Apocalyptic Nightmares

In the realm of creepy dreams, this one came from Friday night (or, well, Saturday morning, really). It started with some sort of party, which I don't remember very well except that one of my very old friends was there. Then it shaded over into something more apocalyptic, featuring:

- A long, dark stretch of water drainage (or sewer?) tunnel, with mostly-still-intact metal catwalks above the water line. As I was moving down the catwalks, I heard a child's voice crying out for help. The child turned out to be just a head and torso; the arms and legs were gone somehow. I knew it was too damaged to survived, and since there was nothing I could do I went on. I had just jumped across a missing section of catwalk when I heard something come up behind me and eat the child.

- Another child was outside with his father when something meteorite-ish crashed into the father, killing him instantly and mostly-killing the boy. The boy reappeared from time to time throughout the rest of the dream, wielding a length of chain that acted like some sort of monofilament whip to cut people into pieces. Sometimes the child was indoors and on foot; sometimes he was outside on a bicycle. He seemed to be haunting a particular area.

Right at the end of the dream, the ghost-boy caught me and my girlfriend outside. (In real life, of course, I have a Beautiful Wife, but she didn't appear in this. Also, I'm not sure, but the girlfriend may have been played by Michelle Yeoh.) We alternated between trying to avoid him as he whizzed by on his bike, using old cars and the placement of curbs for shelter; and trying to get down into the storm drains, where he wouldn't follow us and couldn't hit us with the whip. Finally, I got close enough that I had to step in closer to him to avoid the whip; the chain, I don't know, shortened and became less sharp, and I was able to grab it. Girlfriend caught the ghost boy when he tumbled off his bike, but then he slipped into a small drain himself. I was able to coax him out (despite the really, really eerie ghost-boy laughter), and catch hold of his arm - at which point I made him stop and sit with me. I think there was a vague idea of either sort-of-adopting him, or maybe letting him haunt some part of myself; either way, taming him by giving him a home and/or family. I don't know how that turned out, though, because I woke up about then.

- Somewhere in the middle there, I was helping lead one group of survivors to shelter. (From aliens? From zombies? From collapsing cities? I'm not sure.) We'd gotten everyone into an old wooden campground building, just up the road from a similar building where another group had taken shelter. I called for some volunteers to go back with me for supplies, since the chips and hotdogs at the campground headquarters weren't going to last very long. (My brother was one of the volunteers. If you know him in real life, this is no surprise. There were also two children and one other adult.)

We'd made it just a few steps up the road when there was some sort of attack or explosion in front of us; a great sizzling orange energy-dome that started expanding towards us in steps. It was, of course, burning and/or crushing everything in its path. We ran. We ran, in fact back through our camp building - yelling for everyone to run with us - and on down the hill to the other group's camp building. The effect stopped just after smashing in the wall of the second group's building. I don't know how many of our group got out, but I didn't think it was very many.

I'm also pretty sure that that's how the girlfriend and I wound up going back to get supplies later. We were definitely circling around that effect, and the supplies were in the ghost-boy's territory. I'm not sure just how much time had passed between that disaster and the supply run, though.

So, yeah: creepy dreams. Or outright nightmares, if you prefer. I blame the nyquil and the incipient sinus infection.