An Uncharacteristic Dream

I was playing a video game and quickly became a part of it. I was soaring through a huge city at night in torrential rain. Everything was in foreboding shadow, lit only by the people who were still awake in the dead of night, and even then the light was muffled by curtained windows.

I landed silently on the second story of an apartment high-rise and looked in the window. My goal was to kill everyone in the room, except a woman who was sitting on her bed. Maybe the woman would see the world as I did, after searching in futility for a meaning and eventually finding no answers, only an enhanced sense of cold reality. There was a man inside, dressed sharply in a suit as if he had just gotten back from a date somewhere nice, and the woman had a small living doll at her feet.

I burst in through the window and whey were so stood perfectly still, paralyzed with fear. I had no weapons, so I looked through the drawers in the dresser and found a knife as long as my forearm in a shallow drawer, sitting in foam shaped to fit it snugly. I turned and lunged, burying the knife upside down just above the man's belt and wrenching it upward to the base of his ribcage in fluid succession, causing him to lurch off his feet. I then spun around, knife tearing crookedly from his body, and beheaded the doll as the man spun off his feet into the floor, sputtering unintelligible last words.

I left the woman in shock and tears, and glided to the balcony where I had landed. I stood there, soaking in the rain, until I saw the woman run to the phone in the kitchen to call the police, and began to climb the building. They would be here any minute now. It made sense to me that going up the building would be a much less obvious way to escape.

At the top of the highest balcony, I armed the grappling gun I was carrying on my back and shot it up toward the top of the building. It slipped and fell off the top ledge, but caught on something on a landing four stories above me. I pulled myself up onto the ledge, and saw that some villains I knew were in an alcove talking and taking refuge for the night.

There were seven of them, four female and three male, with me making eight villains in the city in total. One of the villainesses had the power of ice. She had wispy white hair and other than a shattered white scar one side of her jaw line, the rest of her was translucent as a dark crystal glass, and parts of her shone with sparkling highlights against the shadows like a black polished stone with distorted lights from distant windows passing through her as she moved. Knowing that I had no powers of my own, she gave me an assault rifle as a gift.

We took a group photo and started talking about our motives. With the sirens below beginning to converge on the building, I stated, "I feel no joy in killing. I do it for the chase," and I took a running jump off the edge of the landing.

I hit the pavement solidly on my hands and feet. Surrounding me were not the police as I had expected, but a band of thugs. The ones in front of me drew their knives, and began to close in. I drew my loaded semiautomatic weapon and began to shoot the ones behind me so that I had a direction to escape. I took most of them down as I retreated from the initial ambush point, but several of them continued after me no matter how many rounds I fired at them. As they got closer I began to panic and fire less accurately, blowing off the skin from arms and shoulders where I had previously embedded bullets in their heads or body. The ones that ceaselessly came after me were missing skin on their faces, blood soaking their clothes, and several were missing at least a hand, but they came after me with their knives regardless. I threw my gun at them, since I was out of ammunition, and it collided with one of them with a sickening crunch and scream as it broke his fleshless jaw. This bought me some time to gain some distance on them. I ran into a nearby residential building to hide, and suddenly the dream shifted viewpoints.

I was now an old man who long ago was the leader of a gang like the one outside. I hid the woman who had just rushed into my home on my balcony by having her lie flat. The balcony was very old and poorly constructed. When it was built, the balcony was mainly intended for growing plants, so it wasn't really large enough for anyone to step outside on to. I had a vase with bamboo growing in it and some miscellaneous junk from the house rusting out there, but I shoved the vase to a corner and there enough room for the girl. The floor of the balcony was several inches lower than the doorway leading to it, so she could lay there with a the mat over her without being spotted. The gang searched my house, but they knew who I was, and out of respect they didn't ransack the place. Eventually they left, without finding my new guest. When the coast was clear, I went to ask her what had happened.