zeborah

Or possibly a year and a half of living with earthquakes, but I'm going to blame the Hunger Games (which I watched yesterday with my siblings, despite having not read the book, and enjoyed a lot) on the grounds that earthquakes haven't given me nightmares before. A few anxiety dreams, but not waking-up-with-heart-racing nightmares. Not that movies ordinarily give me dreams either, but.

So in my dream -- there's various ordinary dream stuff, like showing my juvenilia to someone and someone else playing with a... reptile-bird-thing? and getting something in my hair that I'd just washed and having to time to wash and dry it again.

But then I was going somewhere along a forest path and realised I'd left my mini backpack behind. (This is my zebra-striped mini backpack that for the last year and a half has gone with me everywhere. I mean like the other night I thought, "I'm tired, I'll just leave it in the other room while I go to bed," and then I thought, "Don't be stupid, you can't go to bed without having your keys and wallet and cellphone and expired passport and ereader and notepaper for emergencies by your bed," and then I thought, "This is an irrational yet valid point," and went to get my mini backpack in order to go to bed.)

So in my dream when I realised I'd left it behind I immediately turned around to go and hunt for it. And came across Dad who had with him not one but two zebra-striped umbrellas, and I was trying to figure out which was mine. About the time I decided, Dad made a comment about a storm coming and I turned to look at the clouds he pointed out (the forest had now turned into the Ilam Fields) and I said something like, "That... kind of looks like a twister."

So we started running away from the twisters. There were at this point dozens or hundreds of us, all running across the Ilam Fields, and I was thinking there was no way we were going to be able to outrun all those twisters.

And then I noticed a blue robot next to a tree on the edge of the field we were going to run past. It was about small-adult-height, but it had no legs, being blocky like a toy, and it was toy-blue, and it had a toy face with a big red dimpled smile. And it shot bolts of energy at us as we came, and the people it shot died bleeding, and it smiled at the blood.

(Think of the creepiest monster you've ever seen on Doctor Who. That's how creepy it was.)

And then I saw another robot on our other side, also shooting, but we had to keep running with the twisters behind us, through this gauntlet of robots, and part of me was making sure I stayed in the middle of the crowd so I might be able to get through while they shot the people around me, and part of me was thinking, was I seriously using the people around me as human shields? and the answer was yes, yes I was, because twisters and creepy smiling shooting robots.

And then I got shot anyway - it hit my umbrella but the shock still knocked me to the ground and I woke before finding out if they'd have noticed I was still alive.

(I like to think not. But they were sadists, not stupid. And besides, there were still those twisters to contend with.)