18 May 2025
Dream
Extremely long cinematic dream in which I, a bunch of my friends, and an older white man (the older guy from The Good Place) save a bunch of street and stray kids from an abusive woman and two or three of her brothers or boyfriends. The whole story was in the dead of winter and took place on a highway between a town and a larger town in Colorado. I was in a car going south first, I think someone else was driving it, and I saw the corpses of two adolescents, one dark-haired white girl and one mangled, indistinct white boy. The ring leader of the adults, an evil middle-aged woman, was dancing around in a long ratty wig and acting like the whole thing was a big party. She and a couple other adults were alternately fighting and celebrating with each other. This was happening in the middle of traffic and apparently police refused to stop traffic to remove to corpses (which turned into just one corpse of one older adult white female), even though I was strategizing about how they could shut down a portion of the highway at midnight for an hour to reduce traffic impact. Still, the police did nothing.
At some point driving along this stretch of highway I tried to call 911, but I was panicked, not sure what I was seeing, and they proved unhelpful or didn’t show up. There came an opportunity to act like one of the children the ringleader (the main middle-aged woman) kept taking in and abusing. I wore overalls and acted like a poor, uneducated, dirty adolescent, just the type she would take in and eventually hurt or even kill. Basically it was a sting operation, and I was infiltrating her home, which must’ve been somewhere along the highway in a rural area. I remember being in a kitchen that was perhaps missing walls or was otherwise incomplete or damaged. I remember being around cabinets and telling the other kids about myself. There were several street kids and I passed as one of them in terms of age and demeanor. There were two dirty older adult men wearing fingerless gloves and one wore a yellow beanie. I asked the group how old they thought I was. It was important to the sting operation somehow and I mentioned that I was an only child and my parents were dead, missing, or otherwise gone and I didn’t know my real age. After a silence, beanie man said “you look poor,” meaning my age didn’t matter, I just looked poor as any other kid there. I wasn’t going to get a clear answer about my age, which was fine and I played it off.
Some friends joined my sting operation, pretending to be troubled kids, and they each joined the group telling the adults that they were “looking for work.” So many came and in quickening succession so it started to look suspicious. Last to join was Colin, who wore his hair down and looked smaller and thin than usual, and wore eyeliner and maybe some goth clothes. He broke the ruse and the ringleader lady was pissed at him. He somehow kicked her out a door and locked it, but the lock was weak and she might just burst through. I and the other “kids” hid, and I looked in all the empty cabinets but wasn’t sure how to get in them, and even pondered hiding in the freezer. I wasn’t upset at Colin, who asked aloud and in a relaxed way if he’d done anything wrong, but I knew what the ringleader woman was capable of and we were in serious danger. Somehow a bunch of us were able to get into a snow-covered truck, which may have been white at first and then turned black. We needed to hurry. The guy from The Good Place showed up with the key, got the car on, and warmed us up. He rolled windows down as the windshield was too frozen to see through. It was important that the truck get away and I was following it somehow without actually being inside it. It barreled down a snowy forest road, steam puffing about. Then police did find us but didn’t understand what The Good Place guy was doing, and was chasing him like a criminal. I remember coming up on a farm house with winding fenced paths, and suddenly we were on bikes getting away. A little girl in a pink tutu made a right turn on a path with her bike, which initially seemed like a problem but actually wasn’t, we had to ride down that path anyway and The Good Place guy followed her while she spoke, I don’t remember what she said.