In the Virtual Bank Line

The Pirate and I are in a car driving to some small-ish town near a larger town - perhaps Richmond. I am tired and uncomfortable and want to get out of the car and walk around, but the Pirate keeps saying "Just a little further." We're going to some walking trail that the Pirate wants to show me. Finally the car stopped. I thought that we had found the trail, so I got out of the car. On the ground, there was a two-foot-wide stripe on the ground with black arrows pointing in one direction. The Pirate says "No, that's not it," but I'm already off walking. I come to some lettering on the ground that tells me that this wide yellow stripe was a fault line.

I walk along the fault line, and came to a place where there was a two-inch crack in the yellow stripe. I kept following along, and the line curved around the block down a little street bordered on one side by a hill. Clothes were strewn about the street, as though someone had lost a basket of laundry. I kept following the now-cracked fault line, and it wound back around the block to where I had first noticed the crack, as though if there were an earthquake, this block would sink into the ground.

I went back around the curve, and this time there were a lot more clothes lying in the street. Now it looked as though someone was throwing clothes off the hill. It occurs to me that I don't know where the Pirate is, so I go up the hill looking for him.

I don't find him, but I find a woman who has apparently been my pen-pal from the East Coast. She is here for a visit, and I am thrilled to see her. She wants to drive into the city for a little sight-seeing. My friend wanted to take a ferry into the city. This ferry was the sort that one drives one's car into, so we drove to the pier, but we saw the latest ferry pulling away. We parked in a parking lot and got out of the car to walk to the end of the pier. There were a lot of other people at the end of the pier, and the more people who walked to the end of the pier, the further the pier stretched out over the water.

The crowd that amassed finally made the pier stretch all the way across the bay, to within 10 yards of the other shore. We waded through the water to the nearest patch of land, which was a gravel beach completely surrounded by a huge building that we would have to go through in order to get out. The crowd acts as though we have just come through some dangerous, scary experience. Most of the people join hands and begin singing a song that everyone knows but me. I open my mouth wide, letting a very faint "la laaaa la" out so that people will think that I'm singing too.

After the singing, my friend and I go into the building and then find ourselves in the Sunset district of the city at a squalid apartment building. We go into an apartment and see that no one lives there, although we are expecting to see a man there. There are a couple of sodas into the refrigerator, but no real food. There is no toilet paper in the bathroom. There are hangers in the closet, but only one pair of pants and two shirts hung on them. No bed, no dresser, no nothing else. It looks like maybe someone uses this place in emergencies, but does not stay there.

My friend says that our target is not there, so we have to go to some desert town where he has fled. We have to get some information from him that is very important. Bad people are also trying to get this information, and it's important that we get it first. We drive to the desert, to a big, sprawling house. There's no one home, but someone has left in a hurry. There is a still-steaming cup of coffee, the dresser drawers are open and their contents spilled all over the place.

We go outside and in the back yard, there is a school bus whose seats have been mostly removed and has been converted into a tour bus. In the back of the tour bus, there is another closet with empty hangers and a pair of pants and a couple of shirts. We know that we're very close. We go through the bus, looking everywhere. We find the man we're looking for. He is dead in one of the seats.

We jump off the bus and go back through the house. There is a baby in a carrier in a bedroom. The bad people don't know that the baby's carrier is the key to the information they want. We look at the carrier, but can't see anything that looks like the information we need. It must be encoded somehow, but we don't know how.

We take the baby and go back to the city, back to the very large building. We were still trying to figure out where the information in the baby carrier was. But now we know that the bad people are onto us. They haven't actually seen the baby, but they know that we have a baby and that baby has the information. I sent my friend away - told her to run with the baby and get away. She ran from the building, and I watched her go, running up the street. I ran out another door and realized that I was on the top floor of the building. A man comes out of one of the rooms and says that he can help me. I don't trust him, so I decide to tell him that I'm alone. My friend will get away alone and I will distract this person by letting him "help" me.

He takes my hand and leads me to a stairwell, telling me that this is the way to escape. He lets me go first, and as I start down the stairs he jumps me, grabbing me around the neck. As we fall I manage to turn around so that we fall onto the man's body. He grunts heavily, so I know that he is hurt. We are lying on the landing, me on top of him, and I'm trying to get up, but he puts his hands around my neck from behind. I grab two of his fingers and pulled as hard as I could, breaking them. The man took his hands away, screaming in pain. I jumped to my feet and began kicking his head as hard as I could until he passed out.

I ran out the nearest door, finding myself on a balcony facing a street. On identical balconies off to my left were two women who were obviously pursuing me. They looked at me and ran back into the building. I realized that I was only on the second floor and jumped from my balcony into the street where I started running. I got a little way down the street when my friend came out from the bushes, hissing at me.

I went over to the bushes and saw that she didn't have the baby anymore. "I put it in daycare!" she said, proudly. I immediately realized that this was genius. None of the bad guys had seen the baby, so if they were to actually figure out which daycare the baby was in, all they would see was a whole mess of babies, and wouldn't know which one was the right one.
Not only that, but my friend had figured out the code. We would have to wait until the heat was off in order to get at it. But it was okay. We could wait years to get the information. The information was encoded in the baby's DNA.

And then I woke up.

At the beginning of the dream, I felt nothing but curiosity. Even when the Pirate disappeared, I only felt curious about where he'd gone. Then, during the very dangerous chase parts, I was excited as one is when watching a movie. At no time in the dream did I ever feel that I was in danger. I knew that I had the ability to outsmart, outfight, outrun these people. By the end, I felt triumphant, really proud of myself.