The Last Trump, With Birds

So I had this dream last night…

In between the usual complicated foolishness, I was birdwatching. There was a beach with a strange watery bridge over it, and on the bridge were enormous dippers (a bird) and piebald herons and other birds that probably don’t really exist. I looked around vaguely for Tina to come tell me what the birds were, because I couldn’t recognize them, and was that a swimming sparrow? Huh.

Then suddenly the Archangel Michael landed in the middle of the beach, in a glory of wings, and apparently it was the Last Judgement, the End of Days, all that good stuff.

He was accompanied by a four-winged Beast covered in eyes (because I READ the Book of Revelations at a formative age, thank you!) and an elderly, rather genial man in robes.

“Pardon,” I said to the old man in robes, “can you tell me, do archangels count as birds? Can I put them on my lifelist?”

“Sorry,” he said, “they’re not birds. But the Beast Before the Throne there is pretty close, and I think you can count him if you get a good look.”

“Thank you,” I said, training my bins on the four-winged Beast covered in eyes. “You’re the Prophet Elijah, aren’t you?”

“That’s me.”

“I should go mention this to my friends,” I said, once I’d noted the fieldmarks on the Beast.

“Oh, probably.”

I packed up my bins and went back to my friends, who were at the bar. “So, it’s the end of the world,” I said. “We might want to get out of here.”

“Can’t just yet,” said one of them, carefully weighing little metal bits into a scale. “If we leave now, there’s a chance it’ll end badly.”

“Okay,” I said, looking toward the sliding glass doors that were, for some reason, on one side of the beach, “but we shouldn’t stick around too long.”

Something that looked like a fairy jumped from an upper window and landed hard on the ground. “You should have used your wings,” I said, as he picked himself up.

“I’m trying to learn how to do without them,” he said.

“Well, I guess that’s a good skill to have. Great landing, then.”

I wandered into an elevator, where an ancient dog lay on the floor, on a filthy blanket. “Want to come with me?” I asked the dog, a very old Rottweiler/Doberman sort of dog. He sighed, heaved himself up, and came with me.

A black panther wandered down the corridor and gave me a disdainful look. The old dog growled. On the beach below, I could hear the sounds of the end of the world.

4 thoughts on “The Last Trump, With Birds

  1. tanita says:

    Yeah, I like End of Days dreams that have a narrative. I’m sure the dog on the dirty blanket is somehow Symbolic.

    I had to snicker that the beast-before-the-throne – eye-full, wingless – gets put on the bird life list. The Prophet Elijah figures this how???

  2. Wolf Lahti says:

    SIgh… I envy you your dreams.

    The most interesting one I’ve had lately was about being on an underwater archeological mission to Mars that ended up with me going back in time to the east coast of the United States in 1920 where everyone spoke with a British accent.

    —Which actually sounds a lot more interesting than it really was.

  3. Katie says:

    …The Beast explains the thing in the Time Quartet, tho… (I haven’t read the book of Revelations. Just Madeleine L’Engle.)

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