sanity is relative

(This is apparently what happens after I spend 3+ hours on Skype talking to someone I met via Cry's video game livestreams, before going to bed. That someone would be Hiro, who you will be seeing here shortly. O.o )


I was playing some kind of coop multiplayer Amnesia-like game with Hiro via both the game client and chatting with Skype, except that instead of normal Amnesia: The Dark Descent with its medieval castle interior, the concept was to run around a modern day mental hospital plagued with monsters (the zombie ones from the Amnesia game) and avoid being caught by them or the regular staff while looking for books. Hiro's character was an Asian boy in his early teens and I was a girl with long-ish blonde hair; I think I'd gone with Alice for my character's name.

The building's layout was bizarre for an actual hospital. Hallways were ridiculously skinny, had maze-like branches all over the place and interconnected rooms, and you couldn't do anything about the lights that were always on. Everything was painted white, so there was no real chance of hiding anywhere in the open. Not only would the monsters cause you to pass out if they caught you, but doctors and nurses also wandered the hall and any of them including the monsters catching you meant waking back up in your room. I can't remember if the rooms were locked by default, I just remember it being so much backtracking that you didn't want to get caught, plus there was a feeling of impending doom like something bad was going to happen if you couldn't escape the place in time.

The point of the books was that they somehow unlocked doors. The books were hardcover, red, and had gold filigree designs on the covers that were all the same. If I remember right, they all had a four digit number on the first page while the rest of the pages were blank, which had to do with how they opened the doors. Some books were fakes and only the right ones would actually open a door at all, and only the door they were meant to. The books could be found in closets or refrigerators that were otherwise empty of anything else, and if you had one that worked with you when you opened the right door, the door would just automatically unlock itself.

I remember being in a small room that had a fridge and two closets, and Hiro took a book out of the fridge while I grabbed one from a closet. At this point it was becoming real as opposed to a video game, although I still had some odd fuzzy concept of an inventory system so that I wasn't literally carrying the books around (I had several by now), they just vanished but I still "had them." I remember hearing a monster grumbling out in the hall right at that moment. The hall went around the room outside past two different doors on opposite ends. Hiro told me to go one way and he'd go the other and distract the monster.

I didn't like this idea but he was already out the one door so I ran through the other. I realized somehow that he'd been caught by the staff and I kept running, as for some reason they were assuming Hiro was the only patient not in his room. He'd bought me some time, but now I had to figure out how to put it to good use and if I stayed in the halls I still ran the risk of getting caught at random. I found a nurse's bathroom and hid under the sink. The idea was to burn some time so the staff would get complacent and maybe enough would go to sleep after-hours so I could finally escape.

Logic really started falling apart at this point (apparently if you stay in one place in a dream for too long, small constant changes start building up into ridiculousness). What started as a long counter with sinks in it and one big cupboard area underneath with several doors (my hiding spot was as far into the corner opposite the entry door by the far end of the sinks as possible), slowly turned into just a counter without the cupboard underneath, and then finally the counter had some kind of tablecloth which hid me better. I remember spending a lot of time trying to make sure I was as squeezed into the corner as it got, and that the white dress I was wearing was staying hidden with me instead of flared out partly so it was visible from beyond the counter.

This whole time I was dreading that someone would actually come into the bathroom, and yes, eventually a nurse and a nurse's assistant walked in, both women. For some reason, they had a bunch of dirty dishes on a two-tiered rolling metal cart. The assistant started shoving dishes under the counter and it was obvious she could see me, but I sat there and thought "You can't see me, you can't see me," over and over. At this point I vaguely understood that I was in a dream and that logic had broken enough she shouldn't have seen me right off the bat.

She didn't say anything to her superior who was blathering on about various gossip and directions for the next shift or something, and I realized it wasn't because I was desperately trying to insist in my head that she couldn't see me. The assistant wasn't evil, and knew this place was way more than just some honest asylum. She kept glancing at me but only crammed more dishes under the counter (I could hardly move for all the dishes). Suddenly the nurse in charge started saying really crazy things, like she was hallucinating and what she saw was no longer what anyone else in the room saw. The nurse stood still and started staring off at nothing as what she was saying rambled to a halt, and the assistant looked at me and mouthed the word, "Run."

I managed to extricate myself from the dishes without making any noise and ran out of the bathroom, not noticed at all by the crazy spaced-out nurse. I found a new hallway that led to a large closet, and inside the closet was a whole lot of hanging lab coats. I couldn't see the back of the closet, so I kept pushing through and the lab coats gave way to winter jackets and I found myself suddenly breaking out of a very thick display of such coats in a clothing store at a shopping mall.

There were tables just beyond, possibly for a cafe in this same store (logic, what is this concept? we don't do logic in dreams). There were randomly dream created family members there who recognized me and greeted me only like it was any old day, not like I'd been locked away in the funny farm. They didn't know, and I myself wasn't even sure how I'd gotten locked up there now. While they asked me mundane questions I said something to the effect of, "Listen, I've just escaped from a mental asylum up there on the hill," and pointed off in the general direction of where the hospital was (you couldn't see it from inside the mall).

They were all like, "Yeah right, very cute ha ha," and I said, "No, I'm serious, and I'm not even sure that I'm really out of there at all." I had a bad feeling that I was still somewhere in the asylum while hallucinating what I was seeing now, or somehow had my "spirit" split between the places and maybe I could actually tell these people something useful before waking back up in the asylum. I just hoped I was still hidden somewhere instead of stuck in my room again. I remember one dark-haired guy who was a random family friend looking off in the general direction of the hospital, he was starting to be convinced there was more to this.

Then I woke up.

There was a family with a mother and two kids, one being a teenage boy and the other a preteen girl. They were on vacation from up north and arriving at a desert hotel in Texas; the place was set up like a bunch of disconnected buildings over a wide area. It was still afternoon, very hot and sunny.

The hotel office was the first building as the mother pulled the car past it, but there was no obvious parking lot right there. She said she'd find it and went to the left along the road, there were more buildings and stuff to the right. They passed a pool, and the son mentioned it though he also said perhaps the water wasn't so promising after all, as from the angle he was looking at it, it looked like it might have been a murky green. It was hard to tell, though, and there was another bigger pool after that with even less-promising water.

The further they went, the more obvious it was they were getting too far away, and the son mentioned this but the mother refused to go back, still convinced the parking lot was out here somewhere. He said it was too far to walk back, and then as they seemed to leave the complex entirely and approach a large warehouse and other buildings, he said, "Look, we're in a whole other township now!"

The mother pulled over and the son got out, tired of dealing with the stupidity. He knew where the hotel office was, even if it was quite a walk back. There was a place to get drinks and he went inside, asking the guy behind the counter how much a Cherry Coke was. On the answer, the teenager put a coin on the counter and said, "I'll take 20, then."

The coin had the denomination "10000" on one side, along with the word "Canada", and on the other side it had the word "GOLD". The guy behind the bar stayed where he was, leaning up against another counter along the back wall; he could see the coin from there.

Some older guy chuckled at the kid and said, "That's worth about two bucks, son."

It still wasn't gonna fly even for a soda, so the kid finally dug a quarter out of his pocket, which was apparently the price of the drink. Still the guy behind the bar didn't move, and the teen asked why that wasn't enough.

"Sales tax."

"Geez, you guys charge sales tax on food here?" Digging around in his pocket again, he pulled out a penny and added it, and he really didn't have any more so he was about to ask how much sales tax could possibly be on a quarter.

A woman came up, she was probably late 20's at least and pretty, with short blonde hair and wearing jeans and a denim leather jacket over a t-shirt of some sort. She added random coins to the little pile and told the guy behind the counter to keep the change. The kid couldn't believe someone so pretty was helping him out, and then it seemed she wanted to actually sit by him at the counter and talk to him.

Now there seemed to be some kind of plot developing, to do with the woman needing to get some information out of the kid. Meanwhile about all he was thinking was that if this kept up and she stuck around even when he would have to walk back to the hotel eventually, he was suddenly glad it was a very long walk back. In the meantime, the soda came in bottles as she had also ordered a regular Coke for herself, and it seemed to keep nicely cold even when they refilled the glasses later.

I had the visuals of the glasses being refilled, but made a comment to someone nearby as if I were watching a movie. I said I could really go for a rootbeer float, regular flavor (the concept of Cherry Coke versus regular Coke was confusing things). I don't know who it was I was talking to, I was still paying attention to the... movie?

Then I woke up.

The first dream was rather long and I barely remember any of it, but it involved zombies who passed on their disease by biting. They could also make zombies out of animals, and although the animal bites didn't make the disease contagious to a person, they were vicious and obviously getting any sort of injury doesn't help one's cause in staying un-zombified. For part of the dream I was indoors and I think underground, which was bad because zombies did better in the dark. The end of it had me and a guy who would be like the main or almost-main character in a movie (if I were the main) outside in the sunlight, with some kind of supposedly-protective circle of branches around us.

The circle was probably a good thirty or forty feet wide, so there was a good amount of room to move, and I think there was only one zombie beyond the circle at the moment but there were a lot more animals. I remember specifically a squirrel or two, and one of them managed to get into the circle and bite me on the back of my right hand (OW yes it definitely very much hurt). There was a third guy with us I think, and I was yelling at him that this circle thing wasn't keeping the bad crap out like it was supposed to and realized right around then that he'd been zombified just now. The whole thing was going to hell and I'm not really sure how it ended, but I woke up really scared and realized it had been the first nightmare of that type I'd had in quite a while (the typical scary-nightmare or horror-movie inspired thing). I was disappointed I'd gone through the whole thing without realizing it was a dream, because if I had, I could have woken myself up.

Well, I went back to sleep because I was way too tired to get up. I went almost immediately back to dreaming. I was in my (randomly dream-created) house, with my (randomly dream-created) boyfriend and family, and it was night time. I was afraid the zombies would attack, as if part of the old dream had carried on to this new dream. Suddenly my boyfriend revealed that he was one, and I ran out of the house. I remember very little of this dream and I wish I could because I'm pretty sure it was epic-scale. I eventually met up with a slightly overweight middle-age lady with a kindly face and medium-length, kinda-curly brown hair. She knew who I was, and told me that I was very important to stopping the evil.

I think I was telling her about what had happened so far, and as I was going over the beginning, the dream sort of flowed into my narrative and thus ended and started to repeat. This time I was back in my house at night where I'd started (though the house had changed) and my boyfriend was there again with my family. I think I was telling them about the first dream, as if I'd just had it or something, and I told them we needed to lock the doors and windows to make sure the zombies didn't get in because I didn't think it was just a dream. Then one of the zombies I recognized came to the front door, I could see him, and as I was freaking out I began to realize my family and boyfriend were all zombies and they were saying something like "she's not ready yet."

I'm not sure what happened to the zombie outside (I think they let him in) but he wasn't out there anymore and I ran outside to get away from them all. I ran left along the sidewalk and I remember thinking it was important I stay under the stars. I looked up and saw what looked like a yellow glow-in-the-dark sword-shaped mouse pointer in the sky pointing to a specific star, so I ran that direction (which was sort of the way I was already going, to my right a little but for the moment I was staying on the sidewalk instead of crossing the street).

An expensive black luxury sedan that I think was a BMW suddenly seemed to be swerving at me or chasing me, so I had to change directions. I silently begged the sky for more help and saw the sword was now on a star further to my left now and right on the horizon, leading me onto grass to my left that dipped down a hill and into some forest and stuff. I was still near the top of the hill as the car stopped and two black people got out, a guy and a girl, dressed nicely and I remember the guy had very short hair.

They asked me what the heck my problem was, and I forget what reason they were actually there but I begged them for a ride. They asked me where I wanted to go and I forget where I said (San Paulo?) and they were cool with that. So I got in the back seat of the car which was now for some reason a convertible, and I had a pillow in my arms when we drove right back past my house so I hugged it and looked away from the house hoping they wouldn't recognize me but at this point I knew I had red hair and I had a bad feeling they would... but we weren't chased immediately. There didn't seem to be anybody at all outside the house as I peeked back at it when we'd gone past.

The couple said they had to make a stop, which was uncomfortably only a few blocks from my house up a side street, but I had barely started telling them about the zombies and I don't think they believed me. The lady they met was going to give them some food they'd ordered, I think they'd found her through some kind of internet service. It was the lady who I had met in the first dream, the one who said I was important, but all I knew now was that she was somehow important, I just couldn't remember why. We were all out of the car as she gave the people their food, and then asked me, "Do I know you from somewhere?"

I answered something about not being sure, and she asked me what my name was. I said, "Shane..." and then it was like it was really hard to remember my last name, it was like I knew the one I had was wrong, and that there was another name I was supposed to be known by. So finally I got it out, "...Dawson" (ahahaha my brain must be taking inspiration from YouTube, even if I have wanted the name Shane for years before running across Shane Dawson). She was sort of looking at me a little funny, like she might be figuring something out, but the other people were saying we had to go now so I left with them.

A few blocks later we suddenly got rammed from behind by another car (and now our car was back to being a sedan). The guy driving finally believed about the zombies, and was wondering how they'd found us so fast. There was some dream illogic behind my response ("They're editing the video!" as if there had been video footage of us going by, and access to fully processed video feed for editing meant they... somehow had all the information they needed) and now it was a car chase.

As if this were a bad Ed Wood movie, we found ourselves in heavy city traffic in broad daylight a few moments later. The zombie car was still too close behind and now they had a large, odd tractor thing on their side as well. I kept telling the driver he needed a wide open road, this kind of car should be able to go really fast and this was totally the wrong area to try and escape in. The girlfriend of the guy agreed with me, and even suggested it might be better if I took a cab instead as those guys could drive fast.

I think we heard on the radio or something that there was an actual ghostbusting service being advertised. I asked the people if they knew about that, they didn't really but the girl drug out a phone book and handed it to me, it was supposed to be the White Pages or something, and she apologized saying it might be harder to find in there. She also gave me her cell phone to borrow, and I dialed 911 while I was looking through the book trying to figure out what the heck section ghostbusting would be under. The operator wasn't honestly sure she believed what I was trying to tell her about the zombies and all, and was fairly sure she couldn't help me. The last thing I asked her was if she had any guesses as to where the ghostbusting number would be, and she said to try the services section. Conveniently, there was such a section, and it wasn't huge.

In that section of the phone book (which was difficult to read because reading is often difficult in dreams), I finally found a page with spiritual services, a lot of occult-related stuff though too much of it seemed like it was places that just sold stuff and had fun-houses and maybe palm readings or fortune tellers if lucky. Still, that had potential and an ad I saw for a place was one I wanted to go to but wasn't sure how to get there, and was about to mention it. The girl suddenly tried handing me a very slim "phone book" that she said was the Yellow Pages with a warm, triumphant smile like it was way more what I needed... but I still wanted to go to the place where the ad was and was about to ask again.

I noticed the shops in the area we were in were a lot like the section of the phone book I'd been looking in. Then the guy said something like, "What about this place?" and suddenly he was pulled over right by that one shop I'd seen the ad for, and in the window there was a sign for "Horror House" though the windows hadn't been cleaned in a while and the whole neighborhood looked really dumpy.

Well, it was the place I wanted to go and we were sitting ducks with the zombies still too close though it seems like we'd temporarily lost them. I said sure I'd go in and begged them to please stay and wait for me in case I had to run out fast again. I grabbed Teddy (my actual teddy bear) who for some reason was in the car as if he'd been with me the whole time, but I left my purse with them as if it was somehow safer to do so (??) and also left the door open even with the zombie threat because I was that worried I'd have to run right back into the car. Also, right around this time there was another person in the back seat of the car, an Asian young lady who the dream plot just sort of threw in like she'd always been there was well.

When outside the store before this conversation, I'd seen some of the employees through the window. Now as I went into the store, the layout changed (baaad dream logic, bad) and also I no longer remember having Teddy (baaad dream edit? lol). I sort of recognized the employees (a guy and a girl in toned-down punky haircuts and stuff) and well it was the same kind of store so I just went with it. I walked past the main customers and those two employees, feeling that the help I wanted wasn't in that area, and I would know the right kind of person when I saw them... if they were there at all.

I saw a lady behind a different counter, she was older and I think she had longish light-colored hair. I could see in her eyes that she held wisdom and knowledge of the sort I was looking for, or something very close to it, so I walked up to her and said I needed help. I forget exactly how I phrased it, possibly being under attack from darkness I was afraid to talk about in public, but at the end I said, "and I'm not looking for help from 'god'" and I even used air quotes.

She nodded, seeming to understand, and then I realized she had totally vanished while I'd... stood there staring for a moment? The Asian girl from the car was now with me (she'd come to check on me I think) and I said, "Wow, she's good." I knew the older lady was going to either talk to someone before talking to me again, or was fetching someone else... possibly because she'd told me. I forget.

It was only a moment or two later that a short, elderly Asian woman walked out from a back room and guided me to go sit nearby with her on a sort of round booth-like seat without a table. I sat down with her and the other girl who was with me, and started telling her about the zombies. I really don't remember what all I said, but this all seemed to make sense to her and she was saying something back to me, I'm not sure what, but as she did so her eyes started looking past me. I looked behind me, back the way I had come, and the area there was totally obscured by almost living darkness.

The old lady got up yelling some kind of curse or something at it (I forget, words of banishment probably) and stretched out her hand. From it came a yellow-white stream of magic with a thick orange-red cord through the middle of it, and it made a long line as it struck into the darkness. A male voice said something from inside the darkness, I don't remember what it was but probably something about the futility of her standing against him. Then I could see a man in the darkness there, and I knew it was one of the zombies, but now it was like I also knew they were actually vampires. Could be that was part of the dialogue, I wish I could remember it better.

The man countered the magic with his own power (which I don't remember what it looked like), and the lady shriveled up and fell backwards, dead. The other girl by me tried to get in his way as well and I think she also either died or got zapped into unconsciousness. Then I was on the floor as well, passing out because he'd hit me with some of that power next, and as everything went dark I heard the voice of Vampire Hunter D asking a very short question. Sadly, I can't remember the question now, though I do believe it had to do with asking where I had vanished to. I realized that perhaps I had disappeared off the floor completely, perhaps with my female friend too, and maybe the lady who I had seen in the previous dream had done it? Perhaps all hope was not yet lost?

But I wouldn't find out, because 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.

The details are fuzzy now, but basically Pyramid Head kept chasing me and my real life family through various locations. And we knew fully well he intended to kill us all. At one point, we hit very slippery and thick, consistent ice on a roadway, and were somehow managing to slide along on our feet. We looked back to see Pyramid Head ice skating behind us on two of his kind of sword.

The dream kept repeating, sometimes because I'd woken up, thought about it, and went back to sleep. Each time it restarted, we'd try a different combination of things to try and get away easier. The restarts were very annoying; at one point as we'd more or less gotten away. Every time we were back at the start (some sort of vacation spot with our belongings) I'd try to gather up useful things quickly and then get everybody running as fast as possible. I remember carrying at least one of my kid siblings at various points. Their ages seemed to change throughout the dream too.

Also, on some of the restarts, just because I knew what was going to happen, some or none of the others didn't. So it was like, "Look, we're all gonna die if we don't move it so MOVE IT run run run yes out the door no seriously DEATH IMPENDING! MOVE!!!"

Eventually I woke up for the last time.

At first I was a young lady of some sort who was in the hospital and this other family member came up, another woman a little older. I was supposed to be unconscious but I could see this woman inject me with like three or four syringes full of morphine. She was overdosing me, trying to kill me!

Then my perspective was switched to the evil girl and the person "I'd" tried to kill became the elderly grandmother of the family, a very important person in the heirarchy. (The attempted murder scene repeated from the new viewpoint, with a few dream-logic-messed-up differences like having problems with one of the syringes.)

Apparently I failed to kill the old woman, and now people were trying to figure out who'd OD'd her. So far I was coming up clean and appeared clueless as the rest. I was worried about some apples in her room tho, as I'd apparently also injected morphine in a few of them. I also remember eating one during a family meeting, so it'd look like someone tried to attack me too. But I was worried that would come across as too obvious, that I'd set myself up but I was really the criminal.

The apples were still in the grandmother's room (and tons of them, along this odd counter with little sides on it so the apples wouldn't roll off). I was trying to think of how to get rid of them all entirely, or figure out which ones I'd poisoned before someone else showed up (I think the grandmother either had been moved from the room or was still completely out of it)...

I don't remember the rest.

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.