5/28/10 - Nukes in Russia

I'm at a boarding school in Russia (though everyone looks, dresses, and talks as they do here). A few things happened prior to what I'm describing, but I can't remember them because they were at the beginning of a fairly long dream.

Anyway, I'm following a girl I don't really know down a hallway trying to persuade her to show me a hidden place she knows about. She's trying to ignore me but I keep following her. Eventually she stops and turns and stares at me for a minute before dejectedly agreeing.

The hallway is apparently partially underground, with decoratively grated windows high up on the walls that look out at ground level on a courtyard. We stop under one of these windows and the girl glances up and down the hallway to make sure nobody's watching. She jumps up, catches the windowsill, opens the grate, and pulls herself through. I follow.

We're crouching in the very corner of a spacious courtyard, closed into a tunnel of sorts by black decorative fencing similar to the grate. We're slightly hidden behind some thin shrubs. The girl motions to follow her and starts crawling down the fence tunnel. I notice some people walking down a path through the courtyard. They see us and come running.

They are clearly not friends. They can't stand in our way since they're outside the fence, but they block our path by standing outside it and we can't get by because we have to crouch and we're defenseless. We have to go back or confront them. [I don't remember what we did, if anything. Maybe the dream just switched gears without resolving that.]

Now we're in a massive lobby, still at the school. The ceiling is absurdly tall, like a concert hall ceiling but twice as high. People are clumping together in small groups on the floor in an organized grid to line up with the ceiling. The ceiling is like a square grid of honeycomb, with square indentations about 5 people wide and 5 across. There's word of an imminent nuclear explosion. People are organized in a grid because the ceiling indentations will drop soon to provide a small bomb shelter for each group.

I'm walking through the crowd trying to find somebody to shelter with. Eventually I meet up with Anna, my chem lab partner from last year. She's got a grid square to herself and says she's waiting for a friend, so I stay with her. I keep looking up nervously at the ceiling making sure I'm in the square and not under an edge.

Her friend shows up; I've seen him around but don't know him or his name. An alarm sounds, indicating that the nukes have gone off somewhere in the distance. The ceiling drops. Anna's friend was under an edge of our square. It smashes into his head and he drops to the floor. There are no lights in the squares; it's dark and they rumble as the blast hits the school.

After a while, the ceiling lifts. Anna asks about her friend, saying "[his name]...?" (i don't remember it) and I say "he's dead, let's go" and push her towards the entrance of the lobby. People are filing out into the plaza in front of the entrance, a wide open area full of stone ledges and fountains and stairs. We're up in the mountains. Two mushroom clouds are visible far in the distance.

I see a flash of light, closer than the other mushroom clouds, and I sprint back into the lobby, through it, down some stairs, and into a back lobby of sorts and throw myself to the floor, my hands over my head. The light was another bomb. The shockwave flies up the stairs of the plaza and vaporizes anybody who didn't get back inside.

I get up and walk out the back door of the school into a parking lot.

The dream switches gears here to a car chase. I'm in a yellow SUV, apparently, and am chasing a nondescript smaller car. After chasing it across what appears to be the Bay Bridge, we're back in some mountains in Russia. The road is incredibly twisty and is wrapping around and up the mountain. After every sharp turn, there are a bunch of motion-sensitive gatling guns that open fire on my car but it's bulletproof and they just dent the hell out of it. This part (going around curves and being shot at) goes on for what feels like FOREVER in my dream.

Eventually we finally come to the end of the road, and my front bumper apparently has spikes on it and I ram the other car.

[dream switches gears again]

Now it's me rappelling down a cliff face of the mountain with the other driver rappelling after me. I know somehow that he is responsible for the bombs. Somehow I've lost the upper hand I no doubt obtained from ramming his car. I'm panicking because he's about to catch up, and if he does, I'm dead. I rappel down past an overhang and catch onto a ledge underneath, where I can no longer see the other guy.

I'm tired and afraid but decide to make my last stand there and just try to kill him when he drops past the overhang. I wait and wait but he never comes. I peek my head out and look up past the overhang. He's still there, just a few feet short of coming down. He sees me and starts laughing. He says "I'd join you, but I'm out of rope."

We had both secured our rope to the only place on the cliff that would hold one, so my rope had just been like 10 feet longer than his. "I'll catch you later, then," he says, still laughing, and he starts pulling himself back up his rope. I sit down on the ledge, relieved.

[I wake up]