sanity is relative

I don't remember the name of the guy who the dream cast with Leonardo DiCaprio, so we'll call him Leo. He's a rising star business mogul who lands a pretty, blonde trophy wife and is making money hand over fist. They have two kids (one boy, one girl). One day when Leo is off at work, the wife is teaching the kids to cook while someone is visiting (it felt like an interview almost but I'm not sure on that detail now). The kids are using sharp knives but the wife insists she's taught them well.

The little girl goes, "Ouch mommy, I cut myself!" and has a bleeding finger but it's not super-bad. The mom starts looking at it but suddenly her own nose is bleeding and she's getting kind of out of it. I have no idea where the visitor went but the mother ends up sitting on the floor leaning against the fridge with her two kids sitting with her and she's half out of it saying weird stuff (I don't remember what she said anymore). The kids just seemed to be sitting there listening to her quietly.

Later on, Leo is writing a love letter of some sort about how he feels like he hasn't spent enough time with his wife lately and he wants to make that right. She comes in while he's writing and finds a half-finished, rejected version of the letter on the desk where he was initially writing (he's moved to another part of the room and hasn't noticed her come in). She goes over to him and seduces him, not like that wasn't kinda the whole idea anyways. But it really felt more like she was seducing him than responding to his written overtures.

The next scene is the family on a four-person swing (each person sitting side-by-side) that is set up to have a really nice view at a place like a botanical gardens. I think Leo and his wife were talking about something but I don't remember what anymore. The only thing I really remember thinking was wondering if that chain would snap. But it didn't, so I think the scene was mostly there to imply things were supposed to be going somewhat properly with the family again, but it still had a sense of foreboding.

The next part is years later, the little girl is now a teenager going to the beach with her mother. Everyone is in bathing suits and the daughter is smokin' hot. The dream perspective switches to her, so I'm the daughter now. We spot someone we know who sells makeup, and rush up to her excitedly. The lady sets out things on the sandy/rocky ground where she is. I see a couple of just-released sample boxes and pick one up, asking if I can have it and the lady says yes. I say I'll definitely be placing an order but I'll be right back.

I hurry off along the beach on my own. I think the idea was I was going to talk to some friends further along, but I end up finding a few guys my age who I sort of know. They're hanging out in a rockier area with my uncle Nick (who is Nicolas Cage). While I'm talking to the other boys, Nick asks me if I'm still dating that one guy and I say something like, "No, we broke up." He goes, "Awww, maaan!" with a tone that doesn't mean he's sad about the breakup but that he's wishing we weren't related because now I'm available. Way to be obvious about it, Uncle. xP

Anyways I'm still talking to the other guys and they're telling me about an incident I vaguely remember hearing about, where a boat got wrecked in a storm a while back. I remember mentioning during the conversation that I had a boat myself, and couldn't understand why someone would leave theirs unmoored to get trashed like that. Turns out the boys had been in that storm and something had attacked the boat. And my mother had subpoena'd the boys for the chunk of the creature they'd managed to keep. This made me double-take, that my mother had anything to do with it, and what the heck do they mean by creature? I was trying to ask them more about this creature, and got the impression of a goopy purple thing with a few tentacles. It didn't sound like an octopus, but the sort of thing that suddenly made me think there was something supernatural going on.

Here dream logic really messes with things because I'm trying to hear what the guys are saying but they're all suddenly very tiny and wet sand is almost covering them up. I call to them and say I can't hear them, and then I say something like, "My mother must be blocking you!" I look down the beach and I think she was down that way somewhere, probably coming my way, but that's kinda fuzzy. I decide to head out into the water to swim away and find somewhere further around some rocky outcroppings where I can stop and try to think about what the heck is going on.

The makeup sample thing I had has vanished to forgotten-plot-element-land, but hey, it's cool, I have a huge crab pet now magically, who seems to understand when I talk to him and squeaks back all cute-like. I tell him we're gonna go for a swim, and while the actual swimming part makes very little sense, the crab also decides to have a piggy-back ride on my shoulders while I'm swimming. He's heavy, but I keep going anyways.

Then I woke up.

(Inspired by watching Annihilation Earth and Twilight Zone last night, definitely.)

I don't remember the first parts clearly, but this was a really long dream. There were several characters stuck on an island that was having major volcanic activity by surprise. Something had happened to mess up the entire island's geographic ecosystem. Also, there was a factor involved with live dinosaurs being in the park on the island, although it was not until later that the term Jurassic Park was used in conversation. I think maybe in this plot that original concept had failed and somebody else later had tried to "do it right."

The characters that survived the lava and earthquakes managed to get a large black jeep or SUV type vehicle to a complex where they were hoping to find an option for safety or communication or the like. At some point I became a young woman character amongst the others, and there was another lady older than me, a man and a teenage guy, and a little girl of about eight and a boy of maybe five at the most. Their parents were already dead at this point.

In the complex, we were discovering things like rows and rows of empty cubicles and lab rooms that were completely empty of staff and had stuff strewn all over the place. Somebody found a dead body, so we were afraid that something like raptors were loose in the building. The older guy with us had a gun, but was low on bullets. By this time we were realizing that being stuck inside was a bad choice, but had a bad feeling we couldn't go backwards and had no real idea now how deep we were inside the building.

We came across this odd hallway where it branched at a cross-ways, and straight ahead past the intersection there was a thick glass pane set like a wall and we could see very dark hallways beyond. In the hallway to the left, there was a door set into the wall on its right where maybe that weird dark hallway could be accessed through whatever room was inside the door. I told the others to wait, and the kids were all "no don't go, it's too dangerous!" but I went carefully into the mystery room. I don't remember anything specific about it, except that it did lead into that dark hallway, close to the far side of the glass.

I remember feeling very exposed in that hall, and walking back towards the glass to investigate if anything might be worth seeing there, there was a sudden flash of quick, white light somewhere behind me, probably from the ceiling. It reminded me of the speeding cameras at intersections, but it also spooked me and the kids on the far side of the glass were yelling at me to get out of there.

I made it back into the connecting room without incident even though I feared something would get me in that dark hallway. There's a bit of confusion to the dream plot/logic here as I'm not sure if what I saw next was in that connecting room, or in another room near the main hallway intersection. Either way, in whatever room I was in now, I saw a lady with a black evening dress on that had no shoulders, and a bodice made to look a bit like two black flower petals covering her chest.

I think the two kids were in this room with me now, but none of us thought this person was actually here to help us, and she started pulling the top of the dress down. Somehow the older guys out in the hall knew about this, and wanted to see, but the kids and I couldn't get out of that room fast enough. I had a baaad feeling that what was under that dress wasn't human (I remember thinking evil vine-plant-like monster) and from the sounds of gunfire I was correct as we fled down the main hallway (having gone right this time from the original direction we arrived, or in other words, putting the glass-walled dark area to our left in passing).

The other lady in the group had decided to stick back with the dudes even though we told her to run, so it was just me and the two children as we turned a corner left and found two sets of glass double doors side-by-side that we realized could be closed and locked. This doorway would also put us into hallways connecting to the dark area, and the little girl was upset because she said she saw a ghost in the hall with me when the light had flashed earlier. I couldn't figure out what she meant by "ghost" and if she had seen it on the glass or actually in the hall with me, but we were running out of time. I'd rather face a mysterious "ghost" that hadn't killed me the first time (to the point that I hadn't even known it had existed) than get eaten by something.

I told her it would be okay, that we at least knew there was danger where we had been before, including the dinosaurs we still assumed were around somewhere, and we needed to lock the door. We had no idea if the others were even alive at that point, and if we sat around and waited we'd all die. So we started working on the doors, which was really messed up by dream logic and required being closed juuuust so in order for the locks to catch, and of course the doors didn't want to stay shut properly. Then when they did, the locks had turned from more simple rotating latches to something more like the plastic belt connectors you see sometimes on backpacks or amusement park ride seatbelts.

We had just gotten the doors properly locked when the man and the lady arrived on the far side. The teenage boy wasn't anywhere to be seen. They told us to open the doors, and he was being really mean about it, not really pleading but demanding it. I had a really off feeling about him (and I already did from the stupid "hot" lady episode), and if I opened the door for the chick who was stupid enough to hang out with him, I'd be letting him through too. He felt like a danger right now about as bad as the other stuff. At least it seemed he was out of bullets, so they didn't have any real option to get through the door.

As I was debating for a moment, he suddenly made a sort of "boo" face at us through the glass, including spreading the fingers out on his hands next to his face. I realized at that point that my impression was correct, even more so... we had no value to this man. I shook my head, said, "...sorry..." and took off with the kids.

As we ran quickly through darkened hallways and rooms that had absolutely nothing in them, I held the girl's hand and she had her little brother's. I told the girl to hold onto her brother's hand like their lives depended on it (which technically they did), and that if I had to I would hold both their hands but it seemed like I needed one free right now. I was using it to open doors at this point, and we were making fast progress even though we had no real idea where we were going. At this point it was mostly just knowing we were getting away from previous problems.

Suddenly one of the doors led us into a room crammed with office supplies and other junk, but more importantly, there were windows around the back-right and back walls. Daylight! There were desks along the back wall (also piled with stuff) but with enough room to climb up and open the windows. I opened one, and found that there was only a simple window screen between us and freedom. I could see that we could make it to the ground below, as we were on the second floor, but we were going to be okay! I was thrilled, and somehow could even tell that the surrounding area was relatively safe... that's right, it was raining. There was something about rain making the environment safe, I can't remember why. The dinosaurs were allergic to rainwater? Who knows.

In the meantime, suddenly a gust of wind blew what seemed like a whole bunch of mosquitoes into the room. The kids freaked out and told me to close the window, and in confusion I remembered the screens and then noticed that the lower half had much larger, almost artistically-placed holes in the screenwork. (I think the dream was just trying hard to fill a plot hole on the fly.) Then I noticed where the breeze was whipping stuff outside past the other windows, and that it looked a whole lot like tiny fluffy-ended flower or tree seedlings gusting around.

I told the kids this, that it wasn't bugs, and that held in the logic and vanished from being a dream element. At this point we were preparing to get the heck out of there, and thinking maybe there were a few things that could be scavenged from the room (like rain jackets or plastic trash bags to use as such) although we weren't going to take more than a moment or two. For some reason I had taken my shoes and socks off to get up onto the desk, or so now the dream decided. So I was fishing around in the junk on the floor for my shoes and started putting my socks back on.

The girl told me she thought I should bring the (possibly Pokémon?) cards with me, as she said she had a feeling they would be on the mantle in the new place we would get when we got free of this. Suddenly the plot element was added that I had been carrying (...how?? lol) a pillowcase with the cards as well as other regular playing cards and something similar. The entire thing was a bit on the heavy side, so I asked about the other cards, and she giggled and said they weren't necessary or entirely optional.

I said something in agreement to that, I can't remember what, and I think I was about to clear the bag out so there were only the cards cute lil' miss possibly-psychic wanted to see in the future home we were apparently going to share... which did seem right, I'd built up a connection with these kids during the adventure...

Then I woke up.

I'm not sure how the dream started, but the first part I remember vaguely was almost like watching television or stock footage of meteorites or fallen space debris landing on earth, creating craters and blowing through buildings like they were nothing.

The next part I remember more clearly was being in front of the double doors of a small building that had a dock attached to it; the water was either a lake or a large inlet from the ocean. The doors were behind me, there was a grassy area to the right where one could access the dock/building, and then the dock stretched out in front of me. Above the entrance area where I was standing, there was a patio cover for shade and the sky directly above wasn't visible because of it. It was daytime and sunny.

The idea of meteorites was sticking in the dream plot, and there were other people under the shade with me. A bunch of them went inside because they were afraid of getting hurt, but I knew it didn't make a bit of difference trying to hide in a building and instead went to peeked out from under the shade. I saw very high up two little meandering white trails in the partly-cloudy sky. The trails moved quickly but oddly enough they weren't straight lines like one would expect from a meteorite. I knew that's what they were though.

There was a black guy who seemed to have a sense of humor about the whole thing but he was still staying completely under the shade. I moved back a couple steps to tell him what I'd seen, and managed to convince him to go look again with me. Now the trails being left by the incoming things were straight, and it seemed like they were coming almost right at us. Then we realized they were and we ducked back under the shade as one of them landed maybe a few yards away on the grass and bounced a couple of times (dream logic fail), still heading for me particularly.

I fell down backwards and landed sitting just before the thing stopped right next to me. I was quite a bit surprised, but since it was there I touched it. It looked like a chunk of ice maybe the size of a loaf of bread at most and felt smooth and slightly warm. Then I made a joke to the black guy, something along the lines of, "Well, if it's got a space virus on it, I've got it now," as I rubbed the fingers together that had touched the thing.

There was some kind of low booming vibration noise now, and I went to look more to the right of the shaded area (though we were still under it) with the black guy. We could now see that we'd missed the impact of a huge meteorite far off in the distance in some mountains. The smoke cloud now rising from that area made it hard to see exactly what was going on, but it almost looked like the meteorite was as big as the smoke cloud was round, which would make it several miles in diameter.

Then our attention was drawn back to the water, where we'd missed yet another hit very much closer, and oddly enough it didn't seem to be making noise like expected. The strike had landed in the water about twenty yards from the end of the dock. Again there was the impression that the meteorite was as big as the smoke cloud rising from it, and the smoke and water seemed to be boiling with the meteorite only partly submerged. Then the smoke cleared like dramatic cinematography special effects to reveal a large black sphere with an oily, shiny surface.

The black dude had enough and ran for the doors, but I walked towards the sphere instead and remember saying out loud, "I've seen this somewhere before..." almost like a suppressed memory was trying to get through. The guy was yelling at me but I was half-entranced by the thing. Then an invisible, powerful force pulled me off the dock and through the air towards the sphere as if I were nothing. I knew it was the sphere doing this, and that it was intelligent.

I had a sense that I was in danger, but was still fairly mesmerized by the sphere. I held my hands out to it like I wanted to touch it, and it seemed like it was looking at me somehow even if the surface didn't change. It had me slowly circling it towards the side away from the building, and then suddenly it moved me faster so I was behind it and out of sight of the others. Part of the sphere's side started shifting and stretching and making a hollow area in its side and then I was sucked into it. The stuff closed around me and I realized I couldn't move, or breathe, and there was no light at all.

The next thing I remember, I must have "woken up" from blacking out or something because I found myself in what looked like underground interconnecting rooms of a city building somewhere. There were a lot of exposed pipes and concrete walls, floor, and ceiling. A guy was there, white this time and probably in his 40's, he seemed like military or ex-military and was dressed in casual clothing. He told me his resistance group had saved me from the sphere, as they already knew somehow that even with all things the alien spheres were immune to, they could be defeated with soda pop.

He said they'd cleared a lot of it out of my system but that there was still some there. I discovered this was true while trying to clear my throat, and coughed up nasty black stuff onto the floor. The guy had a can of pop and used some of it on the black stuff to make sure it was dead (I don't really remember what it did). I think he said that I could eat something to regain strength, but that their doctor wanted me to drink a bunch of soda sometime soon and get the rest of the junk cleared out (which would mean throwing up a lot ^^; ). I decided to go find the doctor and get it done sooner than later.

Then I woke up.

(The roleplay characters in question were two initial concepts I had daydreamed up and Zombie-kun now plays Dimitri while I play Ian. Dimitri is somewhere in his 20's and takes care of Ian who is 13-14, and they are escaping 1920's Russia as the older one works to afford transportation and whatnot. Ian has amnesia from a terrible event that Dimitri rescued him from, and trusts Dimitri implicitly; they had not met before that incident. It's a really sweet story in the making ^_^ but anyways, those are the two characters.)

It was almost like some kind of fantasy world and Dimitri/Ian's story combined together to form the dream setting. Dimitri and Ian were in this odd observation room, and the monitors showed views outside of a yellow-orange wind-smoothed limestone hillside, especially one part that was a more flat vertical surface. There were giant yellow ants all around, a little taller than a tall person, though pretty soon they went into a hidden door in that flat part of the hill.

Dimitri for some reason wanted to go talk to the ants for help and told Ian to stay in the room. At this point I became Ian and watched on the monitors as Dimitri tried knocking on the hidden door and was let inside.

I realized that even though Dimitri had left me behind to stay safe, I didn't feel safe anywhere other than with him, and even if something bad was about to happen to Dimitri (had a bad feeling about that) I didn't care, I was going to go be with him. So I was headed off to find the secret door... and as logic failed completely I think I did get reunited with him, and my presence might actually have been helping the situation with the ants (like they didn't believe Dimitri was taking care of someone else like he said he was).

Then I woke up.

I was a preteen-ish girl in a generic family at first (nobody I know in real life). A mother, father, me, an older brother maybe, an older sister or two; all of us were wearing bathing suits and it was night time. We were walking home from the beach, along a wooden pathway running between some wooden beach buildings into a more forested area. As we got to an intersection of these walkways, it was suddenly very dark on the part where I and my mother and one sister were. It was almost like literally inky black, while the rest of the area was more well-lit.

We had been discussing self defense and the concept of bad guys assaulting people. Suddenly I started screaming like I knew there were bad guys in the darkness trying to get us. Dream logic was failing (worse) at this point, as it was almost like I was trying to make there be bad guys there, and then they were there trying to drag us off the walkways into a bit of swampy stuff below. We couldn't see who the attackers were, it was too dark. I also remember being scared once the enemies were actually real. They were trying to kidnap us! We were the president's family, the dream suddenly decided, and somebody was trying to take us away!

Then my father, yes, now President Obama, came to help us out of the dark stuff, as if he could pull us up out of it... which... worked. The bad guys no longer existed, and it was as if I'd done something goofy and just freaked everybody out in the process. (Technically, that's exactly what happened, but wtf dream logic faaail!) We were safe and everything was fine, yet I remember wondering where the Secret Service was, because they weren't around us or anywhere in sight. My father was leading the lot of us and a little ways ahead.

There was now another man walking along with us, and a boy with him that the man said he knew. I didn't know either of them. I had a branch of holly in my hand (and I have no idea where it came from now) and decided to go up to talk to my father. I was carrying on like a brat, whining about the holly because I'd lost some of it, plus it was hurting my fingers, but I wanted to know if he'd get me some more. And then I whispered really quietly, "He knows." I think this was some bizarre half-plot idea that the dream dropped as soon as it thought of it, as if the stranger guy had something to do with a conspiracy against my father. Like, Obama was going incognito or hiding out or something. But then it was back to "Wah! I want holly!" and wondering where the Secret Service was. They still hadn't shown up.

Then I woke up.

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.