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I generally get up between 4 or 5, you know, get a drink of water or something, and then go back to sleep. So, during the morning sleep cycle, when I have dreams I tend to remember them.

I dreamed that I had joined the Brotherhood of Nod and had been notified of an attack on Newark, NJ, but for some reason I had to be there personally. So... I was, at the Rutgers Newark campus (which looked suspiciously like the Rutgers New Brunswick campus overlaid on the NJ Turnpike but never mind), with the airport off in the distance, and also the industrial sites... and I was walking along with an old friend from primary school, when the initial attack came. It was nothing much - a flicker of light behind one of the airliners, then another plane appeared, fired a missile that knocked the airliner out of the sky, then disappeared again. I turned around to look at all the airliners stacked up on approach to EWR airport, and they too were being shot down one by one.

People started to panic, and started running. Where to? - anywhere not here, and I was running as well. I could see more of the same sneaky aircraft bombing the refineries and stuff on the horizon, and there were huge fireballs and smoke was clouding the sky. At about the moment I saw that, my friend and I saw a pair of aircraft - they were F-22s, I think - coming straight up the street we were running down, and they dropped firebombs on the street and the houses before doing a strafing run. I'd apparently been promised immunity from attack, but I wasn't sure how much to trust that, at that point. I think it was roughly then that my friend was hit and killed, but I had managed not to be hit.

Anyhow, Newark was all fire and chaos, and for some reason there was also water rushing across the streets like dams or huge water mains had been burst, and so I was trying desperately to get back to the place I had been when the dream started, by walking on top of the now-exposed water mains and sewer pipes, and also the collapsed plumbing from burned-out houses (which I called wall knives, in the dream).

Anyway, about the time that the rushing water had put out most of the fires, I noticed people were trying to get out of the city any way they could. In balancing on pipes as I made my way back, I noticed that there was a large park where a furcon was being held, and there were fursuiters all over the place who were fleeing. Look, it's a dream, don't ask.

Anyhow. So I made my way through some sewer access tunnels and came back up in a forested area, where there was a turkey processing plant - people would go out, net the turkeys that lived in the area, and bring them back to be slaughtered and butchered. I ended up being a sort of captive there, I think as a butcher or something, but made my way out - although before I could distract the guard dog with a large piece of stolen turkey meat, one of the butchers decapitated it and skinned it, and put its head in a hopper for grinding turkey. (This didn't stop the dog's torso and legs from standing at the gate and rocking back and forth, although the butcher got the rest of it soon enough, too.)

I somehow managed to meet some other former turkey plant workers, but we both managed to get recaptured, and it was different - the turkey hunters now had guns, instead of nets, they looked a lot nastier, and there were a lot more of them. (The explanation I came up with was that in our absence, they'd managed to catch all of the stupid turkeys, and now they were hunting smarter turkeys, so they needed more hunters and couldn't rely on nets anymore.)

It started to make less and less sense at this point; my companions were all separated from me, except one, who had been old and ailing and was now just a head and a segment of spine in a paper bag. The turkey plant also had been redesigned, with different color-coded sections and so on, and escalators that moved dangerously fast in spirals and stuff, it was very weird and I kept being afraid I would be taken down to one of the places where workers' bodies were cut up and the meat added to the product stream. Oddly enough, the head-in-a-bag person requested to be delivered to "The Place of Pleasant Relaxation for the Elderly", which I strongly suspected was something like that, because nobody who went there was ever seen again.

Anyway, I had gotten into the blue-marked part of the plant, and couldn't figure out how to get out; at this point it just got metaphysical. I had a vision of the leader of the Brotherhood, telling me that to be cleansed I had to lie down on this patch of floor which, instead of being smooth floorboards, was like a liquid mirror. So I lay down in it and was immobilized by it and was sort of a mattress for people who needed somewhere soft to lie on, which was kind of unpleasant, although not as much as I'd expected it to be (the smell of unwashed person gets habituated to).

At some point the Prophet showed up and only I could see him, for some reason; he started making people's heads explode and others go insane and weird things like that, and carried me away to where I met my mother, who was very disappointed that I had joined the forces of destruction and chaos, but didn't actually mind all that much as long as I was okay and wasn't going to hurt people (especially her). At that point, I think the alarm clock turned the radio on, because that's when I woke up.

This dream is just weird, but the scene of Newark being destroyed is disturbing, and it persists in my mind.