Okaaaay…another weird dream. Possibly (probably) influenced by my reading of Shute’s On The Beach a couple of weeks ago. This thing is friggin’ epic, man. Here’s the basics of it:

My mom, grandma or dad (I couldn’t tell which—they seemed to alternate), and I are in our house in the attic. The floors and ceiling are all a dark wood. The attic is quite big, and kind of a dome shape. We are all kind of clustered to the left of the one window. After a few minutes, it is revealed that we are surviving a nuclear attack. Sometime later, I go downstairs and get some canned food. I keep wondering how long the fallout and radiation will last, but I think that it will be over in a year or so. I think that we have enough food to last that long.

We are back up in the attic, looking out the windows. A family was outside in their yard and mom said, “those people shouldn’t be outside. It’s still dangerous.” I looked around and noticed that everyone was out—all these children and all these families were out in their yards. I pointed this out to my mom. “They think it’s safe just because it’s sunny out,” she said. “But it’s bad. It’s coming.” Just then, a cloud of big flakes of black ash kind of swept in from the horizon and began dropping on the people outside.

We went out driving for some reason or another and noticed that more people were out on the streets and in their yards. Suddenly, the ash began gathering again. My mom rolled down her window and told this guy who was standing outside, looking bewildered, to get in our car. I said, “don’t open the door, the ash will get in and we’ll die!” So we began driving up the hill to our house, with the guy following the truck. He said “slow down”, so I told my mom to slow down so that he could catch up. We got to the top of the hill and he opened the door to get in. I kept yelling “don’t open the door, we’ll all die!” There was some type of mishap with my mom and the guy and their doors, but eventually they got back in the truck.

He came into our house with us and came up to the attic. For some reason, the internet still worked, and I remember thinking that that was strange. I was looking up the weather or something, then I went over to my mom, who was kind of sick and cold. I tried covering her up with a blanket, but I was having trouble. After awhile, we started out driving again.

We kept driving places, and I noticed that we only had half a tank of gas. I said, “what about gas?” My mom replied that there was a station not too far down the road. I thought, “Will there even be gas? How will we pay, or will we pay?”

As we were driving, my mom was saying, “the danger is low now. All the debris is over the water.” Just as she said that, a big waterspout full of the ash debris grew and we were all watching it. I remembered I had my camera, so I started taking pictures. I was thinking at first that it felt kind of wrong to be taking pictures of this, but then I got mad at myself because I probably should have been taking pictures since the beginning to document the whole thing.

Then we were in this building, going up some stairs. Suddenly, I was sitting on this wooden floor in this big room, talking to a guy at a barber’s chair to my right and an Indian woman a ways in front of us. She kept saying things like “we’ll be back to normal in a year or so” and I kept saying, “what about food? We can’t grow things in soil that’s been contaminated with heavy metals.” The barber, whose name is Paul, says I’m very knowledgeable about these things, and I get in his chair to get a haircut. The only problem is, I have to do a lot of it myself. Then we started talking about the cruise ship, which apparently we were on, and the Indian woman giving her opinion about it. As she was saying that she didn’t really understand or like it but that she didn’t mind it, we kind of started to quake a little on the water. Paul says that it was a good ship, and that people had the decency to wear coats outside nowadays.

It reverts back to a scene that looks like it was from the game Quake—I had just entered a room through a door that immediately shut behind me. Everything in the room was the color of the terrain in a Quake game—the kind of muddy brown rock color. The room consisted of a wide ledge, which I was walking on, a couple rock-like structures, and a large square pillar in the middle. A door to my right, opposite to where I was standing, was closed. I must have been on the second floor of the building, because I could look down and see that there was another floor below me with a door on the same wall that the door on my floor was. There are these weird looking zombies and guns suspended in mid-air. I did very well destroying the zombies and monsters with minimal health damage, but before I had a chance to go into a different room, each door opened and a person, each with a gun, came out of each door. I tried shooting at them but nothing happened.

One of the men said something to the effect of “if you can catch me, you get the prize”. He showed me this hole and I jumped into it…I seemed to have to hold my breath, even though there seemed to be no water or liquid. I took a couple wrong turns, but wound up in the right place.

I met this black-haired man, who, before I got there, seemed to be wishing to stash stuff away. The black-haired man had just handed an Indian woman this bag of green stuff, and he was saying “please pretend this is such-and-such”. Me and this other guy go out on the porch to meet him. We both start rubbing his hair, saying, “He has such a powerful head.” It feels like his hair, as I’m rubbing it, is falling off. I go, “You can feel the power in his whole head.” I know what he’s thinking, kind of, and know that he is kind of disgusted with us. He says, though, “at least one of you is a woman.”

So how many people honestly remember these little details in their dreams? I wonder if this dream means anything…?

Also, I like my title.