Adrenaline Shot Dream

I had another crazy dream last night and this time I actually remembered a lot of the details.

It starts out at Target. Or I should say, a Target-like store because I'm holding a PDT and helping guests with some furniture. But it's kind of weird furniture. One chair is covered in shaggy beast hair. Another walks around aimlessly. I'm most entranced by this rather large aquarium we have and in it is a fish that has a kitten face. I'm trying to sell the hair chair for some reason when these 3 little black kids dart through. They're obviously stealing something but I don't really know what it is. I stop selling and start chasing. The path they take leads us outside (somewhere similar to behind my other job) and they are cornered and balancing on a pile of shrub brush about to fall.

I talk them down from the unsteady unknown pile and the littlest boy lets me help him down by swinging him into my arms. From somewhere else some other people emerge and start setting small fires around the residential area. Me and the three little boys are stamping out most of the fires and I go up onto a deck to put out some more before they catch that whole house on fire when they (the teenagers or whoever that started the fire) kidnap that littlest boy. This makes me angry because I liked those little kids so I sprint down from the raised deck around the back of one house, then two - practically flying with speed (which I definitely can't do in real life). I nearly catch up to them and they are jumping into their car that they'd left at a nearby restaurant. They back out and I'm about ready to throw myself on top of the car to slow them down when they reverse in a faster gear. All the sudden on of the men in the back seat leans out the back window with a gun and fires once and misses because I drop to the ground. I'm laying at an inopportune angle facing uphill and towards their car because when they fire again I'm hit in the shoulder and the bullet's trajectory is heading at an angle across my body, missing my heart, hitting my lungs. The adrenaline of the bullet's impact shivers all through my body and I wake up.

Insane, ne? I can't help wondering what it means. I hope it doesn't mean I'm going to have to talk down a suicide, stop an arsonist, stop a kidnapping and get shot for my trouble.

Dreamscape

So I had a dream last night / this morning that was something between Stephenie Meyer's The Host, Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty (which is not surprising because I finished it last night before bed), my experiences abroad and some kind of video game. The details are really fuzzy now but I think my sister and I were at a kind of boarding school. We shared a room, ate in a Great Hall, wore ridiculous clothes etc. There was a building that we could all walk to from the main section of the school (I don't remember sitting through classes) that was part library, part recreation center and part bazaar. At one point after hours I was caught trying on jewelry by some random boy (that looks nothing like the boys I know in real life). After teasing me for being there he 'helped' me find some other pieces that apparently looked good on me.
At some point in the dream, members of the school (if that's what it was) would play a video game and depending on how you played your character would determine what would happen to you in real life. It was supposed to be a virtual reality game but it took it to a whole new level since characters that reached a certain power level or had taken a certain route or had shown themselves to have some sort of trait would end the game changed. There'd be a dulling or perhaps hardening of their eyes and their behavior would change. Those of us who weren't interested in the game (me for instance - I had both my sister and the boy for company) could definitely begin to see that those players were different in other ways too: harsher, more preoccupied with death. Words or phrases that were taboo, that they wouldn't have said before pass their lips without a thought. They are mindful of only their own wants.
It eventually comes to light that they are possessed by something 'other' that completely obliterates who they had been. A war of sorts is raged within the school. It's somewhere in this swirling mix of dark and light imagery that the dream ends but I keep replaying parts of it and completely mix up the timeline as new images and details fix themselves in with each replay. There is certainly not a lack of details but I can't remember all of them now that I'm awake. It's very sad really as parts of the dream were so good.

My plan for today is to go to the library and the office. I'll see if we got any money in and if we did I'll probably trot on down to the bank to make a deposit. I work at Target tonight and tomorrow. My parents are out of town for a little while. I dropped mom off at the airport yesterday. Mom will be back Wednesday; Dad won't be back until early February. They're in Florida and I really envy that fact right now. The outdoor thermometer says 27 degrees Farenheit. This is a huge improvement over yesterday when I got up to go to work and the temperature was -3 degrees. I can't wait for spring.