Black, White, Red

I think I had someone else's dreams last night. Nobody I recognized was in them, and the general thematic content, while sharing a few features with my usual fare, (there's almost always a war or revolution going on, for example) was sufficiently different that it just felt like I was along for the ride instead of being an active participant.

1. Setting: The dream starts run-down loft apartment in a large, anonymous city, or possibly The City, near some elevated train tracks. The main room is long, but not particularly wide, with floor-to-ceiling windows along the longest wall, streaked with grime, soot, and a fair amount of pigeon shit. There are pizza boxes and half-empty pop bottles littering the floor and the dumpster-grade furniture. There is a table in the middle of the room consisting of a door laid across stacked-up milk crates - on the table are a couple of overflowing ashtrays, a ziploc baggie full of dried mushrooms, and, incongruously, an opened velvet pouch with rubies spilling out onto the table.

Features: The reason I know they're rubies is that everything else is in black and white, but the stones are blood red. I don't know what I look like, as there are no mirrors and the windows aren't reflecting enough light to see myself in them. I seem to be a fair bit taller though. As this is not a lucid dream, it doesn't occur to me to look at my hands.

Events: There is a young man here. I don't recognize him. At first he's got darkish skin and a severe buzz-cut, but then he sort of reaches up to peel off his face and it's a guy with blond hair and trendy sunglasses. He gives me this knowing smirk and says something, but I can't hear him over the train and the rising sound of shouting, gunfire, and breaking glass from the street below. I get the impression that we need to leave relatively quickly though. His sister is in the other room, so I go to get her.

This is where it gets significantly creepier. The room's a lot bigger than you'd expect from the layout of the apartment, but what really ices the cake is the fact that the room is full of dead, dying, or panicked livestock of various species. The sister is sitting on the back of a large cow that she's just stabbed in the neck with a scalpel. She's covered in blood (again, the only colour in the scene) and so is the floor. She's wearing a long, old-fashioned white nightgown and her hair is all frizzy and wild like she just got out of bed. She looks crazy, and I don't know how I'm going to get her out of here without her taking a swipe at me with the scalpel. That, and I think I'm going to be sick from the noise and the smell, not to mention the sight of all these animals. She hasn't been doing a particularly good job killing them, so they're mostly just slowly bleeding to death.

[CUTS TO]

2. Setting: It's late at night in the countryside - fields and a windbreak of trees on the other side of a ditch. There's a wrecked car in the ditch with an emergency crew clustered around it. I'm approaching another car which looks relatively unharmed. There's a girl huddled in the back seat (not the sister in the first scene).

Features: I appear to be a cop in this one, or at least I just got out of a police car and have on a uniform and an assortment of standard police accoutrements hanging from my belt. I have no idea what the hell is going on or why I'm here though.

Events: When I open the back door of the car, the girl screams that she's been abducted. For a second the point of view changes so that I'm her, and I know I'm lying, but not why. Then the perspective switches back and I help her out of the car and over to an ambulance, where the paramedics are waiting with a blanket and a styrofoam cup of coffee. She's wearing a baggy blue jumpsuit, which almost looks like standard convict wear. She doesn't have any shoes, and that and the fact that the jumpsuit is way too big for her makes me think she's probably telling the truth.

[CUT TO]

Damn it. I've forgotten most of the rest. I remember the third part took place in an old-fashioned prison, almost like what I suspect the inside of the Tower of London probably looked like when it was still being used as a prison. I was locked up with a bunch of other people, apparently indefinitely as we were considered some manner of threat to society. The girl from the second part was supposed to be helping to break us out, but I'm not sure what the plan was. Damn.