A dream about journaling during the end-times
I had a dream last night that I was a black woman of non-African descent - or at least people referred to me as black and I didn't correct them, so I assume it was true. There were flashbacks in the dream where I was a young girl wearing a cream-colored dress, walking with my parents in the suburbs of Chicago. In those memories, my father wore a kippah, so I suspect that I was of the Jewish faith? Or at least I had been? It didn't really come into play, but I felt like it was worth mentioning anyway.
In the dream, as an adult, I had been living in Los Angeles when the end times arrived (I'm not entirely sure what that means, the dream didn't give much more information on the subject). Parts of the city kept flooding - there was no real way out by vehicle, you had to go on foot. I wasn't actually interested in leaving the city - I figured that I would die either way, and so I had been planning to just stay in my apartment where I was at least somewhat comfortable. But then I met a girl with a black dog and a diary and for some reason I decided that I should follow her instead.
The girl was tiny with very pale skin and yellow hair - not blonde, but yellow, the color of a child's crayon. She spoke with a homespun accent that was a strange mixture of southern United States and northern England. She also spoke Japanese with a Hokkaido accent so thick that it sounded mumbled. I hadn't thought anything of her English-speaking accent, but I must have carried some prejudices about the Japanese one because immediately after hearing her speak with it I fell into the assumptions that she was poorly educated and somehow thuggish. (I genuinely know nothing about Japanese accents, and I definitely could not identify them in real life, so I have no idea where me-in-the-dream's assumptions here came from.)
The diary wasn't hers, and that was the part that intrigued me. It had actually belonged to a man that had been traveling with her previously until the two of them became separated, and for some reason he had thought that it was important to chronicle the girl's journey. And at that point I was really just waiting to die, so I figured that if I took up that task in his place, maybe at least it would give me something to live for in the meanwhile.
The events of the dream all kind of blurred together, so it's hard to extract them clearly or put them into an order. There was a portion of the dream where we were working our way out of the city, crossing a partially washed-out bridge with a group of other refugees. There was a part where we spent the night huddled together in the cab of an abandoned truck that we had found. There was a part of the dream where the dog and I had gotten separated from her, and I was trying to gain its trust by feeding it bits of raw chicken. I knew that the dog would find its way back to her eventually, but it didn't seem to care about me at all, so I was worried that at any moment it might bound away and I would lose it.
We reunited at this home not too far out of the city where a strange woman with too-thick glasses was keeping young children and invalid old men in cages crafted from chickenwire. The girl had arrived before me, and was insisting on talking to each of the people there one-by-one. I'm not sure what her goal was - she wasn't trying to free them or improve their quality of life - she just seemed to want to talk with each of them briefly and make sure that they were vaguely okay. I didn't feel right about leaving them there - I didn't trust the woman and everything about the situation seemed bad, but at that point, I really just felt like following the girl was more important - I didn't want to risk losing her again.
The final scene in the dream (before I woke up) involved us spending the night in the backroom of bar of some kind. I didn't trust the man who claimed to own the place - he was dirty in ways that made me uncomfortable, and one of his arms ended in what looked more like a gnarled tree stump than a hand, so I decided to stay up all night watching over things rather than sleeping. The girl's only other possession was a cassette player that she used to play soft country music on a loop while she slept, and so I sat there for a while in the darkness listening to the music and worrying.
It got cold enough that I decided to go in search of a blanket (there was already a blanket there, but I didn't trust it for some reason) and I almost immediately encountered the man, who offered to escort me. Which was fine - It let me keep my eye on him and know that he was away from the girl.
I had somehow known about a blanket in an abandoned van nearby, but on the way there, one of the roads had flooded - not deep, but enough that the man insisted that he cross ahead of me. On the other end, he used his tree-stump hand to reach into a drainage grate and pull out what looked like the drowned corpse of a duck, putrescent and radiating a sickly green miasma. He tossed it into the distance and once the water had fully drained he let me cross.
When we arrived at the van, he did something with his tree-stump hand to hold it in place, as if he was afraid that I was going to get inside and drive away. I found the gesture threatening in a controlling sort of way - doubly so because of the way he smiled and assured me that it was safe to go inside and get what I wanted. That was when I woke up.
In the dream, as an adult, I had been living in Los Angeles when the end times arrived (I'm not entirely sure what that means, the dream didn't give much more information on the subject). Parts of the city kept flooding - there was no real way out by vehicle, you had to go on foot. I wasn't actually interested in leaving the city - I figured that I would die either way, and so I had been planning to just stay in my apartment where I was at least somewhat comfortable. But then I met a girl with a black dog and a diary and for some reason I decided that I should follow her instead.
The girl was tiny with very pale skin and yellow hair - not blonde, but yellow, the color of a child's crayon. She spoke with a homespun accent that was a strange mixture of southern United States and northern England. She also spoke Japanese with a Hokkaido accent so thick that it sounded mumbled. I hadn't thought anything of her English-speaking accent, but I must have carried some prejudices about the Japanese one because immediately after hearing her speak with it I fell into the assumptions that she was poorly educated and somehow thuggish. (I genuinely know nothing about Japanese accents, and I definitely could not identify them in real life, so I have no idea where me-in-the-dream's assumptions here came from.)
The diary wasn't hers, and that was the part that intrigued me. It had actually belonged to a man that had been traveling with her previously until the two of them became separated, and for some reason he had thought that it was important to chronicle the girl's journey. And at that point I was really just waiting to die, so I figured that if I took up that task in his place, maybe at least it would give me something to live for in the meanwhile.
The events of the dream all kind of blurred together, so it's hard to extract them clearly or put them into an order. There was a portion of the dream where we were working our way out of the city, crossing a partially washed-out bridge with a group of other refugees. There was a part where we spent the night huddled together in the cab of an abandoned truck that we had found. There was a part of the dream where the dog and I had gotten separated from her, and I was trying to gain its trust by feeding it bits of raw chicken. I knew that the dog would find its way back to her eventually, but it didn't seem to care about me at all, so I was worried that at any moment it might bound away and I would lose it.
We reunited at this home not too far out of the city where a strange woman with too-thick glasses was keeping young children and invalid old men in cages crafted from chickenwire. The girl had arrived before me, and was insisting on talking to each of the people there one-by-one. I'm not sure what her goal was - she wasn't trying to free them or improve their quality of life - she just seemed to want to talk with each of them briefly and make sure that they were vaguely okay. I didn't feel right about leaving them there - I didn't trust the woman and everything about the situation seemed bad, but at that point, I really just felt like following the girl was more important - I didn't want to risk losing her again.
The final scene in the dream (before I woke up) involved us spending the night in the backroom of bar of some kind. I didn't trust the man who claimed to own the place - he was dirty in ways that made me uncomfortable, and one of his arms ended in what looked more like a gnarled tree stump than a hand, so I decided to stay up all night watching over things rather than sleeping. The girl's only other possession was a cassette player that she used to play soft country music on a loop while she slept, and so I sat there for a while in the darkness listening to the music and worrying.
It got cold enough that I decided to go in search of a blanket (there was already a blanket there, but I didn't trust it for some reason) and I almost immediately encountered the man, who offered to escort me. Which was fine - It let me keep my eye on him and know that he was away from the girl.
I had somehow known about a blanket in an abandoned van nearby, but on the way there, one of the roads had flooded - not deep, but enough that the man insisted that he cross ahead of me. On the other end, he used his tree-stump hand to reach into a drainage grate and pull out what looked like the drowned corpse of a duck, putrescent and radiating a sickly green miasma. He tossed it into the distance and once the water had fully drained he let me cross.
When we arrived at the van, he did something with his tree-stump hand to hold it in place, as if he was afraid that I was going to get inside and drive away. I found the gesture threatening in a controlling sort of way - doubly so because of the way he smiled and assured me that it was safe to go inside and get what I wanted. That was when I woke up.