I wasn't originally going to write this, but after hearing that a couple of my friends had strange dreams today, I thought about it, and more and more came back to me.
I was a woman with short hair.
As often happens, my dreams lift character designs from video games - I don't know why, though it's usually from ones that I play way too much. Anyway, it was clearly Olga Gurlukovich, with the short hair, tank top and mottled dark green/tan BDU pants. But the derivative appearence didn't matter, because I after she got to the edge of the river I saw things through her eyes.
I'll refer to this woman as "she" and not "I" for the remainder of this description, since it was not about me. It was about a character I dreamed of, I just passed into her visual point of view, like I was riding along on her shoulder.
It's not even possible, to my mind, that she was actually me; until the very end. Then it was possible.
She carried a pistol (another element taken from Olga, I know for a fact that the dream-pistol had that boxy laser pointer under the barrel), but had concealed it by the time she reached the river's edge.
It was twilight.
She was running across the river.
After thinking long and hard about this, I've decided that the river must have been frozen over, since there was no importance to the fact that she was walking over the water, it just seemed plausible in a real-life way.
There was a bridge in the background, and a city ahead of her.
This is a tragic future Manhattan that has figured in my dreams and imaginings since I was very young. Most of the old buildings, more so as you get towards the edges of the island, have been abandoned by "civilized" people and become support structures for the higher, more insular city that rises above and around them, built on top of the old city. Sometimes there's a civil war, the island is a walled city, and the apartment buildings along the west side highway have basically become fortifications (as have all the residences on the palisades.) Today, I think most of those buildings were ground into dust. Maybe it was later, after a war... or maybe the city had just run itself into the ground under the weight of progress that loomed above it.
She ran across an empty road and vacant lot, and into a building, which she entered at the fifth floor or so.
(this is a blank, I think she scaled a pile of rubble)
It was a school, an old one.
A lot of recent half-remembered dreams have involved schools or churches... either sneaking into them, or trying to escape from them, or just being in them and exploring the building, or walking around, or RUNNING.
Wooden doors with dusty windows in them, water-damaged tile and cinderblock, but most of the paint still intact. Low ceilings, but more vast than any school I've ever been in, so many sprawling floors on top of each other.
The place had a claustrophobic feeling, but she/I was always running along and being squeezed out into the next tight space.
She worked her way downstairs, through rooms and corridors. It seemed like she kept finding staircases she couldn't use, and had to cross the entire floor of the building to get to another way down.
I've lost a section of the dream here. She went down more floors than she'd gone up on the outside, and still hadn't reached ground level, but that's a function of my dream-Manhattan - the half-abandoned lower regions have no real ground or street level, and you can't be sure how far you can go down before you're in a basement.
They knew where she was!
I heard it over the small (big and blocky, but still barely pocket-size) military-style radio she had, which I think she was using at the start of the dream as well to talk to someone on her side. Another element of Olga.
They were in the building, dressed like a SWAT team
(because they were the police; however, they had a more neutral quality to them, either because they weren't the government police but some private enforcers, or simply because she didn't believe in their authority or righteousness)
and they were chasing her. She kept moving down the floors as she had before, but more quickly, once in a while seeing a few of them at the other end of a long hallway running down a perpendicular corridor, or at the other end of the hall she was in, checking rooms on either side but not seeing her so far away at the end.
The riot gear they had is surely taken from Olga's soldiers, though the people wearing it had no connection to the woman like the connection the influences on their appearences had. The Clearing procedure is also from the game...
She made it to some clear stairs and ran a few stories down to the bottom. Headed for a hallway looking for a hiding place, saw another police officer, and turned and ran again; but the officer saw her and gave chase.
She ran for the bottom of the stairwell again, a small room rectangular on the end that faced the building and rounded on the end that faced the alley outside. She ran out into the alley and jumped to the side so the officer wouldn't see her upon entering the stairwell.
I got a sense of she/I jumping up here, so I think she may have jumped onto a fire escape on the building and grabbed onto the ladder that hangs off the lowest escape platform. That would explain in a literal way why she so easily got the drop on the officer immediately after.
As the officer came out the door in the curved stairwell protrusion in the building's wall, she/I jumped out (down?) in front of the officer and knocked the person to the ground. I saw that it was a middle-aged woman(possibly African-American, though my memory is hazy on this; I remember she had a stern but sympathetic look on her face), not wearing riot gear but a regular police uniform.
I think I somehow knew that the SWAT team members had come in above where I did, possibly from the point I did, or one of the higher levels, or the roof; but other officers had entered from the lower levels, these ones not SWAT but regular police.
The officer, half-sitting on the step of the stairwell door, shouted something ("No"? "Don't"?) at her/me
but she/I drew my pistol and fired three or five bullets into the woman and she was silent.
Everything was remarkably silent, actually. The gun was quieter than I'd expected, and which assuaged my worries of one of her comrades hearing the shots(Was the officer alone? Were there already others following her out? Had she radioed upon pursuing me?), and only two of the bullets made any sound upon entering the policewoman.
She/I stood there, prepared to fight if they were coming and to flee if they were not.
I think it started snowing.
That is all I remember of it.
I don't know where this came from.
"I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind Of Thing."
I don't normally THINK or DREAM this kind of thing. It's very confusing.