My Dream Pt. 3

I sink through the blackness immediately, the water rushing so quickly past my ears that I feel as though it digs a channel through them, eroding my brain and pouring out the back of my skull like a jet stream. Instinctively squeezing my legs against my chest with clenched fists and tight arms I seem to offer no buoyancy to the water, and sink deep and deeper, leaving the raft and the sunlight and the unexplored mountain far behind me. I expect to feel at any second the sharp tearing of my body against the rusted, twisted junk that I know litters all levels of the water. I expect to hear a fleeting crack and see an explosion of light behind my shut eyes just before I die.
But it is when I shut my eyes that I understand that this was never water at all, and through my eyelids I see that I am falling through the grey sky high above an intricate network of roads and cultivated farmland. I can barely suppress a scream as the sense of vertigo overtakes me, but the thrill of mortal severity my situation injects into my bones is wonderful, and I feel alive and clear-headed for what seems like the first time since my childhood.
All around me many others are falling as well, and I know that they each have something they are trying to tell me, if only they could manage to direct the course of their descent to coincide with mine. As they zoom by, limbs flailing, I catch bits and pieces of their message that they scream to me over the wind that howls in my ears. "...wwwASN'T ANYTHING YOU COULDA DOonne..." shouts a blond, middle aged woman wearing denim overalls. Her face is twisted into a mask of violent glee as she calls to me, her hair flickering above her, and her voice cuts off abruptly as she whips away from my field of vision. A fat man, also grinning maniacally, swoops toward me, his neck bent awkwardly as he tries to catch my eyes from slightly below. Streaks of blood course over his shiny, bald head, trailing from his nose and ears, and beneath the wiry stubble on his face his skin looks grey and dead. He opens his flapping jowls and I hear "...nnnoOBODY SEES IT THAT WAY But yoou..."
All the while we race toward the earth, and more of the landscape before me looks green and alive. The people spin by more quickly, each one seemingly more ecstatic than the last, though I feel their frustration at their inability to move close enough to me so that we may fall together and talk. Soon their fleeting voices blend into a wall of noise that ripples my attention, and then finally it becomes a single, wailing siren as if from a distant ambulance sweeping over the city where I live. No earthly sound has every caused me so much unrest as the type of siren that now penetrates into my dreamworld; it sticks in my brain like bacon grease. The sound disappears after only what seems to be a few seconds, fortunately, and I open my eyes to find that they are gone, and I realize that I am no longer falling, but standing in a small, wooden compartment, floating in a hot air balloon, still far, far above the earth. And someone is in there with me.