The people of this post-apocalyptic world didn’t remember the time before. Books had been burnt, the libraries were filled with ash. The power had gone out one night and had never come back on. The government was gone. Gangs were now the higher power.
The tribe found her in the clean white underground of a long forgotten facility. For five hundred years she had been in stasis, not that they could read that number on the pod. But the presence of humans triggered the machine to release her from her slumber. Her father, a scientist, had put her in the nuclear-powered pod when he heard books were being destroyed and professionals killed.
She woke to find the shocked, dirty, tribal remains of humankind. They took her into their tribe out of curiosity. Her teeth were so straight from braces, her hair so clean from the shampoo she had used five hundred years before. She smelled so different from anything in the world now.
She was dismayed by the people’s loss of all the old world knowledge, and their reluctance to create new things because the gangs would find out and raid the tribe. So when she found a rusted bike at the bottom of a dried up creek she reconstructed it and showed the people what could be done. She showed them farming techniques and the basic medicine she had learnt in the time before. She recited poetry. She told them the human race has once sped across the earth faster than any animal, and flew higher, further than any bird. She told them there were human footprints on the surface of the moon.
But now wasn’t the time for cars and planes and rockets. Now the tribes needed weapons to get rid of the oppressive gangs. They would need to travel to the fabled underground library that might just still exist and acquire the knowledge that would allow them to bring the knowledge back.


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Most of my dreams are set in the post-apocalyptic landscape. This means each action carries more weight, the relationships between the people are amplified without the extraneous variables of the civilised world. I think this dream is an expression of an anxiety about how books are often taken for granted, and how there are those who wouldn’t care less if books were destroyed. Many times I’ve heard people say, ‘I just don’t read,’ and it unnerves me, and I wonder about the consequences of this indifference.