heaven and hell

It's strange what exhaustion can do to the mind and body.
After 10 hours of solid drinking on Thursday night and a mere 3 hours of sleep, yesterday I was not quite on top form on the work front.

Thinking that it was probably best to go home and relax, I passed up the opportunity to keep on drinking and went home - only to end up staying up until 1am watching Dogma. What a brilliant film - Kevin Smith is a genius. And hilarious to boot.

Anyhow, I woke up this morning from a dream which started off as a horrible nightmare and ended as a strange fantasy...

The dream starts off with 4 people in a car (myself included) driving to a cottage in the countryside for a short break. The car is absolutely full to the brim with stuff, as if we were moving house rather than taking a holiday. When we get there, the owners of the cottage welcome us and help us settle in before disappearing off to wherever they live. The cottage was nice enough - but it wasn't long before we (I), discovered that it was haunted, and the multiple ghosts that inhabited this small house all manifested themselves to me in a way that was extremely disconcerting. Like when you're living in student digs and you get up in the middle of the night to visit the toilet, still feeling drowsy and sleepy, and you cross paths with someone else on the way there. Only in my dream, they were ghosts - a middle aged couple, an old man or woman, and a young woman that I never saw. The dream picked up pace and came to a head when one morning, the other 3 people in my party all saw something that made them scream. Petrified, I somehow knew what they had seen but didn't know what it looked like, and didn't really want to see it. It was a small bundle, with a 'child' inside. I could see it glowing even though I was in a completely different room, and it was evil. At this point, we all got our things together and left the cottage as fast as we could.

The dream continued on as we carried on driving, we ended up in a small town on the coast. It was very American, wide roads, deserted. Our car stopped, and the driver got out. I looked out of the window and saw that we were stopped outside a boarded up shop with the words, 'oil and gas' sprayed onto the brick wall in black paint.
As the driver (the identity of the people in my dream is pretty irrelevant) unscrewed the petrol cap, he was suddenly surrounded by 3 guys, dragged off and punched and kicked. We stared on aghast, but before we could do anything, the car started rolling. As if by magic, the road was suddenly full of oncoming traffic and we had to take the wheel to avoid crashing into these cars coming on to us at full speed. The next thing I knew, we were parked on a grassy verge and a guy hands us flyer.(the driver was back in the driving seat) I saw the most beautiful beach I had ever seen. The sand was golden, massive rolling sand dunes with clear blue waves crashing onto them. We went back to that town - but it had changed. See, this town was so protective of it's beaches that it had employed the most amazing technology to stop people from ruining them. The whole town was shrouded by a giant hologram and only by passing some sort of test, could you see the true form of it. I walked to the seafront - it was drab and the rain was torrential. Everything was sepia and dingy. The moment I walked onto the beach, it was like walking through a mirror into paradise.

I don't remember how the dream ended. Or even if it did.