Major disaster of the watery kind

I don't remember the first part of this dream, except that it seems like I'd been accused of handling something wrong, maybe to the point that someone had gotten hurt or killed. But I do remember being asked to explain exactly what happened, and as I started explaining it the explanation became reality. I was only vaguely myself and seemed more like a woman a few years older than my real persona, and I was in a room in my house with two children, both girls around age eight to ten. Some sort of huge natural disaster struck, all I knew at first was that it involved a lot of water.

There was a strange square-shaped depression in the floor that we could basically fit into, like a step or two down with some vaguely alien-like architecture that looked like support beams coming out of the corners of this thing (on floor level) and going diagonally up to meet each other above the center of the square "hole." On the top of this thing was a small pyramid thing that could have been a roof if the thing was bigger and not sitting in this room. (I remember thinking it was vaguely Sith-looking in origin, it reminded me of the ancient Sith architecture on Korriban in the game Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic.) The point of noticing this thing is that I knew it might help keep me and the girls safe if we could stay inside it. The water might not be able to rush us out of the room and kill us or spread us too far apart to be able to help each other if injury occurred. So I got the girls to go into this thing with me and I laid down on the bottom with them, one girl under each arm, and all of us facing downwards. I hung on tight to them as the water rushed through the room (it seems like we had a few moments warning before this thing hit). It worked, we were okay and the flooding moved on (or whatever was going on was done with us, we weren't still sure what was going on).

The room was still more or less intact but really messy now, and very wet. There were other people in the house, and I knew I had to check on them. I told the girls to stay in this room. I'm almost thinking it was a first level room or even a basement, which seems like an odd place to stay during a water catastrophe but I think I knew it was over, so since there wasn't tons of water in the room I figured it was safe enough. I also somehow knew that this disaster had incapacitated at least the entire United States. I asked one of the girls if she wanted anything, and she said somewhat spitefully, "Crackers." (Her attitude made sense in the dream, but I'm forgetting bits... it seems like there had been some argument earlier about crackers.) I left the room and went to the front door (the house layout is really murky now, I'm not sure it made sense) and found a teenage boy who I think was supposed to be my son. (At this point some John Grisham-like flavor got thrown into the dream, almost like I was a high-priced lawyer or something who worked too much.) There was also someone else there, probably another family member (not my real family, but this made-up dream family of which at least one of the girls mentioned earlier was part of).

My attention was on the boy though, I wanted to ask him if he was okay and if there was anything he needed but as I started asking, I realized I wasn't even sure what his name was. This was supposedly my kid, and I was so disconnected from my family I couldn't even remember his name! So I appologized and told him I understood it was very careless and wrong of me to have let my life go where it had gone, but at the moment would he please tell me his name and if there's anything he needs? He said, "Mitch," and he was looking at me with sarcastic disgust. I did a double take, and told him I wondered why the heck one of my kids got a name like that, and it almost felt like I got the vague notion of some larger conspiracy. I told him we'd figure things out if we could, and I asked him to go join the girls in the room they were in. The other person went too.

I found a full or almost-full box of saltine crackers and I knew it was the one the girl had asked for earlier. I picked it up and went back to the room where everybody else was now. My food stamps card was there on a table, and it's almost like I used it at that moment to buy the crackers somehow. I was thinking that the card might not work during such a state of disaster, but it cleared the order without problems. Mind you, there's no grocery store present, just this room with my apparently-estranged family. Plus, weren't the crackers at home and mine already in the first place? Stupid dream logic. But I was happy to get my food stamps card back (it was almost like I had to get the crackers to do so) and now I thought perhaps the government had put an unlimited dollar amount on all food stamps cards during this state of emergency.

I called to attention the people in the room and asked them if there was any one single item in the house that they could not live without or absolutely had to have. I told them they should go find it right now and come back here immediately. I said, "If we get raided then you'll probably have lost that thing, and since we don't know what we're going to do yet or where were going to go or what we're going to take, you'll at least have that one thing here where it's safe." I was worried about looting, and I'd figure at first we'd fortify our position in this room and worry about what to do next after that.

One or both of the girls got up (they were still hanging around that weird thing in the floor) and I think the other person (not my son but whoever it was that was with him earlier) was making for the door; they were going to go get whatever thing it was that they wanted most badly. Mitch however didn't seem all that inclined to get going, and I said something like, "If there's nothing here that's so very important to you well then good for you," or something like that. That was some attempt on my part to imply that I knew possessions were just mostly junk and not as important as people... or something. Mitch said, "Well, I do have a lot of movies but there's so many of them." He still didn't seem like he was gonna go find something. I was on my way out the door at this point, and I said, "Well, I have a teddy bear that's not really replacable, as opposed to Jurassic Park which is."

Then I woke up.