I had a number of dreams last night, each one brought to an end by my waking up at various wee hours of the morning. I thought they were all interesting until they were completely obliterated by the last one:
I was in a very large, busy city. Everyone had woken up to discover huge cracks in the streets, and word was spreading like lightning that horrible things were coming out of these gashes in the pavement. I was standing outside looking at one of these cracks when an enormous suckered tentacle came over the top of a multistory building, grabbed some guy and dragged him away. Monsters were breaking out of the earth.
The dangerous cracks and monster sightings seemed to be concentrated in one area of the city, and suddenly there was a mother trying to get her three children out of that area. In a matter of a few minutes I went from being this mother, to being an observing bystander of this group, to being one of the children. We were trying to cross a street when my memory starts getting wonky.
I think maybe we saw and/or talked to some guy who had some idea how to find out what was going on. He believed the answer was in a huge building which everyone thought was a museum, and he was going to try to get inside. Which he managed to do, and then realized he needed to get out before he got caught. He did manage to get out and was running away from the building, I think, when he was grabbed by a pterodactyl-like creature and I don't know what happened to him after that.
The next thing I remember was "me" being inside the building, sneaking around trying to figure out what was going on here. There were rooms full of babies and other things, including candy, something makes me want to say. My brain keeps saying babies and candy, so I'm going to assume there is a reason and that candy was involved. There were people taking care of the babies and working on other projects. Some of these workers were people who had been snatched by the monsters, although many of the people who had been taken had been turned into the babies. Somehow I knew that a small number of the missing had been killed. Monsters gotta eat, I guess. But I had discovered that it was all a giant operation run by some Great Leader, and that this Great Leader was reincarnated or simply replaced by a new Chosen One periodically.
I say it was "me" in the building partly because I was sometimes seeing this as the main character and sometimes observing it like the audience watching a movie, and partly because even when I was experiencing it firsthand I wasn't Angela Morgan, Laconia resident and YBP Profiler. The person I was supposed to be had been a cute young barmaid in a strange little Italian restaurant/tavern. The tavern area was like a cave with stone walls, a stone roof, and a number of huge curving entrances that led into various cobblestone streets. It was a bustling place with lots of people passing through and lots of regulars sitting around at tall tables visiting. One of these regulars was a young writer or artist or something who was in love with this waitress. Everyone knew except her.
Now the naive barmaid had gone off to find out what was in the nefarious building and was trapped there. She had been found sneaking around, but was told They weren't going to kill her because she had been chosen to be the next Great Leader. She didn't want to be at first, but she had come to realize that what they were doing was odd and arcane, but not really evil, and that this was her destiny. Once They knew she would come back, they told her she could leave for short periods to return to the streets of the city. They had pointed out to her that the writer/artist had been in love with her, so now she wanted to go back to the Italian tavern to try to find him.
She/I went running down a hillside behind the building, running through rows of shrubs. As I ran past, the plants stood up in waves; each shrub was actually being held by a person. The shrub people, led by Ed Begley, Jr., were all singing about how the new Great Leader was leaving but would always return to her people. The sloping ground ended abruptly at the edge of a cliff over a river that divided part of the city, and as I ran toward the edge of the cliff some giant bird monster caught me and carried me out over the river where I could look back on the weird plant chorus.
The bird thing put me down in the city on a street near the restaurant. But, it had been many months since she/I had left, and no one was there except the bartender. He told me the writer/artist had kept coming back to look for her/me, with longer and longer intervals between his searching visits, and then had eventually stopped coming in at all.
Then it was years later, and the ex-barmaid-now-Great Leader had left her building again because she wanted to see part of her old neighborhood. It was a sort of semi-enclosed courtyard with stone-paved streets surrounded by old stone buildings (noticing a theme here?). When she had lived there it was just an open area where young people used to hang out, sometimes getting into trouble but usually just whiling away their time. Now many of the people who lived in the surrounding buildings spent most evenings there visiting, playing music, and dancing. On this evening a famous musician was going to be there as a special guest. As his entourage was setting up to play, he looked at the now-middle aged ex-barmaid and recognized her as the leader of the group responsible for unleashing monsters on the city and stealing people to turn them into babies.
Things really start fading at this point. There was something about four tiny dimes revealing something about her role in the group, or revealing the truth about evil, or something. So she had to leave before they decided she was evil and had to be stopped.
Then we were back in the building and I was still the Great Leader, only now I was a guy instead of the ex-barmaid. I think more time had passed. I'm pretty sure he/I was either black or hispanic/latino, and I'm pretty sure I had a mustache. And that's where it all fades away beyond my memory. I know there were a number of other images, events, and conversations that happened throughout the rest of the dream, but they are also lost. I think what I was left remembering vividly was plenty!
