This Is Not A Place Of Honor

- Dreams of the Beyond -

I don't know if anyone else experienced this, but since I started doing zonex, I've started dreaming about the zones a lot.

Sometimes I'm on top of the hill at Destiny again, sometimes I'm down in Nevada at Eureka. Once I was even there during the Trinity Test, where it all began. I've started a dream journal for them, and I seem to have them once a week on average.

Even before I started zonex I still had the occasional zone dream though. I think they started back when I first learned about the Beyond in middle school. I remember being in 6th grade science, and we had an entire section about it. They told us a bit about the Beyond and its history.

They used the more scientific term Metaspace, of course, as though most 6th graders would understand it all enough for a test. You probably remember what they said. "Metaspace has nothing in it. It doesn't have space or distance. It may not make sense to us, but it still follows rules!" Of course, if any of that was fully true, exotic physicists would be out of a job.

Some of the other students didn't care that much, but I was hooked. I needed to learn more. So, in my free time I read about it at the school and city libraries. It was confusing, of course, but so intriguing at the same time. The dreams started not long after, and they've never really gone away.

The first dream that I really remember was kind of weird. I was standing in an EZ, I don't think it was really any one specifically. I looked ahead of me and I saw the Beyond. But, instead of looking like it does in person, it looked like a black sphere.

The sphere grew and shrunk away from me, erratically. I stood there just starting at it, until the world fell away and it was just it, me, and a white void. Then, it grew, and it grew, until I was swallowed up in it. I woke up in a cold sweat, and I didn't go back to sleep. I think I missed school the next day because of it.