la_belle_laide | Dreams WTF?

On April 16th I dreamed this.

Going back even further, on April 3rd I dreamed this:

I'm ridiculously tired because I had a crazy nightmare last night and even though I was able to wake myself up from it at around 5:30 AM, I wasn't able to really get back to sleep after that.

It started where I took a part time job in a mental institution. (This is weird because when my cousins and I were kids we used to pretend that we worked in a mental hospital. The game was called, well, "Mental Hospital.") Anyway I was working there with a training brother of mine who doesn't train anymore (and who has been having some bad problems with the health of a close family member.) He was working as security and was sitting at a desk. All of a sudden the power went out and all the doors holding the criminally insane people opened, and the people started pouring out of their cells. They pretty much dogpiled my friend. THe other workers weren't doing anything to help so as I was trying to pull the violent, crazy people off of my friend, I was screaming at the other workers that they were incompetent. One of them turned to me and said, "You're such a bitch, why don't you just do your job and not worry about what everyone else is doing or is not doing?" I kept trying to get to the bottom of the pile of crazy people but they turned into clothes, and my friend was not at the bottom of the pile.

The lights went off next and I had a flashlight. By the flashlight I could see that one really huge guy that I knew to be a rapist was walking down the hall towards me. I was trying to close a gate between us but it wouldn't close. I ran up the stairs and my Dad was there. I told him that there was a man chasing me and my Dad came down to help. The crazy guy was waiting at the bottom of the stairs and he went up to my Dad like he was going to start a fight with him. I had the brilliant idea that maybe I could reason my way out of this so I asked the crazy rapist guy if he wouldn't rather go outside and play ball for a while. He thought this was a good idea and he went outside. My Dad went back up the stairs.

I decided it was time to get the lights back on and I told one of the other workers, "You know at my other job, we know how to do things like, Oh I don't know, fix the circuit breaker!" And she said to me, "You're such a bitch, if your other job is so good, why are you still working here?" I had no answer for that.

I got the lights back on (no one else seemed bothered by the fact that the whole place was a huge mess,) and I saw that the inmates were now all circus animals locked up in flimsy cages. They were piled in and stacked on top of each other and most of them were big cats, like leopards and tigers, and one lion. They looked hungry. I thought to myself that if I could feed them, they wouldn't eat me, and I was trying to get to th fridge to get them some canned dog food (even though they were big cats.) The lion kept watching me and I noticed that his cage looked like it would break any second. I thought, "I'll never get by there without it jumping out and devouring me." It was like there was a time limit and I would not be able to feed them quickly enough. I also knew that they were waiting for me to get close enough so they could eat me, but that if I took much longer, they would stop waiting and just attack anyway. (Note from hindsight: The anonymous people who sent the messages!) So right before they attacked, I got out of the room and shut the door. The door had a window where I could still see them, and it scared me because I knew that the lion would figure out how to open the door.

Just then a tiny little chihuahua with a broken back leg went hobbling into the room with the big cats and I was behind the door trying to yell to it to get out, but it couldn't hear me. Then the lion ripped open the bottom of its cage and lunged at the little dog. It roared at the little dog and the little dog started crying and shaking. Then the lion jumped on it and I hid my eyes, but I could still hear the little dog screaming as the lion ate it.

That's when I told myself, "Okay, this dream is way too scary and it's time to wake up."

And of course after that I couldn't get back to sleep.

Smart subconscious, y/y? Or what? Because that's a pretty precise metaphor.