black sun

Many years ago I dreamed the sun went black. In my dream we could all see it on our TVs. We knew something had gone wrong, we knew it was imminent, and we knew it could be really bad.

We didn't expect it to go black. And when it did, the world locked down deep into buildings going down into the earth.

The poorest people lived closest to the top, always on the edge of freezing. There was no power but what could be burned. No need for refrigeration if stuff stayed frozen close enough to the surface. The wealthy disappeared way underground. They had power systems and sealed themselves behind permanently shut walls.

World politics was over. Gangs were the bosses. Schools were gone, but books were burned for fuel, so it didn't matter. Very rare expeditions looked for more in other unconnected buildings, but the cold was too bitter to stay out very long without it taking people. Minutes.

The dream felt so real. It was part of a much longer dream series. I was a kid in middle school going on regular field trips in groups on prearranged time hops. Several trips were interesting, but not like the black sun. I had gotten separated from my group and wound up in the wrong portal with a different set of adults, and something went very wrong. We overshot the date and wound up stuck beyond getting back. A household of nice people was assigned to take me in, and I finished growing up with them. They spoke another language so it was hard at first, and I missed my family.

The entire time I was with my new family, they all knew something was wrong with the sun. Debates over cause went over my head, but watching the daily speculations and sun events on TV were all right. I didn't see the big deal until one day the sun started dimming, and over several weeks or months it turned a sickish brown. Then one day everyone knew it was time, and the world prepared. On the last day the entire world watched the sun go out. It was still there and we could still kind of see it, but everything got very dark and never lit up again.

There were ways to survive inside the earth. Years of horticulture adapted to living in the depths before it was time. Most people were ready for a complete change in lifestyle because we'd all been practicing. We educated ourselves on what to expect.

We were wrong. It wasn't as easy as that. The cold came much more quickly than predicted, mere minutes. Before an hour was up, half the world had already frozen, and the people that did make it into the safe zones weren't able to help anyone who didn't. The die-off impacted being able to maintain underground living, because it would take all of us working hard to ensure completing the adaptation. With so many people gone, information holes left those left with scattered knowledge and no easy ways to communicate.

By the time I woke up, I was much older in the dream. I had lived underground for years and had become a leading medical specialist in labor and delivery. Just before I delivered a baby in the dark barely lit underground wreck of an old manufacturing storage facility, one of the gangs had broken in and my people were fighting them off while I was delivering a baby. The mama wound up badly injured from the fighting around us, and as she was slipping away and I was trying to get her baby free of her before she died, I woke up.

I was in a bit of a shock for awhile coming out of a dream like that so abruptly. I had no memory of me in this life in that dream, and suddenly I was a different person waking up.

There's a way to make the sun go black. I've been wondering for awhile if some very stupid people would like to make that happen.

Whatever black sun is in any mythos, a symbol or a cosmological reality, I think some of us may have come from another system that really experienced a black sun. That dream goes back to the late 1980s or early 1990s. The detail of it is still with me. It was way too real.

I don't know why it's suddenly on my mind tonight. It felt important to write it down.