Monday, March 16, 2009

Supermassive Black Hole


Last night dreamed big again. I don't remember what I started out doing, something social but boring I figure. It must have been boring, because somehow I got detached from the globe and started drifting out into space. I picked up speed the farther I went, and wrapped my arms around my head to ward off all the planets and stars I was bumping into along the way. There were lots of glimmering clouds and arms of galaxies with stars and all sorts of stuff in them, and as I flew by I got to thinking I must be on some sort of "Powers of Ten" journey and would soon be able to see the whole universe before I drifted off into infinite space. I didn't get that far, but far enough out to see a whole bunch of individual galaxies. Many of the spiral ones had rays and curtains of light refracting out in all colors from supermassive black holes at their cores. As I passed through one of these curtains/columns of iridescent light I felt a tug from the immense gravitational hurricane at the center and started to worry. The pull of the black hole was such that it sent ripples and distortions through all of the surrounding light, and felt like a current pulling towards a maelstom in the middle of the sea. So I started to swim, and barely reached the other side of the light/rainbow/gravity column before I would've hit the event horizon. I kept drifting on, a little shook up, knowing that with all these supermassive black holes floating around and me with neither rudder nor engine, there was only so long I could last. I hit the next gravity column (which was really quite beautiful, like rainbows and the aurora borealis - they all were that way), felt that massive tug and thought that was it. But when I got to the event horizon, the great heavy darkness in front of me dissolved and changed, and I stood up on the floor of a room covered and lined with old brown paper sacks. There was some kind of square black processing machine (like the x-ray machines you put your stuff through in an airport) on a long fold-up table that was slowly sucking in and digesting one long sheet of this rainbow material, construction paper or something, although nothing was coming out on the other side. There were two or three people in the room: Krystin and Allison were there, and maybe one or two others. I think I was slightly annoyed, or just puzzled - I don't remember, because then I woke up.

1 comment:

Kevin Dolan said...

S. Michael Wilcox has a talk out now where he describes a similar dream, except it ends with him meeting an angel, instead of... a rainbow compressor machine?

If that helps.