Technology Disruption and Loss

I wrote this in an e-mail to Kevin.

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There was some weird apocalypse going on. I have lots of apocalypse dreams but this one was less of an adventure and just more sad.

What started happening was that people's grades started dropping. This didn't seem like a big deal at first, but then people realized that it wasn't that everyone was getting less intelligent, but that the computer systems were starting to fail. The next thing to go was the internet. Once the internet was down, nobody knew how to communicate with each other anymore. Less and less people showed up to class except for a few people. Cellphones, landlines, everything was going down, people lost contact, people panicked and ran away from home... it was pretty much like the end of the world.

I forget what happened, but either my family got caught up in the panic frenzy (some sort of mental disorder phenomenon that came along with the internet/technology outage) and ran away from home, or they had died. Anyway I started going home to an empty neighborhood and empty house every day, made my own meals and slept alone. I remember the first night I was alone and I went into the corner of the bed and rolled up in a ball to sleep, and it just felt crushingly lonely and sad.

Then I'd notice, since nobody is in my neighborhood anymore, then I could go and move into someone else's home that was more of my style and comfort! So I'd go around and pick up things that I liked... pretty much minimalistic modern furniture. 

While I was moving things around, I had a breakthrough with you. I forget how I contacted you, it was either webcam or phone or something, but for a brief moment, I could communicate with you. We quickly set up this special walkie talkie thing, that we could use to communicate and find each other in the future. But for it to work, we both needed to be on a hill and it had to be at a specific time for some reason, and if it wasn't during those exact circumstances or we'd lose contact forever. We told each other the instructions with the limited time we had and then the thing disconnected.

So, I had my walkie talkie, and you were the only person I had left from my "old life" before the apocalypse. It felt like the most important mission in the world. All I had to fix the walkie talkie and find a hill.

But, I couldn't make it work. I'd be fiddling with the inside of the walkie talkie, removing things, putting it back together, trying new batteries, but nothing could make it work. It would turn on but it couldn't get any signal from everywhere, it was just a chunk of machinery that couldn't communicate  It was so frustrating! No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't make it catch any signals. 

And then the time we set up to make the connection came, and passed. We missed it. Somehow I'd figured out that you didn't know how to set up the signal at the top of the hill, and when you finally figured it out and got it working, my walkie-talkie had run out of battery. 

Then I realized that I'd lost you forever. PROFOUND SADNESS. My whole family was missing and I didn't know where they were, they could be dead, all my friends were gone and probably crazy, and the only one left had been you and we had ONE CHANCE and we just missed each other. Without the internet, without society (no mailing system), no cellphones, it was almost impossible to find each other. In the dream, anyway. I'm sure if this happened in real life people would find a way xD

But anyway I just wandered around the post apocalyptic society, completely alone and sad. There was just this feeling of... sadness, loneliness, and remembering what it was like when I had my friends and family and it was just really sad and lonely. Mostly because I knew that I had one chance to find you and I blew it, and now I wouldn't even know if you were still alive, or you were crazy like everyone else, or dead.

After wandering around I eventually bumped into a small gathering of survivors who lived in some broken down sheds. I went in and met a couple that had a 17 year old son. Their son was now crazy from the mental disorder frenzy that went around and he was probably going to die soon, because he was so far insane that he wasn't even the same person anymore. Anyway I sat there and listened to them talk about their son as "their little one" which made me think of one particular memory about my mom, and I told them, "I still cry when I think about my mom" and the memory was her kissing my forehead and saying "you'll always be my little baby" and then I started crying really hard in my dream, and the woman in the couple hugged me and we looked at pictures.

When I left their house, I was walking away into some unknown place and the last thought on my mind was, "If only I'd gone to Avana sushi on Friday. I wonder if he would have been waiting there for me." 

THEN I WOKE UP AND I WAS SO SAD.