jakebe | Dream, 11.4.03 (Reply)

Ever since I started trying to maintain a regular sleeping schedule, I've been having dreams that I (mostly) don't remember. This one, however, I did...probably because of the subject matter. It was sort of frightening, but not really. I quickly got used to the idea for some reason.

A small nuclear bomb had gone off near Fayetteville. It was a terrorist act (oh geez), and there was another one that had gone off in southern Louisiana, though at first everyone around thought LA has been been attacked. There really was no reason to attack Fayetteville, though; as far as I know, there's not a military base or anything, though we do have a nuclear power plant about an hour south of us or something.

Anyway, I was living at my first house in Baltimore (though I was really in Fayetteville) with my parents and my sister when the first bomb struck. There was a flash of light (not a particularly strong one) and the entire house rumbled for about a minute, and that was it. I knew exactly what it was, and we were pretty calm about it for the most part. Our main concern was building our house into some kind of fortress, where it was nearly impossible to get in. We had a pretty decent supply of food we weren't about to give up.

I slept in my mother's room with my parents. My sister slept in the very front room, and we had guest sleep in the living room. Of course, people started coming, sitting on our porch until we opened the doors. I was talking to my mom about it, and we were discussing just how many people we could handle when I suddenly decided to leave. There were a lot of questions that I wanted answered, and we couldn't get them because the TVs weren't working.

So I wandered out onto the streets of Fayetteville, Arkansas. Though the bomb was small and distant, it had done it's damage. The streets were littered with trash and debris, and there were dirty, shuffling people everywhere. Most of the newspapers I found blowing around were old, and didn't really have any information on what had happened. The bombs had taken everyone completely by surprise, which I guess is what bombs are supposed to do.

Next thing I remember clearly was being in this really big house. It belonged to a girl I really cared about and possibly had a crush on, though the feeling wasn't exactly mutual. She liked me, but not as much as I did her. Again, we started fortifying the house, but before we got half-finished an entire zoo of animals had wandered in. We were scared, but they were just looking for a place to stay. We told them that in exchange for room and board, they had to defend this place from any outside influences. They all agreed that was fair. With that settled, we all went to bed for the night.

I woke up to one of the dogs barking their heads off. I rushed out to the living room and the place was in complete disarray. What was worse, one of the window-doors had been broken in. I think I knew immediately that the girl and her boyfriend had been kidnapped. I was very distressed and ran from the house looking for them.

There, I saw Odis. Odis was pretty casual about everything. He informed me that the girl was making a tremendous mistake being with that guy, and that he had turned them over to the enemy (there's an enemy?) so that they would break up. I was *really* upset with Odis about this, but it made sense to him. He had unshakable faith in his plan. I ended up crying quite a bit because I felt really betrayed, and well...my girl was in trouble. Odis offered me a ride somewhere, and at first I was going to take it because I had nothing else to do, but I steadfastly refused after I had had enough of his utterly remorseless behavior.

i wandered around and I found the girl and her boyfriend in a ring of abandoned cars that the enemy had set up. I'm not entirely sure, but they weren't human. Maybe animals or orcs or something like that. Anyway, they seemed more annoyed that they were there than legitimately frightened, and they even started to warm up to their captors by the time I got there. When they started to play cards I left. Nothing made sense any more.

I went back to the house and said goodbye to the animals, and pretty much told them how to operate everything without opposable digits. They got the hang of it OK, but they were confused about why I was telling them this, so I told them I had to go somewhere else. When I left, I found a recent paper they brought in from Dallas. Looking back, it's kind of odd how the media got into the area before the National Guard.

I wandered over to Kevin's place, and by then it was nightfall on the second or third day. We were talking with one of his friends for a bit when we heard this screaming rocket sound. We all tensed up and looked around, hoping it was just a low-flying aircraft, but a scream we heard from outside told us different. We raced down to the basement (we were well stocked) and locked the door, because we knew the bombs dropping were *much* closer.

That's when the alarm woke me up. Thank goodness, too, I don't think I could have dealt with two nuclear explosions in the same dream. Would have colored my day something horrible, mm-hmm.