I dreamt I found myself in what seemed like some old basement. Cobwebs and dust were everywhere. Corridors and rooms were lit by bare, flickering, filament-type light-bulbs, everything cast sharp shadows. I wasn't alone, there were about 10 more people with me, but I had no recollection who they were. All I knew was, like the rest, I was disoriented and didn't know how I'd gotten there. The more I looked around, the more this looked like some sort of research complex. It was too big for a basement. We stumbled upon a room full of cryogenic chambers (think Cameron's 'Aliens') that were open and empty. We might have woken up in them earlier and not remembered. I don't know. We had regular clothes on. After, what seemed like hours, we found some sort of exit. We drew matches and I wound up as part of a three-man scouting party.
There was no gigantic vault gate, no huge creaking slabs of metal. We exited through a side door into an alley, of what looked like a regular, early XXI century city somewhere in western Europe. I had this nagging feeling like something was off, like we didn't belong, or rather, like the world didn't belong.
It was the small differences, like the font on the bus signs. Transparent slabs of glass for smartphones. Weird neckties.
Like we slept for 50 years and woke up in the future. Only the future was a mix between the Noughts of the 21st century and some weird extrapolation of the Eighties from the previous one. We waited at a what I thought was a bus stop and got on some sort of maglev/tram hybrid. I looked at the route map on the on-board display, it was stylized to look like a world map straight out of a 16bit JRPG. I noticed that the next stop was a nuclear wasteland bordering with a post-fallout autocratic dystopia. Then it finally hit me: I was in the future, but way further than I had realized. The whole thing was some sort of theme-park and museum hybrid depicting different eras of humanity's history. The only difference was that the staff (for lack of a better word) actually believed they lived in their respective era. By that time everyone else left the cart. I stayed on as I wanted to get to the terminus, to see what the real future looked like. The maglev went into a tunnel and the on-board lighting dimmed. I must've dozed off. I started hearing some chatter and woke up. But I woke both from the dream-sleep and real sleep. The chatter was the radio-alarm.
There was no gigantic vault gate, no huge creaking slabs of metal. We exited through a side door into an alley, of what looked like a regular, early XXI century city somewhere in western Europe. I had this nagging feeling like something was off, like we didn't belong, or rather, like the world didn't belong.
It was the small differences, like the font on the bus signs. Transparent slabs of glass for smartphones. Weird neckties.
Like we slept for 50 years and woke up in the future. Only the future was a mix between the Noughts of the 21st century and some weird extrapolation of the Eighties from the previous one. We waited at a what I thought was a bus stop and got on some sort of maglev/tram hybrid. I looked at the route map on the on-board display, it was stylized to look like a world map straight out of a 16bit JRPG. I noticed that the next stop was a nuclear wasteland bordering with a post-fallout autocratic dystopia. Then it finally hit me: I was in the future, but way further than I had realized. The whole thing was some sort of theme-park and museum hybrid depicting different eras of humanity's history. The only difference was that the staff (for lack of a better word) actually believed they lived in their respective era. By that time everyone else left the cart. I stayed on as I wanted to get to the terminus, to see what the real future looked like. The maglev went into a tunnel and the on-board lighting dimmed. I must've dozed off. I started hearing some chatter and woke up. But I woke both from the dream-sleep and real sleep. The chatter was the radio-alarm.
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