Frozen time

My father and me are driving a big old truck. The vehicle looks like one of those WWII military trucks, it’s brownish green in color and has that classic canvas top at the back. We’re supposedly driving the truck from one destination to another. We’re driving through familiar territory, although I can’t really put my finger exactly at where we are. Mountains slide by, we make our way past lakes and great plains, but we never pass any place inhabited. It’s just me and my dad. Sometimes we spot animals though; mostly birds but also reindeer and bears. It’s a quiet, comfortable ride. My father is a younger version of himself, oddly enough.

As we travel along, we start a long, almost unnoticeable descent into a wintery landscape. The colors change into white and blue, rivers freeze and trees turn black. We reach the bottom of a mile-wide slope that ends in a gigantic clearing. There’s a frozen lake here, and we drive on to it. We slow down to watch the amazing scenery below us; the ice is completely transparent, yet thick, but we can see structures and form inside it. We pass entire buildings frozen in time, there are even people encapsulated in the ice - these images are so beautiful and horrid, it’s impossible to describe. It’s as if the water came so sudden and froze at such speed that nothing or no-one had time to react. These three-dimensional images in the ice are like snapshots of a single moment in time.

It gets darker around us. We drive on. For some time all we can see is the black ice, but after a while we start seeing faint, green lights under the surface. The light increases in intensity, and suddenly we can see hundreds and thousands of bottles scattered in the ice, silhouetted against the green light. Several hundred feet long racks, or shelves, on which the bottles were originally stacked, stretch far into the distance under us. The scene that the ice has captured here is one where the shelves have started to topple over, and the bottles all fell out. It can’t be described, but it’s as beautiful as it is absurd.

A bit further on the atmosphere gets chillier. The lights under the ice turns light blue, and now we can see people again down there. They are all dressed in old, white rags. Their hair is also long and white, they all look like ghosts - and suddenly it dawns on me that this is what they actually are. Weird, haunting music emerges from below, scary, muted sounds accompany the music, and suddenly the ghosts start screaming. At first I can’t make out the words, but then it gets clearer and clearer. The ghosts scream: «And again! And again! And again!» They move slowly in the cold ice. They move towards the surface, inexplicably. I know they’ll eventually appear above the ice, and it totally freaks me out. My dad tries to revv up the engine and drive the hell out of there, but it is useless. The ghosts keep chanting: «And again! And again! And again! And again … ! »

To my great relief, I wake up, cold and sweating.