I was trying to sleep at home, except my house didn’t look like my house in real life. I was in the living room, which was on the ground floor, fully furnished, but with hardly any walls. I was lying under the covers on the sofa, or perhaps it was my bed; it was daytime, and the living room was well-lit with daylight.
Through the missing walls, I could see green bushes; I was in a suburbia. A couple of neighbors, middle-aged, portly, grown men, kept walking into the living room while I was trying to sleep, asking for this and that. After they left, I got back under the covers, irritated, thinking that the problem with such an open living room was that people kept walking in.
And then another neighbor – or perhaps it was the same one, as he was middle-aged and portly – walked in and said he needed to inspect our heating vent. He was some kind of repairman. Our heating vent was covered by a large grill on the side of the wall, about head-high. The repairman stuck his head through the grill, tinkering with it, his tongue sticking out the corner of his mouth in concentration. As he fiddled with the grill, his arm turned into purple tentacles that wrapped around the grill bars and protruded from the other end of the rectangular grill.
Upon seeing this, I thought I had to call the CIA, or the MIB (Men In Black). In my dream, they were the same, and it was similar to calling 911. So I called them and the male operator told me they had an office on the 32nd floor of my building, so would respond soon.
But there was an impending sense of danger and we had to evacuate. So my parents and I quickly left our house and wandered away. I only had time to grab my stuffed animal, Jellybean – but in my dream, I had two of her. My mother and I joked that the two stuffed animals were Jellybean and Jelly-buhn, meaning Jelly-stupid in Chinese.
As my parents walked around, my dad wandered into a small farm field. At first, my mom and I were annoyed, wondering where he was straying off to on his own, as he walked to the top of a grassy bluff with a playground at the top. But we followed him. He was walking among a few rows of crops, like short green corn crops, at the bottom of a grassy hill. A tractor was plowing through the field. When we asked him what he was doing here, he said he wanted to make sure there were still farms producing food that could be made into pizzas. I replied huffily that pizzas were unhealthy and I keep telling him that but he never listens […]. Then I stomped past him through the tall grass, clutching my Jellybeans.
We eventually wandered into a closed mall, where many other refugees had gathered. We used the bathrooms and I wanted to get a backpack to carry my Jellybeans in, but we couldn’t get into the store before it closed down.
My family and I sat on a bench with a lot of other refugees. My mom had brought my laundry bag and the delicates sack that went inside it. I decided to just carry my Jellybeans in the laundry or delicates bag. But when I took them from my mom, I saw she had somehow filled the bags with random clutter. I started to sort through the bags. The two Jellybeans I had weren’t identical – one was slightly larger and much newer and she seemed to stand upright, while the other was the older and more worn Jellybean that I have in real life. As I was sorting through the laundry bag items, the worn Jellybean’s ear got caught in some laundry bag item and became slightly soaked and shredded at the tip. I sighed, inspected the damage, held her to me and thought, “My poor Jellybean.”
As we sat on the bench, I looked around at the dark, closed mall. There was a wide metal grating over the entrance to the far hallway; I remember thinking that soon, an entire horde of zombies would be stampeding against it, trying to break it down to get to us and the other refugees. But no zombies ever came. I thought perhaps we should have stayed at home and waited for the help of the MIB.
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