Today I took a four hour nap after school and had a bizarre dream. First off, let me say that it has been raining here for probably 10 of the last 14 days, a lot of it has been really bad storms (which don't bother me), and I've seen more hail the past two weeks than I have the rest of my life. I live just outside of St. Louis and we've been having some pretty lousy weather lately which is leading to some awful flooding in a lot of places (again, not a huge concern to me, as I live at the top of the river bluffs). I just figured that I'd mention this because it might have something to do with it. So in this dream, I'm just walking along the backroads in the middle of a bunch of farmland with someone who was apparently a friend of mine. I can't put a name or a face to them though, or even a gender really. We were walking and talking and I was trying to convince this person that the end of the world is nigh as evidenced by a list of recent calamities that I seemed to have committed to memory and was reciting to them. Have you ever seen movies where there is an angel or some other messenger comes and is explaining how things are going down to the completely oblivious protagonist? That's kind of how it was, only I was the one doing the explaining (but I was very human, just myself). So I brought up a lot of things going on around the world, not all of which are an issue in real life, such as but not limited to nuclear weapons, Japan's tsunami/earth quake, crazy killer viruses and bacteria, unrest in the east, droughts in Australia, obesity here and starvation there, floods in the midwest, out of control genetic engineering, environment going down the drain, and of course the whole general people-not-caring-enough issue. When I type that out, it sounds really lame, but I went into a ton of detail explaining this to the other person in the dream, I just don't remember how. It took several dream "hours" and it was starting to be dusk by the time our conversation was wrapping up. Then in a really no-chalant way I'm just like "It's going to happen whether we want it to or not. There's no stopping this, we're all screwed. We all fucked up." Which is another bizarre thing because I don't cuss in real life. And out of the woods come all of these weird creatures that look like they belong in some painting of the underworld. I don't remember what any of them looked like but there were a couple in back that I thought were just sorta dementeed looking wildebeast, but apparently they were minotaurs (with wildebeast heads). None of these animals seemed to concerned about us though, they just came out of the woods and headed down the road. So of course, what do I do but grab onto this thing's horns and haul myself up onto it's back and convince my walking buddy to do the same. Right about there I feel like I'm missing a substantial chunk of this dream. I know we kept talking all along our ride to this house/store/diner looking place and something happened when we got there, I just can't remember what it was. Maybe I'll remember it later? Sometimes something will happen throughout my day and it will make me remember part of a dream. Anyway, out back of this place there is this pond and a creek which is of course really swollen with all of the recent rain. And all along the banks are all of these little nooks and crannies and shelves that are all between 3 and 12 inches wide and not at all regular. If I can think of a better way to explain it I'll post it. And all of these are filled with rats (which, again, aren't something that bothers me at all. On the contrary, I think they're sorta cute). But they aren't the big gross brown rats, they're all white. Sorta dirty white, and they aren't albino, but just all of these big dingy white rats sitting on the banks, watching the water, waiting for something. The guy that owned the house seemed really concerned about how many of the rats were around ("more than he had ever seen at once") and the whole time I was very non chalant to the point of just saying "Oh, well we all had it coming." Then the wildebeast-minotaurs came back but this time they seemed a lot more malevolent. Not necessarily mean, just a lot more ominous, like stuff was gonna go down. Then I woke up. Now I'm not religious, I don't believe in prophecies, and as for the end of the world? Well, the world has been ending forever, I don't think it's going to rush the process suddenly. I think the thing that interested me most was that it was a really disturbing dream. I have a feeling that the REALLY disturbing parts were the ones that I can't remember, but still. Underworld creatures and the end of the world seems to make for an unsettling combination, or what SHOULD be an unsettling combination. However, I woke up with no fear or anxiety whatsoever. It was just sort of 'yup, I guess that was a bad dream.' I mean, what kept that from reaching some serious nightmare status? Even in the dream I went about all of this end-of-the-world business with this detatched, disinterested air. I didn't care AT ALL. It didn't bother me, it was like talking about the weather. Hell, parts of it WAS talking about the weather. It was just conversation fodder, even though it was really earth shatterring to an almost literal level. I'm not sure why I typed all of this out, mostly just for me to make sense of it, but feel free to tell me what you think or ask me any questions about it, I'll try to answer them. Thanks for reading!
