sanity is relative

This started with other stuff but got interesting as I was standing in a parking lot outside of a tall building in the daytime. I saw a dog flying through the air like it was swimming happily through it, about ten feet off the ground. It was a golden retriever type of dog. Meanwhile, buh? I kept watching, knowing something incredible was going on, and as the dog got further away there appeared just above it a kind of black mist in a tight swirl. Jagged black lines or black lightning came down from the mist and totally disintegrated the dog, and the whole thing vanished. It gave me the impression that something had just deleted an anomaly, and I wasn't supposed to see any of it.

I remember seeing a gentleman in Victorian-era clothing off on a sidewalk a moment later, and I think there was something else odd about it but I can't remember what now. The black mist stuff appeared above him too and POOF bye mister whoever you were. There was something else too that made no sense and then black-mist-vanished, can't remember what it was, but at this point I looked up at the sky and noticed there were very dark clouds that were parting in a wide circle above the tall building near me. I could see the side of a building with a whole bunch of windows in kinda dated apartment style, and that was falling very slowly downwards.

I realized there must be some kind of instability between our dimension and one nearby, and that I probably had very little time to find somewhere safe from the impending crash of that building up above. I had no idea how big the thing even was, and had a feeling that running away wouldn't suffice. So I ran into the big building because I (somehow) knew it had a deep basement system. I ran inside and started yelling for anyone to hear that they had to get down under the ground as far as possible. Even if we ended up buried but alive we might have a chance to get out or get dug out, in the meantime I just yelled at random people to go downstairs as far as they could.

I found some people having a church service in one room as I was trying to find the stairs down, and they were having trouble believing me. Whatever, sucks to be them, I kept going until I found a way down. The dream setting started to shift to where I was now only in a house and there was a downstairs that was still unfortunately half-open to open ground (large windows filled one wall, it was like the house was built on the side of uneven ground so the front door upstairs was on one level of ground and the bottom opened out onto the lower ground).

I was now trying to get a bunch of kids to hide, and I remember ducking down almost behind one couch and then thinking as I sat there that this wasn't going to help. I ran back upstairs and found a closet that had a laundry machine in it and enough room for someone to be in there. Several someone's technically, another girl arrived and wanted to hide with me while a third thought she could find somewhere better. I tried to tell her otherwise but she ran off so we shut the door.

Then the crash hit, and logic went all to heck. It felt like the closet had somehow been separated from the house and catapulted straight upwards. The explosion outside was something now like a nuke going off, and as the other girl and I kept our feet against the door while sitting on the floor with our backs to the washing machine, the floor started getting really hot. There were random sheets of metal like extra-large cookie sheets and possibly a flat plywood section or something, I tried sticking one or two of those under us to keep from being fried as the floor took on a look that it was burning straight through (reminded me a bit of partly-cooled lava texture in video games).

I remember thinking that if we were flying through the air, at some point we'd come back down and I had no idea how we were supposed to survive the impact. The logic fell apart so much though that the dream began to change entirely, to the point that I think I was telling someone else about it in a new house in a new location that I thought was actually not a dream, knowing at that point that the other part was a dream. I think I believed it was a warning, though, and that something really bad was about to happen.

I remember the idea that something tipped me off, but I'm not sure what. I ran to the windows and looked out, and saw a whole bunch of ridiculously large metal cubes (like Borg ships but smoother) arriving in the sky very high up and hovering there. I said, "They're here," and I told everyone to hide. There were random children of various ages and one or two adults in this house that my dream-self knew, and one person from real life which was my little sister who the dream decided was about thirteen again.

So yes, I told everyone to hide and I told them not to move, no to try and run away. Just find a good place to hide inside the house and stay there. I grabbed my white down comforter (that I actually own in real life) and found a closet that was painted white inside with fairly large shelves, like you could stack three or four rolls of toilet paper on each one. There was actually packages of toilet paper in there and not much else, and there were really only about two of them though they were some of the bigger packages (12 rolls, 24 rolls). I scooted under the bottom shelf with the comforter, toilet paper, and a random box of a half-decent size. Right at that moment my sister showed up to stand outside the door.

She seemed unsure this was going to work but I told her again to go hide, it was our only chance. She disappeared and I finished making a fairly decent hiding spot if nobody pulled the stuff out of the way. I lay there perfectly still and closed my eyes, and for some reason by this point the dream had decided there hadn't been a door on the closet in the first place. The house got very quiet and I started feeling very sleepy. So sleepy that it was like I could fall asleep right there even knowing we were about to or quite possibly now currently being invaded by aliens. I remember thinking I hoped if I fell asleep I would remain still and would survive simply because I remained hidden even while sleeping.

Light started to grow brighter, but my eyes were still closed. There wasn't any sound. I kept my eyes shut, and the light got brighter and brighter. I had a bad feeling there was one of the aliens standing outside the closet door right now, quite possibly staring straight at my hideout. I'm not sure if it was my imagination or a sorta movie-like dream info bit that showed a smooth, slender humanoid figure of a very light cream color standing out in the hall with a very bright light thing in its hands that just sort of glowed from some kind of central point.

I hoped that it couldn't literally see through the stuff I had in the way, and I was very aware for a very long moment of trying not to move, of trying to breathe without moving as much as possible. Then the light went away finally, and fairly quickly, and I realized the thing hadn't found me after all. I waited a bit longer and then peeked out from my hiding spot, saw nothing, and crept out further. One of the children came up to me whimpering and I asked if some of the others had try to run away from the house itself and she said yes. It was the two other adults, they'd been taken by the aliens and only the kids who had hidden stayed free for now.

While everyone seemed to think that for the moment we were safe, I knew better. I told them I had a bad feeling this was just a preliminary check, something fast to get the majority of people who didn't see it coming or weren't smart enough to hide right off the bat. I told them the aliens probably had some kind of device that would detect us but was clunkier to haul around or whatever, and now we needed to get out of the house. I think I was trying to figure out where to go, I have vague memories of some kind of Army base being nearby (maybe not very close but worth trying to travel to on foot) or possibly another structure with some kind of underground that was abandoned or not used much, and would serve as a better place to hole up and figure out what the heck to do, meet and/or gather others who had stayed free thus far.

I don't know what my solution was in the end, though, because then I woke up.

It started with thinking I'd woken up from the previous dream. I was in my bed in my place except it in no way resembled my real bed/place (yet my brain was convinced it was all normal). My kid sister showed up and wanted to play a complicated card game with me which at first I said I didn't know the rules to, so she said she'd teach me or show me, and then later seemed more like some sort of "magic trick." So she was dealing the cards and making piles out of them and asking me to pick a card and kept doing whatever it was she was doing. I was so out of it, I felt like I was really doped up on medication or perhaps I was still trying to hold on to the feeling of sleep.

My sister suddenly admitted as she combined most of the cards together again that it had been quite a while since she'd actually made sure all the cards were there. She dropped a card and said something like, "Oh mannnn" as it slid between the bed and the wall. I said I'd get it, and I think she said not to worry about it right away but I was determined to do it. I followed where the card had gone with my hand, then the bed was further away from the wall for some reason and I could keep following the route down to the floor which I did with my entire body. (Now that I think about it, the bed was sort of hospital-institutional with nicer bedding.) On the white-tile floor now, under the bed looking for the card (which was nowhere to be seen) and then I saw a length of thin chain (larger than necklace chain but smaller than the sort of chain you'd chain a gate closed with... the individual, round links might have been about 1/4 inch in diameter or maybe a touch bigger).

I wanted the chain, and I remember my sister saying something that I should leave it alone or get back to what she was showing me but I didn't care. There were other bits of chain too, two of them but in the end I stuck with the original one. It was at least two feet long and one end had a clasp, like a basic round jewelry clasp except larger, the same size as the links. I was out from under the bed by now and made the chain go around my right ankle, securing it there with the clasp and letting the other end trail. For the moment I let it drag on the floor and left the room, going out into the hallway. I don't really remember the hallway very well except that it was long and there were other doors leading into it, like a dorm floor or perhaps a hospital. There was a lot of white. I think one reason I'm having trouble remembering is because at this point I realized I was dreaming and I wanted to make the dream interesting.

I had been looking left down the hall but now I went right, starting to run a bit, holding on to the end of the chain so it wouldn't trip me. I wanted to get away, I wanted to escape, I didn't want to be here anymore, and I was thinking it's because I'm crazy and I'm in an asylum but I know this place is actually evil and I have to get out! Have to run, have to try. As I was thinking this stuff trying to convince the dream to take that plot concept, I could see the hallway ahead of me literally merged into a different-color hallway, sort of dingier with some sepia-tone to it and it seems like some puke-green color. There were wheelchairs and I knew that I could run into it and the dream would change properly.

So I did, still with the chain around my ankle (which as the plot went now was something I'd been secured to my bed with and had broken). As soon as I was in the dingier hallway I was completely in the mental hospital, and it wasn't really very easy to run or think because of the medication I was on... that had failed to keep me properly in bed. Up ahead the hallway got wider before going back to normal size, and in the middle of the wide part was a room that I couldn't see any details about except that its walls were made of the same painted-over cinder blocks as the hallway walls. There was a man sitting against the hall wall on the left on almost the far side of the room-thing. I knew he was a patient too, but I remember thinking I shouldn't trust anyone in my little escape attempt and then it seems like I remember another patient who was a friend (or at least someone I kinda trusted) saying this guy was bad news... that he sided with the staff.

Then a nurse came out of where there was apparently a door on the left side of the room-thing and I panicked because I didn't want her to see me. She was going to talk to the man or something, and although I thought for sure she'd see me I managed to go to the right without her noticing. Although the hallway continued I knew I couldn't go that way at least right now, but there was a smaller hall where I had headed to the right, and there were a couple of little staff-related rooms there, one to the left and one to the right.

I was totally lost because I'd never seen these rooms before (I'm not sure I'd seen much of the hospital before). It seems like I realized there was someone on the left side, meanwhile the lady back out in the hall was heading my direction so I went into the room on the right and at this point was only really looking for somewhere to hide. It looked like a storage and equipment room, things laid out on shelves, some of which had no backs and were spaced out in the middle of the room. I kept along the right-side wall seeing that it had a nook in it in the corner (that went right again just a little) where maybe I could hide.

Diagram time! Mostly because if anybody can see what the heck I'm talking about by now, you're doing good.

,--,______,   ,
|                 |
|                 |
|                 |
---------------
The open space on the upper right is the door I came in from, and the nook is in the upper left.

When I got there I noticed that there appeared to be a door on the right side of this nook (when standing in front of it with the main room's left wall to one's left as oriented in the diagram above). It looked like a very ordinary door, a bit worn and uninteresting and painted white like the rest of the walls in the room. It wasn't locked as I opened it, but right behind was a very obviously not normal door. It was a light brown color and had no door handle. I was scared now that the nurse was going to show up any second, and I had no idea if there was some sort of special trick involved in opening the second door. I tried just pushing on it, and it actually just pushed inwards. It was almost like it was a very light piece of wood that I then had to hold onto so it didn't fall because it wasn't attached to anything. Maybe it was broken... because it had sure seemed like the first major sign of "things aren't right here in supposedly-honest asylum land."

So anyways, beyond that things were a whole lot less finished-looking, either like creepy Silent Hill mode in one of those games, or a very unfinished basement. I could hardly see, it was so dark, but I was still thinking the goddamn nurse is going to find me if I don't do something fast. For some reason I couldn't do anything about the first door I'd opened, and dream logic was failing with the second door barrier thing as it was turning into a much smaller piece of plywood. How was this supposed to help block off the doorway? Then there was a second piece, and I remember trying to prop them up one against the other in an inverted V shape and hoping that would suffice.

For some reason it did, and the doorway was completely blocked again (which makes no sense considering the two pieces of wood came up to about my waist), as if I'd just shut the first stupid door in the first place. Either way, the dream was happy to be convinced I'd succeeded at least in that step, so whatever. It was even darker now with the door properly closed, but after a moment's confused thoughts (yay meds and fear) I realized that this was a place people went and it should have lights. There was a light-switch box to the left of the door and I turned it on. I saw that the little passage I was in went to stairs downwards shortly, wooden steps that still had that very-unfinished and old look to them.

I think I then realized that having the lights on was a bad idea, as staff would guess if they showed up that someone was there that shouldn't be. So I turned them off again and moved towards the stairs. I could now see a little better as further down the steps was a large open area that was again very much like an unfinished basement. Uneven dirt floor, concrete brick walls, very high indications of perhaps windows because of little bits of light, daylight! But I knew that I wasn't that close to freedom yet. Closer, but going to those light sources wouldn't do me any good, they just helped me to see right now.

At the bottom of the stairs, to the left was some more shelving and stuff and it didn't seem like a useful way to go. The basement opened up even further to the right, so I went that way. As I was working my way along very uneven ground that looked more like I was entering the very beginnings of a subway construction sight or something, I heard people shouting behind me. They knew I was there, and also that I was quite possibly on the correct route to get out of there. I was trying to move faster, the chain still there, but as I dared glance back (even with my brain screaming don't waste the time looking back) I saw there was already a nurse about thirty feet behind me.

I kept running (or trying, I was having issues running as I seemed really tired and the air really thick) and glanced back again after another moment and I saw that the nurse was wearing red (maybe it was a different nurse, or the dream decided to change her on the fly). It was more like a fancy red dress. I had only glanced at it though, back to running, and suddenly I had a memory of someone saying the lady with the red dress was the worst possible nurse you could encounter, that if she was on your tail you had no hope. It had the feel of a hospital myth, like some people didn't believe she even existed... and yet it appeared she was now chasing me. Well, whatever, I wasn't going to give up. Another glance, oddly enough, showed the nurse's skirt was red and maybe her collar, while the rest of her outfit had turned back a more normal white.

I managed to get myself corralled into a corner finally, choosing the wrong direction to run once I got closer to the far side of the huge bizarre area. I was so close, the other way had gone to a door but meanwhile I had one very big nurse ready to sedate me. She already had the syringe in her hand and even though I begged her not to hurt me she was very determinedly going to inject me. There were a couple other nurses in her wake as well. She moved to strike and suddenly I asked her, "Are you crazy too?" and she said, "Yes." The look on her face as she said it was a brainwashed/insane but determined combination. I thought I felt pain in my neck, but then she was still holding the syringe and I was still feeling the same, not getting sleepier.

The other nurses were now standing around, and it seemed like they had sort of decided they weren't sure they wanted to be doing what they were doing anymore. They were talking about the head doctor though, and how it was pretty much impossible to cross him. I don't remember if I encouraged the thought of breaking loose, but they decided to give it a shot, and now there were other patients who had apparently followed us down here. Someone opened the door I hadn't gotten to and we all filed outside, straight out into bright, warm sunshine. We found ourselves in a little walled-off sunken area with metal steps and a catwalk leading out of it, so we followed that.

We knew we were now free, and following this path would take us to further freedom. I stopped part-way across the catwalk though. I said something like, "What about the other patients in the hospital? They don't deserve to live like that. We should try to get them out." Some people didn't want to risk their freedom by going back in there. I thought we had a chance, if we worked together, whoever wanted to go, and I did say that I understood if people didn't want to risk it, but that whoever wanted to go back in should give it a shot. Also, the dream suddenly decided that maybe some of us had Heroes-like powers. There was one teenager who looked like he could have been in My Chemical Romance the way his hair, makeup, and clothes were, and he said he had some sort of ability (I don't remember what it was). He wasn't very confident in it, sort of like a minor thing he could do as opposed to something truly impressive, but he was volunteering to go on the rescue mission if I wanted him and I definitely did. One of the nurses agreed to help, and a handful of others were thinking about it.

Then I woke up.

It's daytime and I'm on a road trip with my entire immediate family (parents and three siblings). At some point all the water in the car starts turning into foamy orange liquid like melted sherbert meets fizzing-out soda. We get out of the car and realize it's happening to all water sources around us (other people pulled over too). As we're wondering what the heck is going on, it's suddenly nighttime and UFOs appear and suddenly these white yeti-like creatures are appearing and killing people. (They looked like the typical yeti from World of Warcraft.)

As we're running away, I try to write in a small notebook what happened in case the US Government comes here and finds the place wiped out and can't figure out what happened before it's too late. (I remember some daylight while I was writing, but only for that part.) I have alot of trouble actually writing this properly (and actually think in the dream something about how it can be hard to read and write in a dream because the wrong part of the brain is in use) but eventually get it down after concentrating really hard.

The yeti are currently distracted killing others further behind us (I think one of my brothers got it at that point, the older one) and the rest of us find a lake. We jump in without a second thought and start swimming, thinking that if the yeti go off smell this will throw them off. The surface of the water has dark foamy residue from the water-transforming thing from earlier but it's still mostly real water.

My kid sister starts talking about something random and wants to show off a song of some sort and starts yelling it really loudly. I keep trying to tell her to shut up, but can only do so by being louder than her. This attracts the attention of the yeti, who are now coming after us. I think they got my sister... and maybe my mom... and also now we're being chased by crocodiles that the noise drew in as well.

The water is clean now and it's daytime again and we're swimming like mad trying to follow currents in this river we entered at the end of the lake. (The currents go faster than the rest of the water.) I think my kid brother was lost somewhere during this part. That left my father and I, and the dream started really falling apart during some odd conversation while swimming about "being a man" (and yes, at the end, I was a man, sort of late-middle-age and balding? lol). The water turned into an odd series of flat wooden trays with numbers on them and... okay I can't even describe it really. FAIL.

Then I woke up.

I was in a house that was supposed to be the family house, but it didn't look like any house I've ever been in. My kid siblings were there, watching TV I think. I went into the kitchen and discovered there was a snake (on the counter? memory is fuzzy). Not just any snake, a cobra. I was afraid it was going to go after the kids, and it was really fast. I managed to grab it by the head (it was either that or get bit at that point).

The thing was freakishly strong, and was using its tail around my arm to try and pry its head out of my hand. I had no real clue what to do with the thing, but tried putting it into a large glass jar (think giant pickle jar). Dream logic intervened and decided there were suddenly large holes in the metal lid, and the snake got out again. I grabbed it again and ran outside, thinking maybe if I ran far enough away and threw it I could run back to safety. Meanwhile it was very difficult to keep proper hold of the snake.

The neighboring property was a house of some sort with a bunch of fields, like farmland. I thought perhaps the neighbors would have some idea what to do, or perhaps an axe or a hoe or anything we could try to use to kill the cobra. I ran across the couple who lived there, they were working on something outside. I asked them for help and they said something to the effect of "Oh, we grow those" or breed them or whatever.

I realized I didn't want to be anywhere near these crazy people anymore, and the snake was still trying to get loose and kill me. I was thinking of going back to the house to make an emergency telephone call or something, but then the snake finally pulled free properly and bit me. I died. And a little screen came up in my field of vision summarizing why I'd died, as if I'd been playing a video game. (And I remember it said something about me not having died from the poison, but from... I dunno... dream logic made something up that makes no sense in the waking world and I can't remember now what it was.)

Then I woke up.

( dream symbol analysis and thoughts )

(Possibly inspired by reading The Art Of The Matrix and a short conversation with my kid sister about stealing cars.)

I don't remember if I saw the actual invasion or if I just heard/knew about it happening. An alien race of high technology was taking over our planet. They were enslaving millions, killing those who would not surrender (and killing lots anyways). A few of us managed to hide, but we knew they were coming. There were two groups, I (as myself) was in the first group with my real-life mother and sister, and the group seemed to consist mostly of women and children. The second group was all men. We did not know at this point if the second group had survived. I figured if we waited around we'd get killed.

So I spoke to the people gathered around that we had to go to the source if we were going to have a remote chance in hell to fight the aliens. It was blatantly obvious that aliens existed, so that meant that our government really did have a crashed alien ship in their possession (viva la conspiracy theories!) and they were probably researching and even using the technology from it already. I told the people around me we were going to Area 51. (For some reason I thought it was in Arizona throughout the dream, though that doesn't make sense upon waking... but I guess the dream logic figured that was close enough. Plus, my group was located somewhere near Washington D.C. so Arizona was just as far away as New Mexico considering at the moment all we had was our feet to travel with.)

I looked out of the warehouse we were hiding in, and there was a car in the dusty parking lot, baking under the hot sun. I ran to it and found the keys in the ignition. It started and someone said it was wrong to steal and I said it was our only chance. The owner might be dead anyways. So everyone else piled in (there might have been two cars, I forget) and we drove off. It seems like we had to switch vehicles at some point when we ran out of gas, and it took us longer to find cars with keys. I remember thinking that if the human resistance lasted long enough, someone should set up usable car hubs for people fleeing but especially for resistance group members to move around the country. Take a car, drive it to the next hub, get a new one.

The next thing I knew I was suddenly a member of the second group, a random white male character. This was the all-guy group, and we were on foot. We knew the aliens were not far behind and tracking us somehow. It was somewhat snowy and we put logs and big sticks across our path at random points. It seems like we knew the aliens had trouble getting past these (or some metal-like alien-made machine did) so at first it was worth it. We heard the aliens making annoyed sounds at our previous roadblock (we were on a path though, not a road). This caused some satisfaction in our group but I figured they were too close for comfort now and we had better just run.

I told the guys to be careful so they didn't fall, to run steady and not too fast. I was in the lead and made my way over some wet, potentially slippery rocks, and beyond. I remember thinking we were trying to catch up to the first group, and I remember something about the first group trying to figure out how to leave behind some sign of where they were going without giving the whole thing away to the aliens.

Then I saw a black guy in a car (seen from like a camera angle or perhaps from the perspective of one of the second group members). He'd stolen the car and it seems like he was a key resistance leader, maybe even the top guy. He looked like Samuel L. Jackson but a little younger. He was pulling up to a corner to turn left.

Then I was him. I don't think I was going anywhere specific, probably just on the run. I was driving casually and this seemed to be fairly normal, other people were driving along like there wasn't some huge alien invasion going on. I saw up ahead a bunch of cars driving closely together, and too slow. I felt like it was a trap, they wanted me to pass and the aliens must know where I was. There was a dirt road up ahead on the right and I took that instead (still driving somewhat casually). As I took the turn I noticed a huge semitruck come up into opposing traffic in the space I would have been in if I'd tried to pass the cars. As if in a movie, I heard the aliens or some people working for them (or the aliens could shapeshift to look human) saying over the radio "He didn't take it."

Now I was driving down the dirt road with an open field on the right and a dead-looking corn field on the left. I knew I was in potential danger but figured the aliens hadn't planned on me going this way, so I had some time. But then up ahead I saw an ambulance, two cars right behind it, and another ambulance following right behind the lot. Damn radios, they were able to move fast because of the communication. I think they might have been hoping that I'd think they were real ambulances and pull over to clear the road. I was definitely not stopping for that. They pulled into my lane, heading straight for me, and as I slowed down they stopped completely. I could see a big (red?) pickup truck coming up behind them fast, essentially blocking the opposing lane of traffic and there wasn't any more room to drive past the cars and ambulances.

A woman who might not actually know what's going on at this moment was now beside the closest ambulance. There was a big, somewhat-evil looking man near her. The pickup almost hit the woman but the man pulled her out of the way at the last second. I'm not sure what happened to the pickup after that (although it's angle would have put it in the field to the right).

Meanwhile, the road was thoroughly blocked now by even more vehicles. Well, I wasn't going down here. I opened the car door and bailed into the cornfield. The corn stalks didn't even have much in the way of corn on them, and they were tall, dried up spindly things that didn't give much cover unless I had a lot of distance between me and my attackers. The aliens chased me, except they were human looking or humans in league with them. I have a feeling some of them were actual aliens, some were converted humans (mind control?) and some just hired people, maybe even innocent and thinking they were working for honest humans, not aliens.

Several times various people got close and each time I sprayed bullets their way (yay for instant dream uzi's... maybe I got one off a soldier, some of the people chasing me appeared to be in the National Guard). I realized too many of my pursuers were too close and I dove to the ground trying to hide. Some part of me knew that the cover here was too scant but I thought as hard as I could "they can't see me" and it worked. I was able to move ahead slowly, barely crawling along.

Ahead were two people arguing about trying to find me. One was a white woman, she had a uniform on and seemed to be in charge. The other was a black woman, a hireling of some sort, maybe a mercenary type, and she was saying that I'd "just... vanished." The black woman was scared. She thought I might be some sort of legendary evil spirit or something. She said "Naga" like she was even afraid of saying the word. She refused to keep searching even though the woman threatened her, and walked off. (Maybe the white woman killed her for such insubordination, maybe the black lady managed her own vanishing act, I don't know.)

I couldn't keep hiding forever and on a mad dash they spotted me and shot me with some sort of tranquilizer. As I fell I rolled into a clearing in the cornfield. I fought the drug in order to stay conscious, but I didn't move. I lay still with my eyes closed so they wouldn't know I was still awake. I was lying on my chest and felt horribly heavy from the drug but I figured if I had one chance now, it was to keep hold of reality. Maybe I could find the right moment to run... if I could still run...

The bad guys came and one of them held me down with his knee in my back while the others surrounded me with guns pointed down at me. Someone came up and lifted my head a little. I felt fingers opening my left eyelid and I saw a nurse (a very stereotypical, outdated looking nurse, who was probably a shapeshifted alien who'd watched a little too much 1940's earth television). She used the little finger on her left hand to poke lightly at my eyeball. I remember being worried about her fingernail. I moved my eye only a little but still thought she might notice I was awake. But she seemed satisfied after a few pokes and let go of my eye. Just as I was thinking I'd succeeded in keeping at least one small advantage I felt a prick somewhere in my back and a very powerful dose of some drug sent me to unconsciousness.

I was instantly dreaming, I knew it, but it was unlike any other dream I'd ever had. The world was in shades of black and white, and even the sound in the air around me seemed foreign. I was breathing and could hear it like a controlled rush as I stared out what must have been some sort of helmet. I was looking at the corn field, the clearing I'd fallen into, but the scene had been surreally transformed into perfect right angles. The corn was no longer a mass of spindly stalks but featureless flat hedge-looking things. I was standing in the clearing, and it made a hallway between these odd flat wall-hedges that stretched out in front of me, before it ended in a T junction that led to thinner passages to the left and right. I felt rather than saw tubes coming from my helmet into my suit (some sort of space suit?) The helmet must have been large, because all I could see was the glass/clear protective surface before me that curved the secenery at the very edges of my vision. I realized that I was an alien now, a real alien, somehow connected to it, but I honestly felt like I was the alien. The end result was frighteningly realistic, but in effect redefining "real" because I wasn't human anymore.

There was nobody in the clearing ahead of me. I turned and saw someone behind me... it was the old me! The me I had been before this terrible dream. He was just standing there with an odd, somewhat stupid smile on his face. I felt such an intense and complete hatred for this man that I immediately reached out and grabbed the human face and head in my hands. (The alien hands were suited up almost like a typical astronaut in a space suit, only less bulky, and the gloved fingers and hands were human shaped.) I squeezed the man's head and crushed it, killing him. I dropped the body and turned back the way I'd originally been facing. I walked to the end of the corridor, all the time hearing the terrible breathing... my breathing...

There was bright light above me and I looked up, raising my arms in the glare and feeling a strange mix of familiarity and total exaltation. I felt my body being sucked up into the transporter of the alien vessel not far above me, like I became a digital painting that streaked upwards, first from my fingers and helmet and continuing quickly down until I was completely transferred to the receiving pod inside the ship.

The next thing I remember is a great, dark space, like the interior of a huge ship. A sinking feeling that I'd been asleep all this time and woken up who-knows-where under complete alien control told me that I was myself again... at least. But I wasn't sure how I was seeing what was before my eyes. It was like the ship I was in was transparent or at least the bulk of it seemed to be to my right and a little above me. Ahead of the alien ship was a pulsing beam of light that flexed a little like a frequency wave turned 3D. The ship was travelling along the light beam like it was a travel route; it disappeared into the front of the ship somewhere and I'm not sure if it continued out the back of the ship... it may not have.

The ship was going slowly and the whole time I could hear a loud, metallic, and vaguely deep voice saying over and over, "You are here. You are here. You are here." This vision didn't last long, as I moved almost involuntarily, trying to figure out if I could move at all, or where I was in all this. I felt sheets, the solidness of a bed below me, a very human feeling after such an alien experience. I was sure I'd seen the previous scenes, but had I been asleep and only just now woken? Had I been able to unwittingly access some sort of alien viewing system with my mind? Had I connected telepathically with the alien who I'd envisioned... killing me in the corn field? Had my death only been some wish or delusion on the part of the alien? I was obviously still alive... and in a bed somewhere... in alien custody, right?

Then I realized I was awake, truly awake, and this had all been just a dream.

( dream symbol analysis and thoughts )

I've forgotten a lot of this dream, as quite a bit of it didn't make sense. But there was a remote, tropical island and I was part of a group of stranded people trying to keep alive and not get killed by "the Others" (just like in the TV show Lost). I remember at one point getting hypnotized by some flowers on a tree nobody else could see (I'd breathed in some kind of gas they hadn't gotten a whiff of), and running off to a place where the Others had control of a big, fortified building. I was going to go in there because the madness in my mind made me think I had to. John Locke was trying to stop me but I went up a lot of steep, sandy slopes and the trees and plants I used to pull myself up would always pull out of the ground as soon as I was done using them, so Locke couldn't keep up.

Later on there was some weird goings on to do with guns, and I had one at one point but then ran out of ammunition, but didn't want the Others to realize this and was hoping I could find some more before they figured it out. There was also some Sims skill-building weirdness going on (like I said, half the dream made no sense but there was a definite air of suspense and fear throughout the dream). In the end, though, I remembered that another character in the dream plot had swum out west and found another island with nobody on it, a safe place the Others didn't know existed. (I think I was that other character somewhere back in the dream, that's how I knew). So I rounded up the one other person I could find who was still alive and said we had to swim west. The nice thing was, the sun was setting in about an hour so it was very obvious which way to go. Follow the sun!

As I was swimming off, though, my (real) kid sister runs up to the beach and starts crying because she can't swim (not true, but in reality I don't think she woulda been able to make it to the island anyways). She has some teenager friends around her too with similar problems; some of them can swim, but not very well. There's a moment where I wonder if it's too late, because it seems like I knew the Others would be showing up any moment, but then I decided I couldn't leave her behind and swam back to shore. I told my sister to hang onto me, and her friends to hang onto her, and I'd swim and we'd all make it together if some of the others could do some kicking too. This was working fairly well, but we had only gone a few yards before I saw one of the Others.

This person was more like an ape-human hybrid creature, and this one was female. At that moment that's what all the Others had been like the whole dream (but they hadn't really been, they were humans up to that point... silly dream physics). I was afraid because the Other had an inflated inner tube and was getting into it to follow us. But she called after us and said she wanted to join us, that she didn't want to be with the Others anymore. I told her she had to promise not to flip out and kill us later on, and I had to be convinced she was being truthful, and she did promise and I believed her. So we added the inner tube to our floating people raft and kept swimming. The inner tube helped a ton.

We saw the safe island coming up through some haze, but then there was the thought that swimming past that would bring us to New York City. And we hadn't even gotten to the island yet when suddenly out of the haze (to the left of the island) comes a very New-York looking skyline, with tons of skyscrapers crammed in and going straight down to the waterline. More and more of this city appears and we stear towards it, confused but not gonna let this chance go to get back to civilization. As we get closer we notice that the buildings are put together oddly, like they've been stacked up all funny on top of each other and not like you'd expect any sane builder to do.

A wave carried us into a hallway of the closest building, it turned out to be an indoor shopping mall. Then the place we'd come from, with all the water, melted away into more of the mall, disappearing like it'd never been there. The architecture seemed to normalize as well, and there we were sitting on the floor with the inner tube, people walking by us ignoring us.

We walked into the closest shop, seeking answers to this weirdness, and it was a Meet Santa shop sorta thing. Santa Claus was sitting behind a desk and for some reason I knew this guy was probably actually the real Santa Claus, not just some guy dressed up in a suit like anybody else would think. This section of the dream feels very Narnia-like, specifically the end of The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe where the kids ask the Professor if he thinks they've been on a real adventure. And that's more or less what I asked Santa, was if we'd been on a real adventure. He seemed to be indicating that he believed it was real, but now that I think about it, he never gave a straight answer.

Then I woke up.