The Fence

Yes yes. It's been a long time since I posted. My dreams became pretty infrequent and erratic. >:

But this one was so clear and strange, I really need to put it down.

And on a side note, I lost my lucidness, or most of it.



It started off with me at school. I distinctly remember it being highschool, but the location was the elementary school I went to as a little kid. Derek was there too, along with lots of other people I've known throughout my time in school. It seemed like I was having nice, regular school days. Having classes with my friends and Derek, herpderping around on lunch breaks (for some reason I remember there being no rule against smoking on campus, hahah), having my dad pick me up in his Kia after school. Just good old highschool days.

There were two girls who existed in real life outside this dream, Lisa and Alicia, and they were in junior high with me- I distinctly recall not liking them very much, even though they weren't outright jerks to me most of the time. They were just those sort of girls at the top of the 'popularity food chain,' they had a legion of boys with a handful or equally-prissy girls following them at all times, and pretty much ignored anyone unworthy of their attention. Right, so how is this relevant? Well, I'll get to that after this paragraph. In my dream at school, everyone knew about "the fence."

"The fence" was just a regular chain-link fence that circled around the campus down by the field, a little more than waist-high, something you could easily hop. The field itself was just like the one at my real life elementary school. A few wide acres of grass for playing sports and stuff on, then in the farthest corner away from where anything of interest was, it tapered off into thick forest. The fence only allowed a few yards of forest onto the campus, and the fence actually made a corner in this forest area (the campus being rectangular-shaped). But beyond it you could see it stretched on for miles on the right side of the corner, and on the left, there was an innocent-looking state park. Another field, a walkway path, some benches, etc. It was all fairly normal.

But everyone in school knew you didn't go near The Fence, not that part anyway. Nobody did. It was all the way across that damn field, anyway, which took half of your break to get across. But I had seen Alicia and Lisa with their legion of popular kids running across the field at every break they could, even after school, to go to that area of the fence. It struck me as really weird, since they were just a bunch of shallow idiots; what would they be doing in the woods by the edge of the campus?

At lunch break, I was standing in line with Derek at the cafeteria. I was bored of how long the line was, so I told him I'd be back and went to have a smoke. A kid I used to be good friends with in junior high in real life, Cagney, was sitting reading where I was smoking. I said hey to him, and he just gave me a weird look. I kept trying to engage him in conversation, but then what appeared to be his exact duplicate walked by me and sat beside him. I was thoroughly confused, but not freaked out.. just confused. I shrugged that off (oh, dream logic) and decided I'd walk across the field to see what the snooty kids were up to by the fence.

Standing there smoking, with a cheeky grin on my face, I just watched them. Nothing really important seemed to be going on, not to me, anyway. Alicia and Lisa themselves were talking with their friends, while some of the guys were standing guard by breaks in the fence that people could walk through. I walked along the side of the fence, away from the people, until I thought of what to say. As I approached Alicia, I said this exact phrase: "Hey, why do you guys have this little monopoly over the fence? I mean, if you're just hurrying here every day to keep watch on some weed you planted here or something, I'll totally become a buyer for you guys." It seemed logical to me, anyway; what else would popular kids be doing, hurrying to some thick forest all the time and just hanging out and standing guard by it? It must've been weed.

But Alicia just smiled at me, saying cordially, "Actually, it's nothing to do with that. Why don't you throw your cigarettes and lighter away?"

I was confused, again. So I asked her why would I do that.

She said in a sort of enigmatic way, "We're protecting nature."

It was downright weird. Since when did snooty kids care about that, and talk like they were some psychedelic hippies...? I kind of took a look around and started walking along the fence, noticing the park beyond it. I wanted to figure out what she meant, sort of, before I left. "Ohh, I get it," I had began to say with a grin again, "You guys are getting extra credit for keeping the park clean. Biology class, right?"

She didn't answer, she was still standing where she had been before. I turned to leave back toward the field, but suddenly I was tackled by two dudes. It seemed they had a lot more people in their group than I had determined; they were familiar faces, but people I had never really gotten to know. But anyway, I was facedown in the ground as these two guys beat the living crap out of me. After a while I was rolled onto my back, and some complete stranger had approached. While these dudes were holding me down on my back, this new person--an adult, wearing a bandanna over the lower part of his face, took out a lighter identical to mine. I had forgotten that my pack and my lighter were in my hand still. He started flicking the lighter on, trying to burn my arms that were being held down. I was trying to kick and flail, and I was certainly screaming because I was scared as hell. I kept screaming, "Don't burn me! Don't burn me!"

He had the same calm, dreamy tone of voice that Alicia had. It was like they were all possessed or something, or knew something I didn't, with that kind of voice. He said, "You need to feel the pain and mutilation of a burn the same way a forest on fire does."

I frantically started to babble, saying something like, "No, no! I know what it's like! Look at my thumb, I have a scar from when I burnt it on the oven!" But he ignored me. I kept snuffing the flame out by pressing my arm all the way against the lighter--it seemed this guy didn't really know how common Bic lighters work--that is, when you cover the hole where the butane comes out, the flame is snuffed completely. He kept flicking it on over and over, though, undaunted by me putting it out. And his determination was frightening.

Eventually I remembered the pack and lighter in my other hand. I threw them as best as I could, and the man stopped trying to burn me. The other dudes let me go, too, and I was scared beyond belief. I started to run as fast as I could away from them, but the forest seemed deeper now. I realized, that's why they had done that to me; when Alicia told me to get rid of my cigarettes, she really meant it. She was the one who told these people to hurt me, because I had not thrown them when she asked.

I ran as fast as I could out of those woods, with vaguely-familiar faces of the people I went to school with, but were aligned to these girls, watching me from every corner and tree. When I finally made it to the tree, I sped across that field lightning fast. I knew I had only escaped because they had let me. But for some reason.. I really wanted my goddamned cigarettes back.

By the time I got back to the cafeteria and found Derek, I was shaking uncontrollably, stuttering, and just overall not myself. I looked like I had seen a ghost by the frightened way I was acting. I pulled Derek aside and told him what had happened, also expressing my new-found hatred for "those goddamned kids" after all that, and said I wanted to get my pack and lighter back. He didn't think it was a very good idea, and mentioned maybe I had just pissed them off with the comment about them covertly growing drugs or something. So he insisted on going himself to retrieve my stuff. I told him to stay as far away from the fence as he could.

I secretly followed him to the location I had just escaped from. I was terrified that these people would do something to him, that he would never return from the forest and it'd be all my fault. So I watched behind a tree as Derek went right in the midst of them, not really seeing any of them--because this time, all the dudes were in trees, or hiding behind trees, and they looked ready to attack. When Derek stooped to get my pack, a kid high up in a tree stood up on his branch--he had a bunch of heavy rocks, and was lifting one to drop right on his head. I yelled at Derek to watch out from above; he managed to miss the rocks this kid was dropping, but a few other guys with bows and spears and heavy sticks noticed me. And made the connection that Derek was here because of me, and that I had just come back after having a severe warning beaten into me. It was evident from the weapons they had and their numbers that I was either not coming out alive this time, or at least not leaving the way I had came.

There were a lot of them, now. They had easily captured and restrained both me and Derek. These guys all acted together, knowing the same purpose and everything; it was clear they had someone giving them orders. Derek and I were thrown in a ditch near the fence itself. Alicia and Lisa came and were frantically yelling at the guys who had thrown us there, "No, no! They can't be within ten feet of it. They're like NINE feet away from the fence, get them farther! They can't be this close!" It was weird, as if the fence was some drastically important thing to them.

I kept quiet. I just didn't want to make things worse. I had been here earlier while some psychopath tried to burn me, so I wasn't saying a damned word. But Derek hadn't been here before or witnessed the crazy shit these dudes did. He asked "Why? What's so special about the fence?" We both got the crap beaten out of us for that. And then we got an answer afterward. We were pulled up, dragged out of the ditch, and held up so we could watch Alicia and Lisa walking through a break in the fence. And they disappeared, just like that, as soon as they passed through it. Like some sort of rift.

As scared as I was, I really wanted to know how the hell that happened. Nothing was happening to us now, just an eerie sort of waiting--and then the girls came back, said something quietly to someone near them, and whatever they'd said was spread to the guys holding us from running. They kept us restrained and guided us along the ditch, on some kind of specific, unseen pathway to the break in the fence. I heard many people saying in the same dreamlike-voices, "You want to see what's beyond the fence so bad?" over and over.

Derek and I were thrust through the break in the fence. There was a bright light that flashed over everything. We were then right on the other side, just how it looked, except it was much darker. It looked like it was night here, and everything was in an eerie shade of purple, constantly shifting as if from a heat-wave effect. I just stood there, alone with Derek, shivering from how unreal it was--and to make things even worse, the trees all started to grow eyeballs. It was horrific, each tree would have a random number of differently-sized eyeballs creaking into existence, swiveling around, then laying their gaze on us. And we then heard something that made an enormous sound, like a creature that must have been some sort of gigantic thing. It sounded far off, and I could hear the trees in the distance falling as whatever-it-was moved around. It did sound as if it were quite far away, still, so Derek and I figured we ought to get the hell out of this place before it got here. But the break in the fence behind us was gone all of a sudden. The fence was solid. And for some reason, it hadn't occurred to us to just jump it right then and there (again- dream logic). The gigantic whatever-it-was sounded very, very close now. Impossibly close.

We could see the tops of trees crashing to the ground as something that must've been 500 feet tall approached us. We could only see the immediate lower part of it: giant, filthy hooves covered in dirt and grime, and slimy, scaly red skin on its legs. All of this was enough to scare the living fuck out of both Derek and I, so by now, we realized, we had better jump that damned fence. And we did not hesitate to do so. We dove over that fence, back into our "dimension" or whatever.. and just ran. We didn't even stop to get our bearings. We didn't want those crazy bastards tossing us back to the devil himself. So we ran through the woods as if we were being chased, but we didn't rightly know if we were. I had to pause and scramble to get over a huge pile of branches that had been cut and stacked in my way, and when I looked behind me after I had gotten over it, one of the dudes who had captured me before was laughing at me. "I was hoping to slow you down with that trap!" he had called to me. So that confirmed that they didn't want us to leave--and that only made me go faster to get farther away from these lunatics.

Derek and I made it back across the field and to the area where the buildings was. It was already the end of the school day; we had been down there the whole time we were supposed to be in classes, but we didn't care at this point. Now what had occurred to me before when I had returned to the cafeteria had happened to Derek. We was just as frightened and shook-up as I was; we both were now. We just huddled there shaking, unable to speak, still trying to make sense of what we had gone through. The whole trip into hell, or whatever it was (it certainly seemed like hell--a dimension of pure fear, and eyeballs, and a goddamned giant goat thing!), had sort of changed us. As our friends came around asking why we hadn't been in class, where we had been, we couldn't answer. We just continued to look entirely lost and frightened, making our way to the parking lot to find my dad's car and get the hell out of there.



...Yeah, shit was super weird.