Free Flower of Scotland by William Meikle Page A

one word.
    No.
    　
~-oO0Oo-~ 　
    #dreaming
    @greatcthulhu Feeling sleepy LOL! #ryleh
    Darren was amused to see the Dreaming God turn up in his Twitter feed that January morning, amused enough to follow whoever had set it up. Over the next few weeks he noticed the handle turning up with increasing regularity. Somebody was having fun.
    @greatcthulhu Hey @yogsototh Whassup dude? Tekeli-Li! LOL!
    All over the world people joined in with the @greatcthulhu in conversation. Darren recognised a lot of the users from Mythos-based games and knew many of the writers from Lovecraftian anthologies and magazines. They all kept the joke going, re-tweeting @greatcthulhu to an ever wider audience.
    The bulk of the traffic came through one particular hash-tag, #starrywisdom, and seemed to be concentrating on collecting information from world-wide sources on dreams, and in particular, dreams about the end of the world. Darren decided to play along.
    @dazza Last night it was ice-giants and Ragnarok LOL Anyone else gone #viking? #starrywisdom
    His expectations of any comeback were low; he only had a couple of dozen followers and his tweets were infrequent and rarely commented on. So he was pleasantly surprised the next morning to see that his follower count had risen to number fifty-two, and that @greatcthulhu was responsible.
    @greatcthulhu Hey dude THX for the new dreamers at #viking. Y’all should be following @dazza
    By mid afternoon Darren’s follower count had risen to the low hundreds and he was hooked on the rush. He started posting using hash-tags that he knew had large numbers of followers.
    @dazza Hey #kindle #ebooks Check out #starrywisdom for some cool reading material
    He checked his follower count before going to bed. It was over a thousand and rising fast.
    He thought he was too excited to sleep. He was wrong. He dreamed.
He is alone, in a vast cathedral of emptiness where nothing exists save the dark and the boom of a pounding beat from below. Shapes move in the dark, wispy shadows with no substance, shadows that caper and whirl as their dance grows ever more frenetic.
    He tastes salt water in his mouth, and is buffeted, as if by a strong, surging tide, but as the beat grows ever stronger he cares little. He gives himself to it, lost in the dance, lost in the dark.
    He wanders, there in the space between. He forgets himself, forgets everything in a blackness where only the dance matters.
    He woke to a crumpled, sweat-stained bed, upset that he had been taken out of the dream. But a ping from his laptop got his attention and seconds later the dream was forgotten as he read his Twitter follower number.
    Five thousand? How high can it go?
    The #starrywisdom tag was now showing as a trending topic, in the top ten of all subjects being discussed on Twitter. The @greatcthulhu handle seemed to be enjoying all the attention.
    @greatcthulhu Any more of this and I might have to wake up early LOL! #starrywisdom
    Darren spent the day tweeting to a large number of hash-tag topics, funneling more and more people towards the #starrywisdom topic. By the time he went to bed he had ten thousand followers on his own account, and #starrywisdom was the hottest topic in the Twitterverse.
He floats, mere shadow now, alongside tens of scores of others, in that cold silent sea. He has no thought for anything but the rhythm, the dance. Far below him, cyclopean ruins shine dimly in a luminescent haze. Columns and rock faces tumble in a non-Euclidean geometry that confuses the eye and brooks no close inspection. And something deep in those ruins knows he is there.
    He dreams, of vast empty spaces, of giant clouds of gas that engulf the stars, of blackness where there is nothing but endless dark, endless quiet. And while the slumbering god dreams, they dance for him, there in the twilight, dance to the rhythm. He is at peace.
    Coming up out of the dream felt like surfacing through hundreds of feet of water. He woke, panting and exhausted, physically