Sometimes I have really weird dreams. Writing short stories about them seemed like a fun idea.

The wi-fi isn’t working.

I’m at work, and the wi-fi isn’t working. An internationally-renowned research institute, and the wi-fi isn’t working. Something’s not right here.

What is it giving me this sense of unease? Why does it feel like…something’s happened? Something’s happened outside, in the rest of the world?

Other people seem to have sensed it too. People are scrabbling about, trying to figure out what’s going on.

A group of people want to go down a floor in the lift.

the earliest of it I can was that everyone was at Sanger - non-Sanger people too and the wifi wasn’t working properly but it was clear that something was wrong more globally we were all inside, and people were trying to figure out what was going on (when I say globally, I mean like there had been some kind of world catastrophe) at some point some people I knew wanted to go down in a lift but I told them no, it’s unsafe. the lift isn’t stable enough one of them was I think one of my old coworkers, and she had a child in a pram and I said the pram’s going to be way too heavy but she went into the lift and sure enough the lift dropped down like half a meter because the cable was so loose and she was asking me to pass the pram, but I refused, because there was no say they were going to be able to get back out so they climbed out, but she was so furious so furious I had separated her from her child and I was just about to try and empathise with her when the dream skipped forward and I was in the car, at Harome, with mum driving, pulling out of the driveway. but I was sitting in the back seat, like there was some distance between us. like I didn’t deserve to sit next to her somehow it was night time and she said, “let me show you how the world got like this” apparently it was some time after this catastrophe had occurred - some time far in the future, but where its effects were still felt we got to the gate on the driveway, and she said, “Last time Sid was visiting he told me not to budge from the car between the house and the gate. He saw a dog around.” I was about to get out of the car to open the gate (which had been fortified, it looks more like a port cullis now) when I saw this “dog” in the mirror but it wasn’t like a normal dog it was this…thing, some kind of mutation it carried itself like a gorilla, on all fours, supporting itself with its arms at the front it had grey fur and it’s head…wasn’t like a normal head it was kind of…wishbone shaped and at that moment I saw this dog pounding some other animal into the ground with its powerful arms and proceeding to pummel it and there were lots of smaller versions of this “dog” around too running by galloping on all fours, including their arms mum said, “God, isn’t it hideous?” I locked all the doors because I was terrified and somehow mum managed to get past the gate and onto the road but Harome was now part of a city we were straight onto a huge road with massive houses either side and electronic advertisements strewing the space above the road we came to a red light, and mum asked me, “do you want to stop for the red light?” I was so confused I couldn’t formulate an answer in time, so she just kept on going and kept on going through another one and I remember thinking: did the British like rules so much simply because it was forced on them? now that there is no government (because of the apocalypse?) to enforce anything, do people just do whatever they want after all? the dream skipped forward a bit again and…I’m not sure whether we were still in the car but we had arrived at a building that was obviously some kind of centre of science because it had…great spiralling arcs continually materialising out of it and receding again clouds spontaneously forming around it shapes popping in and out of existence I think I was now alone and a narration had started from somewhere it was talking about the history of some branch of science I was unfamiliar with, something to do with genetics but it sounded as though the guy narrating it knew what he was talking about, so I decided to trust it now I was running through some kind of parks where there were more of these buildings with spontaneously changing geometric shapes apparently I hadn’t got to where it was I would learn what happened to the world yet? and this narration was saying that they came to understand more about genetics, more about its function and that…there was some link to the rest of the world that we found out genetics controlled the rest of the world, too that we could make the wind as broad or as flat as we wanted at that moment I heard the lumbering, galloping gait of a “dog” so I had to duck behind some bushes while it went past after it had gone, I started running again, but I’d missed some of the narration and the last thing I heard it say was something like “we found the wind was alive, too” and something about how we used all this knowledge to try and reshape the world as some kind of carnival, to make it more fun. but in the end, it turned into a nightmare instead I wanted to rewind it to hear that last part again and by this time I’d reached some kind of indoor refectory so I asked someone and she showed me how on her “phone” (which looked like a Sony walkman, actually) you could just rewind it apparently the narration had been come from one of these things I had and although I didn’t directly see it in my dream, I knew it was there, and I could adjust its controls unseen but I ended up fast forwarding instead so I was trying to get back to exactly where I was but then I started to, much against my will, fade out of the dream state and woke up, thoroughly confused and haunted by the image of those “dogs”