The Eternal Dreams Trilogy (Most Imaginative Setting Winner 2012)

Chapter Two: Inside the Imagination (Part 2)

At first the light overwhelmed me. My eyes just could not adjust to the brightness and a jolt of terror that I had somehow gone blind temporarily filled me. Fuzzy objects then filled my sight and as time passed, clarity returned to me. I was standing inside a circular room that had been coloured a heavenly white. Wires and machinery cluttered the room as did desks and stacks upon stacks of paper. Kanoa was standing near a monstrous blinking mechanism that lay in the center of the room.

“As if we didn’t understand this place before,” he said.

There were many gasps as everyone piled into the room. The middle of the room held the largest machine, which Kanoa was studying carefully. It resembled an hourglass; wide at the top and bottom but thinning in the middle. Many wires and cables extended from its metallic frame, which was lit up with many different coloured blinking lights. Surrounding the hourglass machine were many smaller bed-like stations. All the cables protruding from the center machine connected into these technological beds, as if it were some sort of mainframe.

The beds were tilted at an angle, facing the hourglass machine at an almost standing position. Glass bowl-like instruments were located at the head of the beds and seemed to have the purpose of being slid onto someone’s head. There were no straps on the beds and despite being made of hard, silver metal, they had thin cushioning upon their frame, suggesting that they were made with comfort in mind.

The tables at the far end of the room were fortified by massive amounts of papers and documents. Some had overflowed onto the floor and some stacks had fallen on their side. Clearly a great deal of work and research was being done before the place had been abandoned; if it had been abandoned.

I could not see any specific light source and yet the room remained painfully bright. It was as if the mere white tone of the room was illuminating it. I hadn’t realized it at first, but the center of the room seemed to be slanted lower from the outskirts of it. The ceiling too seemed to become higher the closer I became to the middle. I wasn’t sure if the orb structure of the room was an illusion created by its colouring or by the machines orientation within the room, but it certainly felt as though we were standing inside a tiny world within our world.

“HUGO INDUSTRIES,” Osias read aloud. He had walked over to the paper area of the room and was reading a document he had picked up off the desk. “Where your greatest dreams are our best intentions.”

“So this place is owned by some sort of company,” I theorized. “Any idea what they made or why they were here?”

“Well I am just searching through all this paperwork,” Osias said, his thoughts clearly focused on the documents, his eyes scanning them intently. “So far all I can tell is that they were onto something big regarding sleep technology.”

“Sleep technology?” Cora inquired.

I walked over to Osias and began searching through the many piles of paper. There were many drawings of different machines that resembled the ones now in the room. Some were of images of the castle and some were of the surrounding area. One sketch even looked eerily similar to our own campsite.

“Yeah it appears that they were working on some kind of process in which they could manipulate dreams to make them more vivid and real,” Osias explained.

More sketches presented themselves to me. Many of them were of things that were not of this world; people flying over oceans, men and women standing atop of mountains and one was of a man who appeared to be walking across the surface of the Sun.

“What does Pons mean?” Adora asked. I looked over and saw that she was inspecting one of the beds. She seemed to be reading a word on the side that I wasn’t familiar of.

“What’s that?” Osias asked excitedly as he rushed over to her. I could tell that all this technology and research was whirling within his mind.