sanity is relative

I was standing on a beach somewhere. There was a city off in the distance, in a valley created by surrounding mountains with a lot of snow on them. I don't think anybody I know was there with me, and I really am not sure what city that was supposed to be, or even what country I was supposed to be in (kinda thinking I was on vacation somewhere exotic, but not really sure). It was getting late in the day.

Either someone was listening to a radio or the dream imposed the voice of Dubya announcing war on another country. The country I was visiting. A couple fighter jets were flying overhead towards the city, and a moment later a nuclear bomb went off in the enclosed valley. The ensuing explosion pushed the snow off the top of the mountains ringing the city, so it just looked like a great big mushroom-cloud-in-progress poofing snow before it around the edges of the city's valley.

The explosion continued mercilessly towards those of us on the beach; almost everyone turned and ran straight into the ocean. I'm not sure about the ones who weren't smart enough to do that, I was too busy trying to swim under the water away from the cloud of death. The first heat wave went over and everybody under the water avoided injury. For some reason there were suddenly a bunch of medieval swords and daggers in the water, some partly destroyed, so I think the explosion had dropped stuff on us. I grabbed two sturdy short swords and used them to help pull me through the water faster by stabbing my way along the sand below me.

The water became too shallow, so now I was running through it and there were a few other people near me. We were ahead of what was left of the main crowd. I think there might have been one adult and two children, all male, nobody I knew. The older of the two kids had an ARMY-style walkie talkie, and he was talking to someone in the military strike force who was asking questions about who had survived and if anyone was injured. (I'm pretty sure either the kid found the thing moments before or it was something he had for a hobby, and the military guy was surprised to get a signal from where we were.) The kid asked me if I was hurt and I said no, the only thing I could really feel at the moment was that my back extremely warm thanks to the destruction behind us, but it wasn't worth mentioning as the kid was busy enough talking to the guy on the other end.

Around this point in the dream we were definitely in America somewhere, even though we didn't actually change locations (yay dream logic). I don't remember if the military guy gave the kid instructions, but we were pretty much making a bee-line away from the bombed city. The walkie talkie either stopped working or it was off or the guy on the other end had stopped talking. Our trajectory took us off the beach and into a housing area. We ran straight into the first house which was partially collapsed on the side we hit, and the structure was so weakened (and I was so strong? lol) that I could pry the first layer of sheet rock out of the back wall of the house, pull the planking in the way out as well, and kick down the back part of the wall. Apparently this was faster or safer than trying to go around buildings.

The next house we went through, I recognized my bedroom in somewhat of a messy shambles even as I started tearing into the back wall like the previous house. (This was a random bedroom, as if I had been living with parents or something.) I said to the kid, "You know what's ironic?" and the kid with the walkie talkie said, "What?" and I answered, "This is my house." I didn't stop for anything in my room, I was too busy busting through the back wall (I seriously pretty much didn't care, knowing we had to move fast and were leaving this place far behind as soon as possible). It didn't break as cleanly as the last one, and I warned the people behind me of some splintered timbers sticking up where they might cause injury if someone wasn't paying attention.

The people behind me and the kid were starting to fall behind just a little; there was an older gypsy lady among them, and not really all that many people to our little haphazard group, but we weren't gonna leave them behind just yet. This gave me a moment to look around and see if there was anything worth grabbing in my immediate vicinity... something useful, I wasn't gonna carry junk around for nothing. There were clothes and bags strewn about a partly-collapsed picnic table by me. I grabbed a bag made mostly of black mesh with handles and what looked like a baby bonnet made of white mesh with a big black satin frill and I figured that would work for a hat for now in case I needed shade from the sun. I stuffed the "hat" and whatever else I was carrying into the bag (not sure if the dream logic had figured out I'd still have the swords if I possibly could). It was time to run again.

Then I woke up.