Last night was a very dream-filled night for me. The past few years have been pretty dream-filled, as you'll see by following that pipe link there and read my very first E2 node. As a result, I feel well-rested today.
Anyway, onto the dream.
As certain noders here can attest, a lot of fiction I've written in the past had somehow to do with the end of the world. It's a concept that has always fascinated me: some disaster happens leaving not a lot of people left and they have fun for a while with a big open world where they can pretty much do what they want, but then they have to get down to business and restart society. My dream last night deals with the end of the world.
The dream begins with an interstate highway. Something Really Bad happens to the city that the roadway leads to and goes away from. I'm not sure what it was, it could have been an asteroid, might have been a neutron bomb, the dream wasn't quite clear on what. I doubt it was nuclear since nobody was worried about fallout. An asteroid is more likely, but one asteroid destroying one city shouldn't destroy all of society all over Earth, but, hey, it's a dream. At any rate, all the cars traveling in the lanes going to the city start turning around, an amazing feat to see, especially when no cars hit each other.
The dream switches to me being in some sort of suburban area, with people that I don't know that are made up for the dream. It is far enough away from the calamity to be pretty much intact, but was close enough to where it was affected and almost completely deserted. These people I'm with are all young, either in their teens or early 20's. There is a subplot here: one of the teens is a blonde girl (I suspect her hair was bleached blonde) and she wants to leave her house and go and do...whatever...with us. We try to convince her to try and see if her parents are OK. She has such hatred for them that she refuses. There's a bit of drama there and I convince her to at least leave a note on the door telling them she's doing well.
We move into somebody's house that we don't know, since they aren't home and probably dead. We make ourselves at home, eat their food, watch their movies, etc. I loudly and excitedly advocate we go on an "Xbox run" where we go and loot a store or two for some Xboxes and all the games we can carry. Surprisingly, nobody seems to be that interested and some members of the group decide that it's time to go to bed. They hunker into some bunk beds in one of the bedrooms wrapped in sleeping bags for some reason.
More stuff happens, I think, but basically, not long after that, I partially wake up. I don't open my eyes though. However, I continue the dream. This is where my conscious imagination sort of takes over. A couple of us decide to go get a really cool, expensive car somewhere. Why not? I get the brilliant idea that we should be flanked wherever we go by snipers (two members of the group who have somehow procured sniper's rifles follow us on the rooftops or whatever on either side of us wherever we go in case there's trouble). While we're milling about on an abandoned car lot a cop pulls up, flashing lights and all. Me and whoever the guy is who is perusing the cars with me get nervous. It's the end of the world, where'd this cop come from? What's his angle? Does he actually still have a local government to report to? Or, and this is the really scary prospect, is he totally rogue? Should we listen to him or not? He's got a gun and a knightstick. I glance inside the cop car as he gets out. His dashboard computer is dark. He doesn't communicate with anybody before he gets out. This worries us.
When he asks to see our IDs I ask him if we can see his. He doesn't think that's a good idea. Now, while I'm talking to him, I tread lightly, trying to show him some amount of respect without submitting to him. He's either some psycho pretending to be a cop, or he's a real cop genuinely trying to maintain law & order who may or may not be able to do whatever the hell he wants to achieve that end.
Since I was partially consciously directing this part of the dream I had to decide if the snipers take him out or not. I ultimately decide that since my friend and I are, and by all rights should have been, defiant given the situation, things would get physical at which point the snipers would kill him.
I suppose we do get that cool car we had wanted, but at this point I think I fall totally back to sleep. Now, this is unprescedented: I continue the dream. Never in my life had I continued a dream after waking up in the middle of it. Well, I don't remember doing that anyway. When the dream continues I am all hopped up on going to the nearest mall and procuring the biggest, baddest, home entertainment system out there. I mean I wanted the works: big screen digital theater-shaped flat screen television, biggest speakers I can find, ass-kickingest CD player/radio, and, well, the Xbox (preferrably 360). Finally, people agree, and off we go. At this point my family is with me: mom, wife, kid, stepdad (it's nice to know that they survived).
We get to the mall and decide that we need a huge truck to bring that all home. This presents a problem. We need gas and keys for the big yellow delivery truck we had intended on taking. No gas stations are operable at this point so we need to ciphon gas from somewhere, something that doesn't sound very fun...
And that is where the dream fades to oblivion.