There is total blackness. Not like, the lights are off in your room blackness; utter, complete, all-encompassing blackness. Envision a piece of black construction paper. Got it? That's not black. Turn off all the lights and close your eyes, and stare at the back of your eyelids. That's not black either. We are talking, total absence of any particle remotely resembling something that might have once encountered light. A concrete bunker with walls eighteen feet thick, buried under four miles of dirt with nothing connected to it but earth, and you are inside it. It is black.

And as you float about in this pure blackness, this void where there could be anything and yet you sense that there is nothing, you are suddenly aware that you are in the driver's seat of a car. Now remember, there is no light, but you can clearly see the car. There is no light source, and this is very hard to envision. It's like being inside a painting of a very realistic car, but with no shadow and no light. You can see all things clearly, there's the steering wheel, and the speedometer, and the drive shift, and the pedals if you look under the steering column. It's a little bit like everything having its own internal illumination.

And as you are sitting in the driver's seat, you look out through the windshield at the black outside, and you wonder just where the hell you are. And then you realize that you are moving, although nothing around you indicates it. The speedometer registers at its maximum speed of 80 mph. You are pressing the gas firmly to the floor, with your hands folded neatly in your lap. You have no idea which direction you are going, if you're going straight or curving wildly or zooming about madly in a circle in this weird lightless place where everything is visible without a source of illumination. You don't know whether you're going up as if on a mountain road, down as though on a steep slope, or flat as if on a wide plain.

As you are staring about, a ribbon of light appears in front of the car. It is straight and heads off away from you into the infinite distance, is the width of a regular one lane road, and illuminates the car on the bottom (you can see it when you poke your head out the window, all of which happen to be open, which would make you wonder about air except that you haven't died of asphyxiation yet, and so you continue on) but nothing else.

You begin to be interested in the car, and take a look around. It's a two door. The interior is beige, and the exterior is beige too. It's got bad plastic that's cracked, such is found in older Volvos. The seats are cloth covered, and that's worn out in places too. The radio is old, and only tunes in to AM, without a cassette deck. The headlights are off, but you suspect that, had they been on, nothing would have looked different. You look in the back seat and are extremely surprised to note that there is a dog napping there. He is a medium sized dog, with longish brown and white fur, like a Collie (really like Lassie). He is whuffling in his sleep, and his paws are twitching. It's funny. The car is clean, and the floormats have very little dirt on them.

Back outside the car, you think you are still zooming along the ribbon of light. You're not really sure, since it never changes, but since you're still firmly flooring the gas, you believe that you're moving. You suspect that the ribbon is going straight and flat, but again since it never changes, you don't really know.

It's very quiet, except for the dog's whuffling in the back. You decide to try the radio. You push the power button and move the tuner back and forth along the entire spectrum. At the very lowest frequency, you can faintly but clearly hear Bohemian Rhapsody. You start nodding your head and bouncing and waving your arms with the music. Then you start singing along. You sing louder. You sing louder still, and increasingly out of tune. Eventually your warblings wake up the dog. He says, "Hey, loser, cut the racket!" You stop dead. Slowly you turn around to look in the back seat. He is lying there with his head on his paws, looking annoyedly at you. "Your voice is just exactly like dumping salt on a bloody wound and scrubbing vigorously with some bleach and sandpaper." You shudder violently as you imagine this, then manage to stammer out a question about how the dog can talk, and where in tarnation are you? He sighs, which you wouldn't have thought possible on a creature without lips except that he just did it. He gets up and climbs over the center console into the passenger seat, but says no more. You get bored and look around, then scan the radio stations again until you figure there's nothing on there but white noise, so you shut it off.

By now you really have to pee. You've been sitting in the car for a couple of hours and your right leg is kind of cramping from pushing the gas pedal into the floor for so long. So you decide to ask the dog if there's anywhere you can get out, and dammit, where are we? He doesn't answer, though, so you're left to find out on your own. You go to open the door but find that the handle is broken. So you reach out the window and open it from the outside, putting one foot out the door.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," says the dog. You look back at him, one foot hanging out and scraping the ribbon of light. Your foot kind of sinks into it a little bit, with the stuff piling around your foot. It's like dragging something through sand. You question the dog as to why not, but he just begins to lick his paws. Suddenly, off in the distance to the left, a dim point of light appears. It's really weird looking because you're so used to just seeing blackness out there.

"Well, that's it. We're done for," says the dog. You pull your foot out of the ribbon of light and close the door. You ask the dog what it the point of light is, and where you are. He says, "It's an energy sucking creature that's infinitely powerful, and it wants to eat us." Your head twitches slightly. You notice that the light is growing larger and brighter, although it's not illuminating anything. You can feel butterflies in your stomach and adrenaline in your blood. You grab the steering wheel and crouch over it, narrowing your eyes and pushing harder on the gas. The light grows. You narrow your eyes some more and lick your lips. The light is almost upon you. You clench your teeth. The light splits in two vertically and one half goes on one side of the car, and the other half on the other side. You suddenly jam on the brakes. The light goes flying away forward up the ribbon of light, since it had matched speed with you and didn't slow down when you violently braked. The dog flies out the window. You have a brief second to reflect upon the wisdom of safety belts before the car twists out of control and heads off the ribbon of light. Looking out the rear window you can see the ribbon going away upward, with the light monster off in the distance. You stick your head out the window and scream loudly.

Out of nowhere the blackness that you've been engulfed in for so long suddenly fills with points of light, just like stars. With your head still out the window, you shout, "My God! It's full of stars!" You scream as you float about in the star-filled void. You can no longer see the light ribbon or the light monster. It's just stars, stars, and stars.

And then the car is gone. You're free floating. Your clothes billow out around you and your hair waves about. Your arms float up and your legs spread apart. You keep screaming.

A cold sweat comes over you and you begin to thrash wildly around, feeling constricted even though your clothes are hardly touching you. You can't breathe. There's something all around you, tying you up. Then sight disappears and you still can't breathe.

You wake up with a huge gulp of air and flop back on your bed, tossing the sheets off the side and lying still until you stop breathing quickly and your heart slows down to normal speed. You look out the open window and feel the cool summer breeze blow over you. The clock reads 2:14. You sigh and think about dreams for awhile until you become sleepy again. You roll over and fall asleep again.

• Visions Past
• Tables tutorial
• Image
• Rightness
• Fixed the pages so that they work in the midnight hour.