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.

I was a guy mercenary/gunman type running through a hospital at first, and people had been turned into very slow-moving zombies somehow (though they looked like normal people other than the slow movement and intention to kill the non-zombified). I don't remember much of the hospital.

I think I ended up outside for a short while, then I was in a huge apartment building. I was dual-wielding two pistols of some sort and I kept shooting zombies. Suddenly I was following Alma (the little girl version from the F.E.A.R series), who had something to do with the solution to the zombie issue (she wasn't the actual problem). She was running like a normal human girl instead of spooky supernatural critter / whatever she actually is, and had a light-tan colored, old-fashioned backpack on her back. I specifically remember the backpack being rendered in low-resolution pixels, like in a video game.

We kept going up floors and running through long hallways where zombies would slowly come out from rooms on each side. I think whatever it was we were looking for as a clue to the apocalypse stuff was far up in the building, and for some reason we couldn't just go up all the floors at once. I think we took elevators at some points and stairs at others. In one hallway with a lot of corners and doors, I had problems with my guns jamming and threw them away. Logic failed as it tried to propose a replacement gun out of something nonsensical I picked up (I don't even remember what it was, it was that illogical).

I made a comment to Alma about my stupid guns jamming and how I was unimpressed with the whole situation. She said something back but I can't remember what.

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.

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.