Ramon Atila’s DREAM JOURNAL #7

Dream Journal #7

I am a connoisseur of my own dread. In a recurring chamber of my subconscious, I find myself standing in the stark, silent lobby of a modern skyscraper, a temple of commerce and order defined by its three-story walls of flawless glass. This is not a place of shelter in the traditional sense; it is a diorama, a grandstand for a performance I did not choose to attend. Through this immense, transparent pane, I watch as the ocean, in the form of a mountain of churning, grey-green water, methodically overtakes the city. This dream is not a narrative of survival, but a meditation on witnessing, a profound and terrifying exploration of the space between safety and cataclysm, where the only true action is the act of seeing.

The lobby itself is a character of profound contradiction. It is the apotheosis of human control and architectural hubris—clean lines, polished stone, a cavernous space meant to impress with its stability and permanence. Yet, its primary feature, these vast sheets of glass, is also its most profound vulnerability. The glass represents the thin, illusory barrier between the ordered world we have constructed and the chaotic, primordial forces that underpin it. It is the screen on which my deepest anxieties are projected, a high-definition display of the world’s undoing. I am not outside in the chaos, nor am I safely hidden in a dark, interior bunker. I am in the liminal zone, protected yet exposed, a spectator in the front-row seat of the apocalypse.

The tsunami itself does not arrive with a cinematic roar, but with a dreadful, inexorable silence. The water is not a wave in the traditional sense; it is a new landscape, a slow-motion avalanche that swallows the city whole. My dread is not a spike of panic, but a rising tide that mirrors the water level outside. It is a cold, sinking realization of absolute powerlessness. I watch as the city’s icons—the smaller buildings, the streetlights, the familiar geometry of downtown—are erased, one by one, beneath the surface. Then come the cars. This is the dream’s most chilling detail: the sight of sedans and SUVs, these symbols of individual agency and daily routine, transformed into weightless, swimming objects, carried past my window like dead fish in a current. They are coffins for absent drivers, a silent testament to the obliteration of the mundane.

My dream-self knows the logical course of action. I must run. I must ascend the staircase core, climb to the fourth, the fifth, the tenth floor, to outpace the rising water. This imperative is a cold, hard fact in my mind. Yet, my feet remain rooted. I am paralyzed not by fear, but by a macabre, overwhelming fascination. I am a witness, and to turn away would be to abandon my post, to fail in the only duty this dream has assigned me. This is the core of the dream’s meaning: the conflict between the instinct for self-preservation and the compulsive, almost sacred, draw of the spectacle. I am documenting the end of my world, and in some terrible way, I need to see it through.

The fact that the glass never shatters is the most crucial and telling element of the entire tableau. The terror is not of being struck by breaking shards or being immediately engulfed. It is a more profound, psychological terror. It is the fear of the barrier’s inevitable failure, the certainty that at any moment, the tenuous film holding back the abyss will give way. The dread lives in that sustained moment of tension. It is the anxiety of the modern world made manifest: the looming climate catastrophe, the political instability, the pandemic—we watch these slow-motion tsunamis through the screens of our devices, safe in our lobbies, knowing the glass could break at any moment, yet mesmerized by the progression of the disaster. We scroll, we watch, we bear witness, all while the water level climbs past the markers we thought would keep us safe.

In this, my dream casts me not as a hero, but as a symptom of our time. I am the modern individual, educated about impending crises, aware of the need for urgent action, yet frozen in a state of horrified spectatorship. The skyscraper is the illusion of our insulated systems—our technology, our economies, our civil societies. The water is the raw, physical reality of a planet and a universe indifferent to those systems. My paralysis is the paralysis of a culture that is too often a witness to its own demise, finding a strange, awful beauty in the scale of the collapse.

Ultimately, the dream is not about the city drowning, but about me watching it happen. It is about the aesthetics of catastrophe. The play of light through the water, the slow, balletic tumble of the cars, the surreal silence—it is horrifyingly beautiful. This is the final, unsettling layer of the dream’s meaning. My dread is intertwined with awe. I am filled with terror, but I am also captivated. I need to run to survive, but I cannot help but stay and watch, because on some level, the witnessing is its own end. The dream forces me to confront the uncomfortable truth that we can be safe, aware, and complicit all at once, standing in our glass lobbies as the world we know is washed away, our inaction protected by a pane of glass that, for now, stubbornly, terrifyingly, holds.

AtilA