, but more often than not I have no idea if I dream or not

[the_siobhan]

I definitely dream every night but I don't usually manage retain more than whisps. The ones where I get the fully fleshed stories are my favourite.