Upon waking, the dream did not dissipate. It stayed at the front of the mind, impossible to ignore. I didn’t happen to speak to anyone until I got to work. At the door to the office, one of my colleagues stopped me, “I had the weirdest dream last night.” She proceeded to recount my dream. As I listened, the hairs on my neck pricked and stood on end. She did not believe me until I mentioned a detail she had left out.
When it became clear that the majority of the staff had shared the dream, we looked for explanations. There must have been something we all saw, they said, some common experience that triggered the dream. Phone calls and emails alerted us to the scale of the thing. On the train home no one spoke. We all just looked at each other, saying it was unnecessary. It was top story on the evening news. The dream had been limited to the UK. Not everyone had shared it, but most did.
There was no dream that night. The next day, a picture circulated the Internet. It was crudely done, though we all recognised the image. Even those few who did not have the dream said it was familiar.
The experts said it was a form of collective hysteria. After a few weeks we stopped talking about it. Life went on. Things were as normal, but in the mind of everyone there had occurred a paradigmatic alteration. From time to time a phrase, or a certain sound, or a shape in the clouds would remind us of the dream and we would stop to contemplate.