Until I was 24 or 25 I didn’t dream – or if I did, I never remembered them. Now I don’t remember them, but I definately know I do dream. But this weekend I had a totally bizarre dream, and afterwards I lay in that trancelike state between sleep and awake and it put upon me a strange eerie feeling, like the first time I read Bruce Sterling’s ‘The Belonging Kind’.

I was in a bar, and the bar’s layout was very detailed. It was 3 levels, and in the corner of a kind of strip-mall like buisiness space. There were empty stores and offices around it and the whole building was built in a square, with the center being an old courtyard type place, overgrown with weeds and a broken down fountain. I was looking for my daughter, and she was missing, kidnapped by unknown forces. The bar, while actually a real bar, was a gateway into another reality, another ‘here’ that had the same physical space, but was not quite ‘here’, as though it occupied some of the space between the electrons of our current ‘here’.

Rumours about how to get to the other ‘here’ circulated among the young patrons, who would go into the third floor stairwell and try to find the doorway, but few were successful, and fewer returned. I was inside, music overpowered me as I climbed a different stair to the top floor, currently unused and walked towards the fated stairwell. Two girls were running around trying to find the gate, and as I approached, they fled downstairs into the nameless security of the crowd. The bouncers and workers could see people going up to the unused third floor, but merely gave a look that conveyed dismay, uncaring and tiredness all at the same time. The music came muted through the floor and filtered up the stairwell, it’s treble bouncing off the hard wooden stairs and causing me to wince.

I walked into the third floor landing and blinked, and I was ‘here’. I immediately saw my friends, Matt and Sandra, sitting on a bench, reclining with their daughter. The smell told me that I was in the place that I was looking for, and I hoped that here I would find what I was looking for.

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