Total Collapse

Yes, this is about Rammstein, but no, it's not bad news about the band. It is a weird story about the dream I woke up from this morning, before a migraine left me in a stupor. Because of the migraine this post is slow work, with a lot of corrected typographical and spelling errors (I become slightly dyslexic when I get them), but more detailed than my usual dream recollections, because I've been lying here much of the day ruminating on the story with my eyes closed, since there was nothing else to do.

There were three odd features of the dream: partial sensory deprivation, pain, and odour. You'll see what I mean if you keep reading.

I don't remember the dream before the point I start at, but I do remember it had something to do with windows. Yeah, who knows!

My recollection starts with me standing in an internal corridor, around 20 metres wide, inside a large sports arena. It was identical to the largest sports arena in the region of New Zealand I live in, but wasn't, if you know what I mean. In my dream it was a place in Berlin. Because the arena is circular the corridor was curved. I was standing there, about 15 metres away from a large man in a heavy overcoat, scarf, and beanie. I looked at him and saw it was an old family friend, now dead for almost 20 years.

I smiled at him, and turned to look the other way, back down the corridor, which curved away to my left with the circumference of the building. I saw that there were huge cracks running towards us, along the ceiling, and freaked. When I turned back to the man I noticed that it was no longer the friend, but a stranger, and then I realised that I no longer had my contact lenses in as everything went blurry. I looked up and saw a heavy beam above the man was coming down, and started one of those awful too-slow dream runs at him. I eventually got to him, shoulder charged him, and took him down just as the beam came down where his head had been.

Just as we hit the ground everything went black. That's the first oddity. I have never had a dream before where I was completely blind for a substantial part of the action. From that point on there was absolutely no visual feedback at all.

Something else I noticed (before the blackness even) was excruciating pain. My lower legs were burning, and I couldn't move them. As the dream progressed the burning moved up my legs, and then eased to a dull ache. I've had pain in dreams before, but only when I was in pain in reality, so this was both immersive and disconcerting.

The last weirdness I noticed was the smell. It was the smell of rotten concrete dust. It was an odd, chemical, 'plasticky' smell, and it was really unpleasant. I honestly have no idea what concrete dust smells like, let alone rotten concrete, but I did in my dream. I've only had a sense of smell in a few particular dreams before, and in all of them I smelt exactly the same thing. This concrete dust was a new dream smell.

It was also choking, and both the man and I were coughing and breathing through cloth, made apparent once we began talking to one another. I had my face buried in his shoulder, and he must have been holding something over his face. I couldn't see what. Perhaps it was his scarf.

Anyway, once the coughing abated we started (muffled) talking. The obvious questions about injury and comfort came first. I was lying on his right arm, so I got off that, and he was breathing too fast and shallowly, which made me worry I had broken his ribs when I tackled him. He turned out to be hyperventilating out of shock, but we talked one another into relative calmness and that stopped.

He thought both his legs were broken, and that was when I realised that similar injuries must have been what was causing my pain. I introduced myself as milla, and he said "I'm Till."

"Lindemann?"
"Yes."

That's when I realised we were both speaking German, despite the fact that I don't understand it, let alone know how to speak it.

I bemoaned the lack of light, then remembered I couldn't see much anyway, without my corrective lenses, and we got talking about perception. He told me that he's blue/green colour-blind, and slightly long-sighted, and I told him I'm just very short-sighted, and that was the end of that line of conversation. Not very interesting, but it's the conversation I remember most about.

I don't remember much detail of what was said after that, but some general topics included cars, hunting, food, and travel. We also talked about literature and found that neither of us had read a single book that the other had read.

It was a surreal, but incredibly real dream. My alarm woke me up while we were still lying there in the dark, in pain, and without any signs of rescue. If this dream means anything I don't want to know about it, but figured I'd share it with you anyway, since the very fact that you're reading this site indicates that have have some interest in Till Lindemann.