you don't have to go home but you can't stay here
I was in a building I found startlingly similar to the gym at my high school. It was dimly lit, with maybe two-thirds of the lighting it should've had. I'd taken a short ride on something like a light rail line to get there -- it went right into the building -- and I had the vague idea that it'd come from something like a college dorm or campus apartment building.
There was something going on, some kind of rehearsal for a special event. I somehow either missed or never got instructions about what in particular I was supposed to be doing, or maybe we were just all floundering but some people found larger groups to flounder with them. I wandered away from the indoor train platform, toward where the gym's stage was, and somebody called my name and asked me if I was going back with them -- had I spent longer there than I realize? I don't know -- and I said no, not yet. I watched from across the building as a group of people got back on the train to leave and wondered why I wasn't sure where I was supposed to be.
I went toward one of the small rooms to the side of the stage, barely opening the door to it when I noticed a bunch of people I assumed to be students sitting in chairs that lined the room's walls. They were mostly males and wearing suits, all of them sitting in the dark. I apologized, assuming I was interrupting something since they seemed so neatly gathered in their darkened room, but a few of them shook their heads and let me know they were just waiting to find out what else they should be doing. A woman with short dark hair, someone I assumed to be a teacher, approached the door to reassure me... and then gunshots rang out. Throat tight with fear, I backtracked a few steps and peeked around the open door to see the front doors mobbed. I don't know who was shooting or why or if there was return fire; it sounded like it, but I wasn't sticking around to find out. I ran.
I ran and realized it was apparently my high school after all (not that it occurred to me that way in the dream). There was a girl (someone who went to my elementary school but was never a close friend of mine) running away, too. The dark-haired woman wasn't far behind, running in fear. A fourth person, James Caan (but not playing himself; I blame seeing him guest star on an episode of NewsRadio we watched last night), caught up to us, and all of us ran and ran. We discovered that we all had tracking devices on our watches, something we probably would've failed to notice if they hadn't lit up suspiciously and we couldn't somehow hear the tinny staticky voice of one of the shooters as he reported, with minor delay, our whereabouts. For some reason the other girl suddenly had a butter knife and she used it to pry out the tracking devices out as we ran.
Once off the school grounds we were in a city I didn't immediately recognize, crossing streets in front of cars that had the right of way, and after a while we came upon the entrance to Disney's Hollywood Studios, which I still thought of as MGM Studios even in the dream. Thinking it a good place to blend in -- I don't know why we were more like fugitives than victims who needed help -- we went in. The James Caan guy paid our admissions, possibly because he was the only one of us carrying money, and shortly after going in we split up, the woman and the girl I used to know went one way and James Caan-but-not-James Caan went another way with me. We found a place inside that did hair and I started getting my hair dyed blonde, one step toward making us less noticeable. The process wasn't even halfway done before the bad guys caught up to us. When we heard them at one of the building's entrances, we ran for the other.
That was about when I woke up.