sanity is relative

A lot of the major details of this dream are fuzzy, but I do remember the animals. At first I found a black rat in a dark room that had a big unmade bed in it (mine? not sure), it was moving really fast and seemed scared of me. I know that as pets, rats are very sociable, and I kept thinking I could convince it to be friends with me somehow. I just talked to it as if it were already a pet, hoping it would think everything was fine and warm up to me.

Then the rat changed to a ferret (as if it always had been one) that was pretty much all very dark fur... I would say black, but my brain kept telling me that all-black wasn't possible, or endangered and thus not really available as a pet. And he was very loving and friendly and I was holding him, and for some reason I was now in a basement room where the ferret's cage was. Then he had a pure white buddy, not even sure where the second one came from, but I knew they were both mine. I was having trouble remembering the dark one's name, but finally remembered it was Riddick. The light one I think had a really short name like "Cho" and possibly later it got changed to "Aster" (as that's my albino original character).

There was some nonsense about the house flooding and me trying to get out of it without the ferrets getting wet. I couldn't remember if they could swim or not. I stuck one ferret on each of my shoulders and managed to get out, since I was currently taller than the water was deep. I think there was something about a car ride... the ferrets disappeared into dream logic plot holes... and then I was in a parking lot by a large open parkland with a playground in one area near a bunch of picnic benches, and some forest and open grass with walking trails. There was a dog in the parking lot, some kids were petting it.

This dog is probably the weirdest combination of breeds I have ever seen. I believe what it was supposed to be was a rottweiler, pit bull, and corgi mix. It had the coloration and muscles of a rottweiler, it's face was also mostly that breed but I could see some pit bull there, and then it had the shape and general size of a corgi. Cute and hilarious all at once.

The kids said the dog was a stray or something, but as I was petting it I noticed that its fur was clean and looked like it had been taken care of; it didn't have a collar. The dog was super-friendly and really liked me (and I liked it, I was kinda hoping it needed a home) so I picked it up and said, "Let's go see if you belong to someone." I started carting this dog around the park, specifically the picnic area where a large group seemed to be having a gathering, and I kept asking random people if it was theirs.

I wasn't having any luck (yay! new doggy all mine?) but strangely enough the dog seemed to keep changing into a fluffier, curlier-haired dog, like cute-overkill, kinda like something Paris Hilton might have except it was still a chubby thing, not skinny.

I can't remember any more.

(I've forgotten a lot of this one... I should have gotten up and written it down... d'oh!)

( contains spoiler(s) for the movie Deja Vu )

I've forgotten a lot of this dream, as quite a bit of it didn't make sense. But there was a remote, tropical island and I was part of a group of stranded people trying to keep alive and not get killed by "the Others" (just like in the TV show Lost). I remember at one point getting hypnotized by some flowers on a tree nobody else could see (I'd breathed in some kind of gas they hadn't gotten a whiff of), and running off to a place where the Others had control of a big, fortified building. I was going to go in there because the madness in my mind made me think I had to. John Locke was trying to stop me but I went up a lot of steep, sandy slopes and the trees and plants I used to pull myself up would always pull out of the ground as soon as I was done using them, so Locke couldn't keep up.

Later on there was some weird goings on to do with guns, and I had one at one point but then ran out of ammunition, but didn't want the Others to realize this and was hoping I could find some more before they figured it out. There was also some Sims skill-building weirdness going on (like I said, half the dream made no sense but there was a definite air of suspense and fear throughout the dream). In the end, though, I remembered that another character in the dream plot had swum out west and found another island with nobody on it, a safe place the Others didn't know existed. (I think I was that other character somewhere back in the dream, that's how I knew). So I rounded up the one other person I could find who was still alive and said we had to swim west. The nice thing was, the sun was setting in about an hour so it was very obvious which way to go. Follow the sun!

As I was swimming off, though, my (real) kid sister runs up to the beach and starts crying because she can't swim (not true, but in reality I don't think she woulda been able to make it to the island anyways). She has some teenager friends around her too with similar problems; some of them can swim, but not very well. There's a moment where I wonder if it's too late, because it seems like I knew the Others would be showing up any moment, but then I decided I couldn't leave her behind and swam back to shore. I told my sister to hang onto me, and her friends to hang onto her, and I'd swim and we'd all make it together if some of the others could do some kicking too. This was working fairly well, but we had only gone a few yards before I saw one of the Others.

This person was more like an ape-human hybrid creature, and this one was female. At that moment that's what all the Others had been like the whole dream (but they hadn't really been, they were humans up to that point... silly dream physics). I was afraid because the Other had an inflated inner tube and was getting into it to follow us. But she called after us and said she wanted to join us, that she didn't want to be with the Others anymore. I told her she had to promise not to flip out and kill us later on, and I had to be convinced she was being truthful, and she did promise and I believed her. So we added the inner tube to our floating people raft and kept swimming. The inner tube helped a ton.

We saw the safe island coming up through some haze, but then there was the thought that swimming past that would bring us to New York City. And we hadn't even gotten to the island yet when suddenly out of the haze (to the left of the island) comes a very New-York looking skyline, with tons of skyscrapers crammed in and going straight down to the waterline. More and more of this city appears and we stear towards it, confused but not gonna let this chance go to get back to civilization. As we get closer we notice that the buildings are put together oddly, like they've been stacked up all funny on top of each other and not like you'd expect any sane builder to do.

A wave carried us into a hallway of the closest building, it turned out to be an indoor shopping mall. Then the place we'd come from, with all the water, melted away into more of the mall, disappearing like it'd never been there. The architecture seemed to normalize as well, and there we were sitting on the floor with the inner tube, people walking by us ignoring us.

We walked into the closest shop, seeking answers to this weirdness, and it was a Meet Santa shop sorta thing. Santa Claus was sitting behind a desk and for some reason I knew this guy was probably actually the real Santa Claus, not just some guy dressed up in a suit like anybody else would think. This section of the dream feels very Narnia-like, specifically the end of The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe where the kids ask the Professor if he thinks they've been on a real adventure. And that's more or less what I asked Santa, was if we'd been on a real adventure. He seemed to be indicating that he believed it was real, but now that I think about it, he never gave a straight answer.

Then I woke up.