Dream Log 5: Slumcity

I am hanging out with one of my classmates that I recognize from my high school years. His place is rather nice for what it is. A living room with two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The floors are marble and the walls are white. Kind of has that classical vaporwave look with columns and stuff. I guess we were watching TV until we get bored and decide to go outside for a walk. We leave his apartment room into this large hallway that looks like nothing else but concrete. There aren’t any elevators so we take the steps down. Everything outside of my classmate’s room is nothing but brutalism out here. You’d be mistaken to confuse it for a commie block in the inside.

You wouldn’t be wrong about that assumption at all once you see it from the outside. Rather, the whole area looks like shit. It’s a mishmash of concrete slabs (All gray or brown) that soar up several stories tall with little stairways on the outside. Some of these slumpartments have little patios and open spaces on some of the floors so you could in theory have a place to hangout other than the rooms inside. You can probably grill on those things if it weren’t for the fire hazards involved with these type of buildings. In fact, some of them aren’t even made of concrete at all but scraps pieces of wood. I assume these slumpartments are the lowest quality in all of this sorry excuse of a city. The worst of the commie blocks. My classmate and I would not dare go near any of those buildings.

The roads and streets (if you can even call them that) don’t have any cars whatsoever. Just as everything else in this city, it’s all concrete. You can walk anywhere without worrying about traffic or incoming cars/bikes, but some of these “streets” are poorly maintained. Probably the most noticeable thing around are the walls. No matter where you go or where you look. Those huge concrete walls that surround this entire premise are always there. They must be there to keep something out, or to keep us all in. I am not entirely sure. Even among all this gray and turd tones, the sky is clear, blue and the sun shines all over the place with intensity like you would see in the deserts during the warmest season.

There was some commotion going on in the streets. People are fleeing away from somewhere. There is word that the area up ahead is being evacuated. I could seen from my position a block away, One of the twin slumpartment buildings is on fire. At least somewhere in the upper floors. Nobody knows how it happened but there’s a strong sense that the buildings might collapse due to the weak support structures failing as they burn. Something that I guess is expected for shitty buildings of these sorts.

My classmate and I take shelter in one of the nearby slum buildings. It’s advised to take cover in the stairway as it’s the most sturdy portion of these buildings; made with strong concrete slabs. As we wait there, someone was watching a livestream coverage of the fire on a CRT that some guy hauled somehow to these stairways. There are reports of people still trapped in the slumpartment and the area surround the disaster has been completely evacuated. It was only a matter of time before suddenly, a loud creaking noise of metal and stone completely distorts everything as the earth violently trembles, even shaking these staircases of which we shelter in. The final crash of noise (or rather two at the same time) is strong enough to crack the walls of these staircases and cause an outage of power in this building. It’s not completely pitch dark as there are slits in the walls (created by the shock of the buildings collapsing) that expose some light into these awful interiors. I think everyone here is mostly alright and not injured but something in my gut wanted me to go see the aftermath of the collapse. Without telling anyone, I make my way out of the stairway and leave this building.

Everything is filthy with debris, dirt and dust. You couldn’t see anything beyond a certain distance due to all the dust floating in the air. Somehow, I wasn’t coughing and wheezing from inhaling the dust. Very strange. As I make my way to the disaster site, I am completely caught off guard by what remains of the building. The twin slumpartment buildings are still mostly intact except for the glass windows and some of the walls on the exterior. They are lying sideways separate from each other. The smaller buildings bellow them, were completely crushed. You could almost see inside the building and staircases, most of which were pitch black. To say that the structure as a whole failed for these buildings wouldn’t be right. They were still intact and it seemed more or less like they were rooted from their base more than anything. I am not a civil engineer or architect so I can’t say for certain what even happened from their perspective. Nothing in these dreams ever make sense sometimes.

Same could be said for what I witness right after seeing the initial aftermath. Some figures are limping out from the darkness in these windows and openings of what remains of these slumpartments. How did these people even survive the collapse? Well they were certainly injured from the way they moved. Some of them wouldn’t be able to walk out though as they were several stories above street level. I didn’t really spend that much time here alone as more witnesses arrived to see the scene though I was for a bit, the first one on the scene. Eventually, emergency services such as the city patrol and fire brigade where there at last to clean this mess up once and for all. Just as they were setting up some ladders, my dream ended right there and then.

Right after I woke up from this dream. I searched the web for any incidents that could have been similar to what I seen in my dream. I didn’t see anything that resembled what happened in my dream. Maybe 9-11 but it felt nothing like that. To be honest, I am not even quite sure what to make of this dream. It could be foreshadowing something that is coming up that I wasn’t aware of, or maybe it’s a insight into an event that did happen in another dimension or timeline. It’s hard to say for certain but I really wished I had my personalized dreams back. There really wasn’t anything in this dream that was reflective of my own emotions or life apart from that cameo from one of my former classmates.

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