I dreamed of an oppressive, near future dystopia.
People had no names, but wore numbers on their identical grey unifs. We were downtrodden only partly by an external agency, but mostly by our passivity and fear of initiative. In the deepest and darkest of places, I spoke with two men mining coal with me.
I spoke to them of sunlight and plenty. I had the idea of, but not the words to label "freedom", so thus I could only talk around it.
They understood, not in an abstract or conceptual manner, but each in a unique and personal circumstance. They understood their children with broken limbs; their friends with smoke scarred lungs, collateral of our superior's ideas of "progress".
We spoke to the cook in the communal kitchen, who shook his head at us, refusing to pass on our messages.
But some listened.
Then we were taking these idea, these words and stories to hurried clandestine meetings in the dim of the dusk; to secret signs flashed i passing, to tentative contact with the law enforcers.
One day, they arrested us. My people spoke to the enforcers, looking at eaach other for assurance, speaking of the warm sun and ope skies, about life out from under the heel of those who watched us.
I saw a sparkle in a female enforcer's eyes, the same sparkle we had seen lit in a faces of a hundred or more people we had seeded in our network. That knowing gleam, the feminine wisdom what testosterone washed away in men, gave the shape to the discomfort in her heart and moulded it into action.
Then her hands, gripping the weapon so tightly, unclenched. From white knuckles to pink.
That was the day the revolution began.