Author’s Note: These Dream Sequence stories each start with an actual vivid dream I had. After I finish writing the details of each dream, I use Sudowrite artificial intelligence as a collaborator to continue the story in an attempt to connect all of the dream sequences somehow. Each story is a mix of human dreams, artificial intelligence, and conscious storytelling.
Previous dream sequence: The Flight of the Fish
I walked my dog along the lonely single-lane road. We came across an intersection where the gravel road met an asphalt road. A rusty gray mailbox sat at the corner, with a small, rusty gray ranch house about twenty yards behind it. Up the paved road was a newer apartment complex, rising about five or six floors up from a hill behind the old house.
As I came upon the intersection, a group of three people came walking in my direction down the gravel road. One was a forty-something woman with white skin and brown hair that frizzled into a puff on her forehead. The other two were heavy-set country boys wearing dirty beards and overalls. I didn’t want trouble and they didn’t look like people I wanted to interact with, so I changed direction and began walking up the paved road toward the apartment complex.
As I climbed the hill with my dog, I heard a frightful sound come from one of the apartments. It was a woman screaming, “Oh no! Oh no! Don’t kill me.” Then I heard two or three gunshots, then silence.
One of the country boys said loudly behind me, “That sounds like what I wanna do with my boss!” I ignored the attempt at a tasteless joke and kept walking away from them, up the road toward the apartments.
Eventually, I came to the wide white sidewalk surrounding the apartments. There were a few young trees planted in the middle of the sidewalk and benches. A lone figure approached. She was a black lady wearing jeans and a white jacket. She had long straightened hair and colorful makeup on, the kind of makeup that sparkled around the eyes. She was probably in her early 30’s.
Before I reached her, she sat on a bench and stared expressionless toward the brick wall of the apartment building. I normally mind my own business, but as I passed her, I couldn’t help but ask, “Do you need help, ma’am?”
She slowly turned her head toward me and replied, deadpan, “sometimes, all you have to do is ask.”
I was puzzled by the response and kept walking. Was she even real?
Eventually, I reached the apartment complex. It was much like other apartment complexes in town, except that it was inhabited by older folks. The building was painted dark brown with tan siding. There was a concrete walkway along the edge of the building leading to the front door. Several women were sitting on little chairs chatting together when I approached.
I could tell they were restless. They looked like they wanted to leave, like they didn’t want to be there. They were talking quietly, avoiding eye contact with me. They were talking about the screams.
One woman said, “I hope I never hear that again.” Another replied, “I’ve been here twenty years and I’ve never heard anything like that. That was loud!”
I asked, “What was that all about?” They weren’t sure. They said the police were investigating. It happened in one of the back apartments away from the street without much of a view of anything.
There were two types of people in this town, and they didn’t get along with each other. On one side of town, there were the Puffs. Puff men wore puffy beards and Puff women wore puffy hair. On the other side of town—the side I was on—were the Jackets. Jackets wore jackets everywhere they went. My best guess was that this incident was just another case of Puff-on-Jacket violence.
There was no sign of the police outside the apartment building. I walked with my dog into the main entrance, which was a small blue lobby with three or four doors leading out to hallways. A black man in a white and green flannel jacket was sitting at a folding table with a computer and a telephone. He was chatting on the phone, so I decided to wait for him to finish.
His manner was upbeat and friendly. “No! No, I’m not having them arrested. I can’t do that. No. You know how that works. They don’t like it when they’re locked up. Definitely. I told them plenty of times to stop the fighting, and when they don’t listen, what do you think happens next? Now they don’t let me in anymore and I can’t serve my eviction papers. Oh, I tried that once. One of them pushed me back outside. Now I just have to wait until they—”
Suddenly, there was a loud sound, like a crash followed by a scream. It came from the back stairway, down the hall to the right. He abruptly ended the call and walked around to the other side of the table, facing the hall. He put his hand on his gun, which was holstered on his belt. He looked down the hall and then he looked at me with a nervous grin. He said good-naturedly, “That’s one of them.”
Someone began walking down the hall toward us. It was a Puff man wearing a puffy brown beard and a green muscle shirt. He was holding a black revolver in his hand. He was an odd looking man, the moustache under his nose being bigger and puffier than the tiny beard on his chin. The man behind the table held out his arm in warning to stop, but the man ignored him and continued coming toward us.
I instinctively bent down and picked up my dog, while shouting, “Whoa whoa whoa bro, I got a dog here!”
The Puff man immediately stopped with a look of resignation on his face, and holstered his gun. The man behind the table turned around and saw me holding my dog, and breathed a sigh of relief. You see, dogs are rare sacred animals in this town. Overall, it’s an extremely violent town, but an ancient truce stated that no violence can occur within sight of a dog. It is known.
This whole town is weird. The people are weird. The whole place is strange. It’s so unworldly, so incredibly unusual!
I’m here in a city where violence is the norm. Gunfire echoes off the buildings every night and stabbings are a weekly occurrence, but no one is allowed to harm a dog. It is known.
This is a place where, if you’re walking down a dark trail at night with a flashlight in your hand, you can bump into a ghost and she’ll say, “watch where you’re going,” and you better. Strange things happen here all the time. It’s like some kind of super night-time haunted flashlight ghost forest.
I put my dog down and walked with her close to my side, like a canine shield against the senseless violence pervading this place. I stepped up the barren stairwell up to the location of the homicide. Four flights of stairs, with each step echoing on the concrete walls. At the top, the metal door opened with a rusty creak. I peered out into the hallway and could see a police officer standing in a doorway down the hall with his dog by his side. It must be that room.
I led my own dog down the dark hallway toward the site of the murder. The officer in the doorway nodded at me and our dogs regarded each other as I passed into the room. Another officer was standing at a corner of the room taking notes on her clipboard. The bed was at the center of the room, and the dead body was splayed out on top of it, with a large dark-red blood spot beneath it. She had dark skin and glittery makeup, and she wore jeans and a white jacket—the same woman I spoke with outside the apartment complex. And at her side on the bed surrounding her body were an envelope and dead aquarium fish, seven in total.
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