Escape and Attack

At times I felt like I was in some sort of co-operative video game. There were the bad guys all dressed as soldiers with faces painted the same charcoal grey as their steel helmets, and there was us, the good guys with a set of supernatural powers ... and playing cards. The reason why the bad guys were after us was because we belonged to them. I guess we were some sort of Charles Xavier's School for the Gifted except that instead of a school we were in a prison.

But no, not a prison, a laboratory.

My first earliest recalled visual from the dream is standing at an observation window looking out on what might be a combination storage bay, or factory floor. The huge space on the other side of the window is dark and dim seemingly lit only by the colour of flames and underwater lights. It may have once been a huge tank of water with pumps and pipes and industrial machines. On far side of this factory floor are four kennels which at first all seem each to hold a single dolphin. (Was that room all under water?) But when one breaks from his cage and rushes the window it's an orange-coloured gibbon, not a dolphin. He's hit the window so hard it has cracked. The window is a security widow, one of those reinforced glass things with wire webbing and so when the window cracks almost to shattering, it's startling. The cracks are in the shape of a punch. On the other side of the window, the gibbon does not jabber, it speaks. Its strength and its ability not only to have escaped its cage but to speak (!!!) are indications of how far these experiments have gone.

I listened hard to gibbon as it spoke but I can't remember what it said. The sense of it was: Let's get the fuck out of here. Right now. All of us.

It galvanized our group; it's the beginning of our escape, our flight to freedom. The group of us (are we five? Seven?) ... we adopted our fight pose, a particular way of standing as we fought that seemed like some sort a comic book pose when I thought about it after waking. Until this very moment of writing it down, I couldn't exactly put my finger on what it reminded me of ... but I just got it. It was from Iron Man , the first movie. Iron Man standing flatfooted with bent knees, chest jutting toward the enemy, raising and pointing his palms at the bad guys and then blasting them with his repulsors.

That's exactly how we engaged the bad guys. We didn't have repulsors in our palms, we just blasted them with the force of our psychic abilities.

This is how we broke out to the street.

It was night. The bad guys swarmed us, identical clones with charcoal Kevlar and guns, shadows in the dark of night.

They didn't have a chance.

I remember studying one of the unconscious ones after he'd been blasted, taking some moments to really appreciate and marvel how his face was painted the same colour as his helmet and wondering who this individual was. I remember vaguely thinking, "How are we going to keep score?" Who was keeping any kind of tally of the bad guys we put down? How many for me? How many for all the rest of them? Had any of our own been knocked down yet?

One of the last sequences I remember was being mentored by an older, more experienced member of our group. I had a deck of cards, big cards, each a little larger than the size of my hand. There was something funny about the deck and I realized that some cards were taped together. The tape did not wrap around the cards, a loop of tape was stuck to the middle of the card so that a second card could be attached, hiding the tape. There were a few other "sets" of cards similarly joined. I took the one out I had noticed first, three cards taped so that all the edges still lined up perfectly, the ace and queen of spades and the four of clubs. My mentor explained to me the special ability that came from attacking with these specific cards held between my palms. I spent the rest of the dream pulling these three cards apart and practicing perfectly putting them together again, their edges all lining up just so.