Fallout Dream

This dream was interjected with unrelated pieces, but the main theme was clearly inspired by fallout. I was in a desolate wasteland, and I think I was in the military. People I was working with kept referring to "my science" in a kind of patronizing way. I think I was the scientist for this military establishment, and they all had a very negative opinion of science because the world had already been ravaged by nuclear warfare.

At some point I was in a hardware store shopping for some kind of supplies, and when an old lady asked if I needed help finding anything I told her I was looking for tissue paper to conceal the more sinister supplies I was actually after. I can't really remember what those were. Well the old lady and I somehow started talking about tulips and I asked her if she had ever been to the tulip festival in Mount Vernon. She said she hadn't then tried to hold my hand. I figured I must have done something to give her the wrong impression and make her think I was into her even though she was about sixty. I felt bad so I just kind of let it happen and we walked off.

We were now outside the store heading to a warehouse. The old lady was no longer a hardware store employee, but was some high-ranking officer in whatever military I was a part of - kind of. I think it was a little like Riddley Walker. We had a military, but it was post-fallout, and it had a certain degree of mysticism, and felt a lot more tribal than the military that you're probably imagining. I think that this woman was the seer for our squad or something like that. Anyway, as we're walking there are these huge smokestacks off in the distance and they're spewing out ungodly amounts of thick brown smoke. But it's really windy outside, it looks like the midwest, just a huge flat field of brown dirt. It was very brown. But I understood that it was just because everything had been levelled by bombs. So the wind was making the smoke from these smokestacks rush upward really fast, and dance around in such a way that it looked just like we were watching them operate in fast forward, and I was really enthralled with this. I asked the old lady (who was much younger now) what those factories were doing, and she kind of bitingly told me to figure it out with "my science".

We got back to the warehouse we were heading to, a hangar I suppose, and there were a lot of characters from earlier in my dream that had in some way defected and were chained to desks inside the warehouse, which also had some helicopters and airplanes and other war-related things. I wish I could remember the dream more completely because I know that it was more cohesive than I'm describing it. These characters already had a history in the dream before I saw them as captives, so I was able to understand that they weren't necessarily bad people, and that I was maybe on the side of this that was evil. A guy that I knew from earlier in the dream tried to stab me in the calf with a blunt screwdriver as I walked by. It didn't pierce the skin but he told me he just wasn't done building his shank yet, and that he definitely would have stabbed me. The last desk I walked buy was occupied by a guy dressed in blood-soaked army fatigues, and a mask that looked something like the one from phantom of the opera, but scarier and bloodier. He was really terrifying. He had a shank that was complete - it was basically a very sharp screwdriver about 16 inches long, and he started ferociously attacking me. I was trying to just keep the thing away from my neck, and a couple times it touched my neck but I managed to get it away. After a pretty long struggle my old friend with the blunt screwdriver came through for me and stabbed the guy in the chest a few times, and I watched in slow motion as blood came out of his mouth and he collapsed on the floor. I picked up the long shank and was now watching myself in the third person. I was wearing the phantom mask for some reason, and I was swinging the weapon around at nothing. Since I was now viewing this in the third person I was able to realize I was swinging at nothing, but I could also see what I thought I was swinging at which was this deformed cat creature with tattoos all over the inside of its mouth.

After the imaginary battle was over I was in a back room with the old lady who was not old at all anymore, and she was just laughing at me as I drew a picture of the cat creature on the wall and described what I had been hallucinating. I was really frustrated that she wasn't taking this more seriously.