Monday, December 31, 2018

The Last Night Of The World

"I dreamed that it was all going to be over, and a voice said it was; not any kind of voice I can remember, but a voice anyway, and it said things would stop here on Earth. I didn’t think too much about it the next day, but then I went to the office and caught Stan Willis looking out the window in the middle of the afternoon, and I said a penny for your thoughts, Stan, and he said, I had a dream last night, and before he even told me the dream I knew what it was. I could have told him, but he told me and I listened to him." 


"It was the same dream?" 

"The same. I told Stan I had dreamed it too. He didn’t seem surprised. He relaxed, in fact. Then we started walking through the office, for the hell of it. It wasn’t planned. We didn’t say, ‘Let’s walk around.’ We just walked on our own, and everywhere we saw people looking at their desks or their hands or out windows. I talked to a few. So did Stan." 

"And they all had dreamed?" 

"All of them. The same dream, with no difference." 

"Do you believe in it?" 

"Yes. I’ve never been more certain." 

"And when will it stop? The world, I mean." 

"Sometime during the night for us, and then as the night goes on around the world, that’ll go too. It’ll take twenty-four hours for it all to go." 

-Ray Bradbury




4 comments:

Sara said...

Love his writing.....but I don’t like how this story makes me feel
Lol.

Rot said...

haha.i know what you mean.

feels so strange.
I think it's my personal favorite short story by Mr. Bradbury.
Just such an odd and wonderfully strange notion.

Anonymous said...

Cool story.

Yeah, just knowing that it would be your last night on earth, what do you do? There's no sense running around like a maniac trying to survive the to desolation that would come after. Why not just sit outside, staring into the sky and admire the stars and the moon.

That’s what I would do.

Revenant Manor said...

The feeling of inevitability at play here seems so authentic.

I was reminded of the feeling of uneasy resignation that comes with the approach of the end of an excellent summer vacation; one that you don't want to end, while thoroughly understanding that it will.

Personally, I very much appreciate the notion that in a situation like that we would all accept the inevitable with grace and dignity; just quietly enjoying the simple things in what little time remained.

However, the unabashed cynic in me thinks it's far more likely that the prevailing activities in the waning hours would be hair-on-fire histrionics being (even more) pointlessly broadcast via various social media platforms...