He was having the dream again.
His eyes opened. It was blurry, as if he were underwater, and dark. Not completely dark, there were lights flickering in the distance, like a lightning storm at sea. Light enough for him to see by. There was something covering his mouth, like a scuba mask. He was naked, but not cold. Floating, suspended in a tank or pod of clear liquid that wasn't water. His arms, his chest, his legs, where he could see them, were pierced at regular intervals with cables, sockets erupting from his flesh like stalks of some parasitic plant, born of metal, not biology.
There was a flash, bright, and a crackling sound, like an electric discharge. But no pain. He realized the flashes were flickering, repeating, out there, outside of his...tank? Pod? It was not boxy, not square as you would expect, but curved, like some techno-nightmare growth plucked from the dreams of H.R. Geiger, black below, transparent above, save for the struts and spars of its frame. There was nothing to see but darkness, and in the flashes, glimpses of other pods, above and to either side.
The loudest noise was the crackling of the lightning, but there were other noises: the gurgling of liquid circulating; the throb of pumps; the hum of machinery; the thump of other heartbeats, slow from sleep. His own heart, beating, rapid with fear.
At the same time, he knew he was asleep in bed. Wake up, he told himself. Nothing changed. If anything, his bed seemed farther away, the dream more real.
He wasn't sure what frightened him more: the incomprehensible sameness of it all, the darkness, the strangeness, or his feeling weak and helpless as a baby, trapped, with nowhere to go. The first time he'd had the dream, he hadn't been able to move at all. Every time he came back to this darkness, he tried a little harder, fought against it with more success. But it still scared the hell out of him.
A recurring dream was supposed to tell you something. But if this was a message, it was written in Greek. He should tell Sandburg. But he never remembered.