In the room outside of time Dream: Part 1

The wheel kept spinning; its hand-painted sections swirled in a blur of color. The small, thin man who stood closest to the wheel twisted his fingers nervously in his wiry beard.  His intent gaze was focused on the motion as if there were nothing else in the world.

And in fact, there wasn’t.

Something had happened on Earth. I didn’t remember what, because we were outside of time. Technically there was no here, no now. We were past the boundaries of all that.

To me, outside of time looked like a small, crowded room where things cut out of the fabric had been hastily stuffed away. These things varied. Just at my right, there was a globe with strange continents on it, old sneakers, and file cabinets full of various types of manuscripts. There was a fake mustache and a large bell. It was very cluttered. It reminded me of my Aunt Erma’s house. Wait, I didn’t have an Aunt Erma? Did I?  I couldn’t remember.

Here is what I knew: if anything was left on Earth, it would be found only in the future. I  needed to go back there and see what was left.  I couldn’t go back to the time I had come from because it would be too dangerous.

 It was the man’s job to find a time for me to go, somewhere many years from where I’d  just left. However, he could not fight the spinning of the wheel. It was what it was. Destiny, some people called it. He just helped the few stragglers who had fallen outside of time to find their way back in it.

The wheel was slowing. Slowing, slowing, and drew to a stop. One section had found itself to be the target of the bronze arrow on top of the dial.

Suddenly, the old man was pulling me to look closer. I bent over to inspect it what was painted on the selected piece of the puzzle. I was barely associating the painting style with something that I vaguely recognized as “impressionism” (or was it impersonation? It was so hard to think outside of time) when the old man gave my back a hard shove.

I was falling and then I was lying on something hard and rough and wet.