A recurring theme in dreams I have is that when I need them to, no one will listen to me; everyone is always apathetic to what I have to say, even in the most distressing of situations. And while the dream I had last night is rather ridiculous, it’s a perfect example of this.
I’m in the kitchen with my sister. She’s sitting down, eating something at the table, while I’m standing at the sink rinsing some dishes. I casually glance at the fridge to my left and I notice a small snail crawling up the side.
“Ew! Michelle, there’s a snail in here! Gross! How did a snail even get in here? Will you pick it up and take it outside?”
“No way!” my sister said. “I’m not touching a snail!”
I fuss a little more and, without saying a word, my sister gets up to pull the snail off of the fridge. I start to slowly back up, automatically thinking that she is going to try to put it on me. “Don’t even think about it!” I say, walking into the living room.
My dad then comes from his room into the kitchen, where my sister shows him the snail. “Let’s microwave him,” she says. She gives the snail to my dad and he puts it into the microwave. Then she leaves the kitchen and goes into her room.
“I can’t believe you’re going to microwave a snail,” I say to my dad. He just
shrugs and turns the microwave on. After a few seconds, I look over my shoulder and look at the microwave. The tiny snail had ballooned and exploded, and the inside of the microwave became a sticky mess. The mass inside, formerly a snail, had morphed into a giant wad of what looked like stretched out bubble gum. My dad and I watched in amazement. Thick black smoke begins to come out of the microwave, setting off the smoke detector in the house. A few seconds later, the microwave is ablaze.
“Dad! Dad! The microwave is on fire! Dad, put it out!” My dad begins to hit the burning microwave with an old dish towel which only makes the fire grow. We bolt out of the house. I have to call the fire department, I think. But the phone is inside! Well, I guess I can go back in and make the call from my room. The fire hasn’t reached that side of the house yet. I go inside through the front door, but before I can even leave the foyer I think about the fire spreading to my room and being trapped inside and decide to take a different course of action. I run to the neighbor’s house, but the people there act as though I’m speaking a different language. “What? What?” is all that they say. I pick up one of their cell phones off of the counter and dial 911. There is no answer – I realize that I have not hit the “send” button, but I go off into a train of thought of how if you dial 911 on a cell phone, it should connect you straight through, so you don’t have to waste time pressing send. This frustrates me, so I leave their house to try and find my mom.
I end up on the second story food court of a shopping mall with floor to ceiling windows and a sunroof. I spot my mom sitting at a two-person table by herself, eating Chinese food. I rush over to her to tell her that our house is on fire. “I know,” she says. “Your dad told me.”
“Well aren’t we going to do anything about it?!” I ask her incredulously.
“There’s nothing we can do,” she says, picking up her tray and throwing it out. “We’ll just have to rebuild.” We walk over to the escalator and I begin to complain about how I’ve probably lost all my things.
When we get home, the damage isn’t as bad as I had expected. Our couch is still functionable and the walls, while charred, are still standing. I walk into my room. My computer, an old desktop, looks in good shape. I walk over to it to inspect it further. I touch the computer’s plastic casing and it falls away.
“Well,” I say to no one in particular, “at least this means NEW COMPUTER!”
Tags: animals, computers, dreams, explosion, family, fire, weird
