Last night I dreamt I was living in a dystopian world, a one-party police state. All members of this society wore olive drab military uniforms; the symbol of the party was a black sea creature, a kraken or the like, and was worn on a patch on the left shoulder of the uniforms.
I had been imprisoned at some point in the past as a dissident but had been freed by freedom fighters, whom I joined in a guerilla war to take down the government. I was sent on a mission, part of a small team, to infiltrate the party headquarters and rescue some political prisoners being held there. I had been to the party headquarters before, which is why I was among those chosen to go.
When we arrived the place seemed abandoned, which was incredibly strange. This was the heart of the government, where they ruled the world. It made no sense: there ought to have been many hundreds of people there. The security protocols had been changed since I was there many months before. We couldn't gain access to the prison cells without going to a central control room somewhere deep in the bowels of the building. I had never been to this room when I was imprisoned there, but I had heard of its existence and had a good idea where it was.
We encountered no resistance on our way to the control room. Again, this was very disconcerting; where was everyone? The room was behind a set of huge doors, like a combination of a vault and blast door. The doors had no controls from the outside, so someone had to sneak in through a service chase that accessed the space above the ceiling and open the door for the rest of the team when we had the opportunity. I was tasked with doing this.
The service space led to a hatch at a very high level of this room. I slowly opened it and found myself looking down into a cavernous room, hundreds of feet wide, long and tall. At the floor of the room was what looked at first like a green carpet, but once I focused my vision on it I realized it was a pool of water covered in green scum. The room smelled awful, a sort of peaty smell crossed with the stench of fish. Between me and this water was an elaborate set of brass catwalks, which encircled a large steel cylindrical vessel that was at least 50 feet in diameter and as tall as the room. The catwalks led to access hatches on the side of this cylinder, the kind you'd see on a naval ship. At the far end of the room the wall was entirely glass, some of it covered in green and black mould, looking out to the ocean. It was dusky, not long after sunset. Other than this wall of glass there were no other windows to the outside, but windows to other rooms lined the walls to the right and left. Catwalks criss-crossed this central chamber, from one anteroom to another. The black cylinder in the middle of the room didn't have so much as a porthole looking into it, just access doors every 20 ft or so of height and dozens of control panels along its periphery.
I slowly dropped on to a catwalk about eight feet below the ceiling. As I planted my feet as softly as I could I heard an unearthly sound, a slithering sound the likes I'd never heard before. Behind me, from the direction I'd come through the service chase, was an observation room behind thick panes of glass with wire mesh; it was empty. I looked down and around the room I could see many such rooms through windows on the left and right sides, many of them with large control panels. I had no idea which contained the controls to the door I needed to open. I couldn't even see the door my comrades were waiting behind, I just knew it was below and behind me.
I heard faint talking. It was a pair of party members, working in one of these control rooms about 40 feet below me and to my left. They had no idea I was there, they weren't even looking in my direction. They moved quickly and silently out of the anteroom and across a catwalk to the opposite side of the central chamber. I took this as my opportunity to climb down a ladder to their level, and perhaps find the controls I was looking for. I peered into the anteroom they had come from and saw many control panels: the room's overhead lights were dark but the control panels were awash in red lights. Something was wrong.
I heard a quiet clanging above me. It was one of my comrades, who must have climbed through the service space behind me. Our eyes met and I gave him a stern look; what was he doing? Why didn't he wait for me to open the damned door? And he was making a god-damned racket, he's lucky the party members in the room hadn't heard him. He gave me a stern look in reply; I took it to mean that they had changed our plan, and for good reason. Behind him another comrade appeared and hopped down onto the catwalk high above me. They were all coming in through the service chase, to hell with the plan to open the door.
I moved out on to the catwalk to get as close to the party members as I could without being spotted. My comrades above moved in the same direction on the catwalk above. I hid behind a control panel about 25 feet from the party members, their backs turned to me. They didn't say a word to each other, just milled about the controls.
Suddenly I caught a glimpse of a black tentacle far below, silently and swiftly moving about 20 feet above the water's surface. There was not even a ripple in the water as it moved to my right, disappearing from view almost as fast as it entered my peripheral vision. I could feel my heart thump in my chest; it was pumping so hard I could hear it. I could hear the party members too, the pair of them, start to breath hard. They were panicking. One began to hyperventilate. He was terrified. They saw the tentacle move beneath them too.
And then I woke up.