Nightmares

I had a SERIOUSLY awful nightmare last night.

I was working at this office building, and the office was overrun by killer robots. This by itself is not unusual, and they were pretty laughable robots–basically stacks of cardboard boxes with red laser eyes. My fellow cubicle dwellers and I took to hiding under our desks and then jumping the robots from behind and destroying them.

Then the rats showed up.

The rats were pretty straightforward looking rats, again, with red laser eyes. They weren’t trying to kill us, exactly, they were gnawing on the wires to turn off the lights so that whatever was sending the rats could get us in the dark. I grabbed one, and while everybody was staring at it going "What do we do?" I gritted my teeth, grabbed its head, and hyper-extended the spine, which is the usual method of killing pigeons (I’m not actually sure if it works on rats, and I do not suggest anyone try it, but it worked in my dream.)

The next part of the dream, which lasted for subjective hours, was me scrabbling around in an increasingly ruined building, full of boxes and cables and broken furniture, with the lights flickering, grabbing mechanical rats with my bare hands and breaking their necks. This was not pleasant. I got covered in rat bites, and the rats kept on coming, and I knew if they managed to chew down to the wires, we were doomed. Various nervous hacker types were trying to keep the system up and running, while I ran around catching rats.

It would have been a decent computer game premise, if I’d had a non-melee option.

I attempted to bring Ben in–for some reason he was there–but rather than catch rats, he gave me a surely-you-are-joking look and perched magisterially in a broken office chair.

The last wave of rats were strangely heavy and angular, rat hides stretched over unyielding metal cylinders. I had to smash those. It was not pleasant.

I was chasing one of those in a dim, flickering room, and I looked up, and a child walked in with red laser eyes. And right then, I knew we’d lost, because there are things people simply won’t do. I felt bad enough about the rats.

I got up and walked into the main office, to tell my comrades that the war was over and we’d lost. And everything was neatened up, and most of my co-workers looked up at me with red glowing eyes, and one of them said "That was fun, but it’s time to go back to work now."

Apparently we’d lost very quickly.

"Right," I said, picking up Ben, "I just need to…visit the…bathroom first."

And I went into the bathroom to the last stall, apologized to Ben, killed him, and then took out a handgun that apparently I had been carrying in my purse and shot myself in the head.*

Were this a proper dramatic narrative, I would have woken up, probably screaming, at that point, but instead I had a mini-fragment of another dream where I talked briefly with Carlota, at the foot of a staircase, about who was attending some race or other, and THEN I woke up and grabbed my head and went "Oh holy crap, that wasn’t good at all."

I babbled out most of it to Kevin, who wrapped his arms around me and said all the meaningless soothing things you say in those situations, and then, rather groggily, "Well, look on the bright side…"

"Huh?"

"It’s not going to happen, because you’re probably never going to work in an office again."

There’s that.

*I have personally disproved the whole die-in-a-dream-die-for-real thing about twenty times, although not previously by suicide to escape Stepfordization.

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