sanity is relative

I dreamed about a lot of things last night (yeah, took Unisom, that seems to make it worse). The only one I'm going to get into though is a brief visit to the world of Riddick, except he'd been dropped into a more modern day earth setting.

It started at night on a passenger train, sort of Amtrack idea mixed with a Japanese bullet train (it went very fast, in other words). Riddick had been captured by either a cop or a federal agent. I am not sure if Riddick killed him, or if circumstances allowed him to get away, but something happened to make the power on various sections of the train go out, and Riddick had escaped.

I became him, and found an empty passenger compartment. There were people or guards searching the train, but not very well, like they were only worried that weird things were going on with the train's power, not that a dangerous criminal was on the loose. I climbed up into a baggage rack to hide for a moment (above one row of seats, it was kinda like the cabins they have in Harry Potter on the Hogwarts Express). A guard went by, opened the door, and shone a flashlight around the compartment but not up towards the ceiling where I was hiding.

After he left, I opened or kicked out the window, then pulled the emergency break cord. When the train was going slow enough (but still fairly fast) I jumped and caught a lamp post or something like that, and then slid to the ground. I wanted to get as far away from the tracks and the whole area as possible, there was the thought in my mind that the guy who'd captured me earlier was still alive and would come after me.

The area was very wooded, a lot of pine trees, but I could see the lights of a town in the valley ahead. I was thinking of finding transportation or stealing some money or something there, if I could do it without being seen or word of my actions getting to the agent guy too quickly. Heh, I was definitely in the mind of a criminal for this dream. As I was heading for the lights though, some guy showed up on an embankment beside me and asked me if I needed a ride. Then he said, "Here comes one!" and there was a bright light beyond the embankment. Ahead of me was a sort of road/path cut into the grass and trees, and a semi truck came barreling through at high speed. The guy on the embankment jumped and managed to grab something on the truck and away he went on top of the truck.

I got to the top of the embankment and thought about trying to catch a ride in this new, weird way, but then I noticed that I was near a sidewalk. And suddenly it was broad daylight. The sidewalk went into a suburban neighborhood, but first you had to go under these weirdly trimmed trees, they were like big squared off blocks of hedge that hadn't been pruned up high enough, and stretched out to the street. There was a guy on the far side of the hedges, standing on the sidewalk amongst a bunch of kids toys (like Little Tikes stuff). He was wearing a grey suit and looked kinda sleezy (he had a goatee and shoulder length greasy black hair that was wavy, kinda looked like Yanni on drugs), but I could tell he was a cop. The thought that he was a crooked cop went through my head.

I guess I decided to find out, for whatever reason, because I went towards him (under the stupid tree things) and he invited me into his house, which was the one he was standing in front of. I think he even knew who I was. I followed him inside, to the back of the house, which had high ceilings and seemed nicely and simply decorated, sort of a mix of beach house and Ikea stuff. The walls and ceiling were white, and most of the decor was as well, although I think the carpet was a very light blue, as were some of the accents. It felt to me like the perfect setting for a fake goody two shoes cop and his perfect family. I knew better... the dude HAD to be crooked. Call it criminal instinct.

There was a little girl, the man's daughter, and she was coloring at a table in the room we'd come to, it must have been the living room, attached to a kitchen with a bar. The little girl was coloring with crayons (or colored markers?) on a very long piece of white paper, on the coffee table by the couch. She wasn't sitting on the couch, just on the floor by the coffee table. She asked me if I wanted to color too. She was probably only about seven years old.

I think all I did was sit down on the couch, and there was a discussion over who was going to make lunch, and what it was going to be. I think the mother of the family was around, and said she'd make it, and the father and girl had a feeling it would be all nasty health-foodish, so one of them decided to make it instead. I remember thinking I'd be relatively safe for the moment, and maybe the cop had some ideas for my particular skill set, or a way to get me out of the area without the agent finding me. My odds of surviving by hanging out at this place seemed about as good as anything else.

Then I woke up.

( dream symbol analysis and thoughts )

Well, okay, maybe they wanted to be in my head. But anyways, this dream felt like a cross between the television series The 4400 and a random alien movie like Signs. For the purposes of this dream, which came pre-loaded with a whole different past for me and everything, we'll say that the 4400 were something that had been heard of in the area where I lived in the dream, but wasn't necessarily something we'd come across. We weren't sure on the truth of the matter, if the 4400 people had been abducted and then returned by aliens, or by our future descendants of the future, or if they really had special powers, or whatever.

Now for the dream proper. I lived with my family in a big farm house in a farm type community. I had a mother and two or three kid siblings, but I don't remember any father figure. My mom was nice, and the kids were cute and relatively well behaved. I remember being inside the house one night, and I kept having these strange quick visions of nasty aliens creeping around our house in the dark, or breaking windows, things like that. I think all the doors were locked, like we had locked them out of fear, because there was a very strong, weird storm going on outside. We knew it might be an alien attack of some type... and huddled in the middle of the house beside a chest of drawers we had placed in a doorway for some reason. I remember a candle, so the power must have been out.

Then it was daytime, and we were standing in the living room (not far from that doorway that had been half-barricaded). I was trying to make plans to survive an alien invasion, but I stopped talking as this boy we knew walked into the room. It occurred to me that he'd been rumored to have been part of the 4400. And something was wrong... he didn't act or walk like a little kid (he couldn't have been more than 10 years old). As he walked by me, I saw that one of his eyes, his left eye, had a bright green iris. I suddenly just knew that this meant he'd been taken over by an alien. And to me, it felt like he was lost, whatever boy had been in his mind and body before was long dead, filled now with the menace of an evil alien.

I was looking around for a weapon while trying to appear like I hadn't noticed that anything was wrong. I found a knife with a rather long blade just as the kid went after my mom, attacking her and trying to kill her. I stabbed him with the knife several times, and killed him. The other children (my kid siblings) were crying and my mom was scared too, but she was also saying, "Now the aliens will be really mad, you killed one of them! Where are we going to hide the body?" I remember saying something stupid like, "Do you think it looks like one of the cats did it?" as I wrapped the body up in a thin rug that was on the floor. I was trying not to get any blood anywhere, yet I managed to get a few drops on the floor. It was creepy looking stuff, thicker than human blood, and a sort of puke green color. I had a feeling that an alien would be able to sense this stuff from a distance, and would definitely freak out if they found it on something in our house.

Anyways, I took the body upstairs and hid it in one of the top drawers of my mother's dresser. I figured that if we were going to hide ourselves somewhere in the house, it should be as far away from the location of the body as possible. I knew it would be a bad idea to leave the house, as at least this was familiar territory, and who knows what would happen next or when. I had just gotten back downstairs when one of the kids started yelling that there was something in the sky. I went to a window and saw what looked like flying saucers from those really old, bad alien movies. You know, the hubcaps on wires concept. Except I knew this was real, and they were flying high through the sky. At least they appeared on a trajectory somewhere beyond our house (they would be flying over it) but that still wasn't very comforting.

I started screaming for everyone to close the curtains. There were a LOT of windows in this house, and I ran around closing curtains as fast as I could. I called as many of the cats into the house as I could justify, since we didn't know how long we had before aliens would be creeping around our house. Assuming my visions were true, and they were starting again. Once most of the cats were in the house and the rest refused to come (there were a LOT of cats, maybe a hint at the movie The Mummy I watched recently), I locked the doors, but there was a big set of double doors by the kitchen that gave me trouble. The lock didn't want to work properly, and the doors kept opening.

I got the doors to sort of hold, at least stay closed, and found that a bunch of the windows in the house still hadn't had their curtains closed. And an argument was starting about where we were all going to hide. There was a man in the group now, I don't know what relation he had to the family (maybe a farmhand or manager). I think there might have been one or two friends of my siblings in the house now too. Maybe an extra person, like a neighbor mom or something, but I really don't know. Anyways, the guy kept saying we should stay in a room with windows. "No windows!!!" I kept saying. I knew we needed a small room with NO windows, something that might be easier to get away with hiding in, and something harder to break into than a room with freaking glass windows. Duh!

Maybe he thought we'd need the airflow or light or something. I figured if we were in a room with windows we wouldn't last long enough to enjoy those luxuries. So I said we should use a closet. I settled on the closet that was off of the kitchen. It had NO windows and was a small empty room with just the one door leading to the kitchen (in reality it makes no sense, it would have been a pantry full of food or something, but whatever... apparently having an empty closet room in your kitchen was normal in the dream world). I told people to find all the food and water and drinks they could find and get them into that room.

I started carrying stuff from the fridge to the closet, things like six packs of soda and juice. I remember passing up the idea of taking some ice cream sandwiches, even though it might be a fun thing for the kids who were really scared. I also remember thinking that I couldn't eat them, and neither could my mom (so my food allergies bled into the dream somehow... the flavors of the sandwiches I had been looking at were Chocolate Chip Mint... but my mom was still this dream mom, not my real one). The guy person suggested three boxes of freeze dried food we'd gotten somewhere, but by this time I was ready to get everyone hidden away because I figured we were out of time. And the strange thing was, it was dark again, night time.

(This dream seemed to change from night to day and back again without warning or implied time flow, kinda like that terribly-made movie Plan Nine From Outer Space. Also, sometimes when I was closing curtains or doors it was like there was this fierce, unearthly dark swirly windy stuff flowing around the house, just outside the doors, but I can't remember specifically what moments that happened during the dream. I remember being afraid of that inky windy stuff though.)

We'd gotten batteries, flashlights, candles, blankets, weapons (including guns), and everything else we could think of on short notice into the closet. Everyone was in there too now, except for me, as I was going to go for the freeze dried stuff which was stored in the next room (beyond the kitchen, and those stupid double doors were half way into that room in the way the house was laid out). I heard a noise in the next room, and saw that those accursed double doors were open again. I grabbed the nearest blunt object, which I think might have actually been some sort of kid's toy, like a hard plastic baseball bat but not quite... it had more like a mining pick kind of shape, especially on the end that I'd be using to bash alien brains in with, or try.

But it wasn't an alien that moved into view. It was someone I knew from the neighborhood, and he had a weapon too, some random blunt object (probably a wooden board or something) and he stopped when he saw me. The thought occurred to me that maybe he had thought my noises in the kitchen were caused by an alien intruder. Then I looked at his eyes, and I noticed that his left eye was darker than the right one, but not green. I think he saw me hesitating and said, "Yeah, I've got an astigmatism," and that made sense in the dream as to why his one eye was darker (silly dream physics again). Then I realized something, and said to him, "You've seen them. You've seen the people taken over by aliens!" And he said yes.

I think the idea was he was going to join our little survival group, and there was a random thought in my head that if we were going to be hiding out for a long time, we should have made some sort of preparation for bathroom needs.

Then I woke up.

( dream symbol analysis and thoughts )