Dreams

I have had the craziest, weirdest, most apocalyptic dreams for the past two nights. They've been kind of awesome dreams. The kind you still remember every moment of, because it was more like watching a movie than dreaming...

The first dream, from the night before last, I was in a giant, futuristic office building. It's a regular in my dreamscapes, and has elevators that go sideways. 'Nough said on that.
It was a police state, in the midst of fighting the bad guys, who were basically Brown Coats (you know who I'm talkin' about here, my nerds) in stiff black trench coats and fedoras. Yeah. My first glimpse of the bad guys was to see a group of them running into the giant lobby of the building, and my heart went pitter patter. Because they were hot.
And the police? The police were robots. Who didn't come running into the building after the bad guys. No no. Nothing so simple. Instead, as the bad guys disappeared into the guts of the building, I felt a rumbling beneath my feet. I looked out the window (I was on the third story, and it was a big ass window), and watched a behemoth slowly rise and fill the horizon. The robot police where in a GIANT fucking square starship, black as ink with the only color coming from a video screen that flashed the same intimidating red symbol over and over again. They didn't say anything, didn't demand that the bad guys come out of the building.

And I knew that they were going to destroy the entire building, and everyone in it, to get to these guys. I knew it with absolute certainty. So I ran downstairs to the lobby, where my family was. In this dream, I was a young blond woman, and my family was composed of 3 younger sisters, a mother and a father. I was screaming at them to run as I pounded down the stairs, but they just looked at me in confusion. Everyone around me was talking about the police ship outside the building, and I screamed at them all to get out. That the police were going to destroy the building any moment. They hushed me, said that's not what police do. We're the good guys, they said. I just kept running, and when I got to my family, I grabbed my sisters arms and started herding them all in front of me, towards the back of the building. My parents were still bemused and embarrassed, and refused to move. I ignored them, and just focused on getting as many people out as I could. I herded more children into the group in front of me, kids whose parents were standing at the windows, staring out and pointing. And we ran out the back door of the building, into a giant, empty parking lot, just as the first missiles hit the building behind us. We all stumbled at the first hit, but I kept them all running across the parking lot, towards the woods on the other side. My dream ended as I noticed a group of black trench coated men standing at the perimeter of the woods, waiting for us and waving us forward.

My second dream, from last night, was darker.
I lived in a world where we KNEW the bombs were coming. We were in the midst of preparing for them, gathered together in a house in the middle of nowhere, piling food stuff and basics into baskets, ready to bury everything within a couple hours. The house (houses, really. It was a community) was made of a sturdy plastic, reinforced and futuristic. We knew it wouldn't protect us from a direct blast, but it would protect us from fallout, for a bit at least. And we knew where the bombs were going to fall. The powers that be had worked the whole thing out in a very civilized manner. They'd marked on maps where every bomb would fall, and gave the people there enough time to run screaming for the safe zones.

Or so we thought.

The first bomb fell well before we were ready. I stood up from the basket I was filling, and happened to catch movement in the sky. I watched the bomb fall, a cartoonishly giant, classic H-Bomb shape, in slow motion. Before it hit the ground, I screamed at everyone to get down. We all fell to the floor, curled up in fetal positions. I had a familiar sinking feeling in my stomach, knowing that it was too soon, too close, that we weren't going to be safe from this bomb. That we were all going to be incinerated in seconds. There was a flash, that I felt behind my eyes more than saw. I had time to feel a strange sense of wonder. I was glad it was going to be quick, that we were close enough to the epicenter that we wouldn't suffer.
And then the explosion was upon us. The house held, didn't fall apart in the hellish wind that was screaming past. I knew we were all still dead, but I stood up, and looked out the window. I wanted to see what was happening as I died. I watched orange fire stream past the windows and the open door, and it was amazingly beautiful. Like wind that had picked up the Sahara, caught it on fire, and whipped it into a frenzy of movement and color.

People around me slowly started standing up, began to realize that we weren't going to die immediately. We all just stood there, not looking at each other. And then my mother went to the door. I yelled at her to stop, but she kept walking. And I watched her face melt off as she crossed the threshold.
I didn't react, couldn't react. I was already in absolute shock, and this felt like nothing more than abstract art, to be appreciated for its terrible beauty.
The wind stopped shortly after that, as the explosion defused beyond us. I walked towards the door, and cautiously stepped out, past my mothers crispy body. I looked around at the village surrounding us, and it didn't look that different. All the houses were still standing, even the little wooden lean-to that sheltered some animals.
I walked towards the lean-to, and found the doctor of the community, an older woman, wrapping two little girls in a blanket. They were still alive, but they'd been seered together, their skin melted into each other. I snapped out of my shock, and asked the doctor what I could do to help. She told me to hold the hands of the little girls, that they might survive. I held their hands, and talked to the doctor about what needed to happen next. We were trying to figure out if we had enough potassium iodine tablets to clear water for the community, since we hadn't had time to bury water in radiation proof tubs. I woke up shortly after that, still thinking about buying potassium iodine tablets.

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