DREAM WORLD
DANIELLE FRANCES DUCREST

Disclaimers: Highlander belongs to Davis/Panzer Productions, Rysher Entertainment, and Gaumont Télèvision. The Matrix belongs to the WB and the Wachowski Brothers. Any copyright infringements were not intended. This story was written for entertainment and not for profit.

Spoilers: Spoilers are for The Matrix.

Summary: Methos dreams of another, frightening world.

*****

I don't know how long I've been having the dreams. My guess would be for at least a century, maybe longer. Every time I wake up from another one, I feel myself doubting that the waking world truly is the waking world. The world I see in my dreams always seems so real, so true.

I don't always dream about that other place, but when I do, my mind is filled with vivid images, as vivid as if I was actually there. The images I see are scattered and out-of-sequence, but I've managed to organize them into three groups.

The earliest scenes are of a futuristic world that is a little more advanced than the twentieth century. Everyone is celebrating something. It is a planet-wide event that dwarfs New Years celebrations. I see huge and small contraptions made of metal, and I somehow recognize these as androids and robots.

The next group of images depict chaos and destruction. The androids and robots appear to have artificial intelligence and are steadily taking over the entire planet. Humans scream, whole cities are burned to crisps. I see a group of government officials, in a last-ditch effort to save the human race, use a new weapon to alter natural weather patterns, creating an eternal cloud cover that would separate Earth from the sun's warmth and hopefully stop the machines, whose source of energy was the sun.

My dreams haven't revealed what happened to Earth directly after that, but several times I have had more dreams that are even more disturbing than the others. I can sense that these dreams take place several decades after the others. In these dreams, I fall asleep and "wake" up submerged in some sort of warm, thick red liquid. I am completely naked and metal hoses are attacked to my arms, legs, back, and scalp through bits of metal that are attached to my flesh. The hoses make it difficult to move, but I manage it somehow. A metal oxygen mask of some sort, which I can feel lodged deeply within my throat, makes it possible for me to breathe.

I am lying down and am unable to stand up. In some of the dreams I manage to maneuver myself to one of the transparent sides of my prison and look out. It is difficult to see outside, but I can make out fully-grown humans, just as naked as I am, lying with eyes closed in other tubs just like mine.

I wake up not long after this to find myself back in my bed in my Paris apartment. I am always shaking when I escape one of these dreams, and it takes more beers than unusual before its alcoholic effects calm my nerves.

I hate these dreams. I hate the feeling I have, right after I wake up, that I need to get back to that dream, to escape that tub as if it were real. But how could it be real?

I am five thousand years old. The older memories might be a bit fuzzy in my mind, but I'm not senile. My memory isn't bad enough to forget important things like machines taking over the world.

No matter how many times I tell myself this, I still can't shake off the feeling that I am living in a dream world that I can't escape, and that I am really trapped in a tub full of red liquid.

THE END

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