The dream has started to fade because I wasn't quick enough writing it down, but about a week ago I had my first real nightmare of 2022. Now and again I'll have a dream of apocalyptic proportions, usually involving impending doom, and very often from the sky. It can be a war breaking out, an otherworldly invasion, a satellite falling towards Earth. The most outrageous to date was an army of mecha-Nazis descending onto university campus from orbit and pulverising all the students with laser guns. My latest dream of this category did not reach the stage where chaos reigned free, but in some ways, this made it all the more stressful.
I was in the city, whether Brighton or London I couldn't say (perhaps an amalgamation of the two, or maybe somewhere else entirely), and I was sitting in a cafe trying to write my novel. The government had been particularly callous of late, doing all the usual things that make people moan such as raising taxes, removing job seeker support, cutting public sector funding, withdrawing resources from the NHS, etc. Anyway, as I do not normally take much interest in these matters, I was wholly unprepared for the news that the UK was arming for war.
This in itself would not have been a matter of immediate concern, but as public panic spread and more speeches from the Prime Minister were broadcast, I realised it was going to affect me in the worst way imaginable. Every citizen, whether eligible or no, was being compulsorily conscripted to the coming war. The government claimed that we faced a threat such as never before seen in the history of our nation. An army of automatons were on their way to annihilate us, not just to conquer, but to wipe us off the map. As the British army had been almost completely eradicated at the first encounter, they needed to swell their ranks with us civilians.
Obviously, such alarming news was not to my liking. It was plainly obvious that Boris was throwing us to our deaths. There would be no military training, no time for any of that, we were report to the nearest garrison to sign up, be issued our weapons, and deployed without further ado. Certain individuals of high rank, or those who simply curried favour with the party, were being awarded special exemption passes, and it was these that everyone now wanted to get their hands on. Chaos engulfed the streets, riots broke out, and huge bodies of civilians tried to flee overseas.
What was I to do? I had a family to think about, I had no disabilities to announce, nor loopholes to exploit, yet signing up would be suicide. Besides, everybody was being conscripted, able-bodied or not. I was unsurprised to see that the usual left-wing hand wringers had suddenly forgotten to care about the oppressed minority groups, being much too wrapped up in their own cowardice to extend sympathy and outrage elsewhere. I wandered aimlessly, doing my best to avoid the police who were rounding up unwilling conscripts just like me. 'I need to get to China', I decided, but it was too late for that.
This nightmare is a very obvious manifestation of the stress and sense of doom I have been suffering from of late. This has been triggered by more family members catching Covid, the illegal shenanigans at No. 10, bouts of self-inflicted insomnia, and the climate crisis that continues to chip away at our existence, though which is largely ignored. I would also like to blame doom scrolling before bed, and also paedophiles, because why not?
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