Clan life, murder, post apocalyptic NYC

This is a dream I had recently, one of the more vivid and revealing dreams that I've ever had. I woke up a couple of times during the dream to use the bathroom, but I was able to return. I'm not posting it as I wrote it up the next day because it's a super detailed 10 page document and no one wants to read that :cheeky: that's also why there may be some blank spaces. mmmhmmm well it turned out way longer than I had hoped anyway... sorry skip the first two paragraphs if you like, they're not that interesting.

At the beginning, I've just returned home from my travels abroad and am meeting my dad near where I grew up. For some reason he's wearing a suit and looks about 30 years younger than he actually is (he's 70). He seems really happy and informs me that he has remarried, which I think is odd because he had only moved out of the family home two or three weeks before I had this dream, but I'm glad because he is happy. We drive into the wilderness and up into some mountains where he introduces me to his new wife at their house. She's sort of a hip older lady, and the house is really cluttered but in a cozy sort of way. It's very comfortable. They take me up to show me my room and it's not so much a room as a platform, octagonal and maybe 15 feet from end to end, piled with blankets and pillows and sort of fuzzy clutter. The platform is suspended above the living room and I worry about my privacy.

After I've been living there a while there is a birthday party for one this lady's relatives, and I'm nervous because I don't do very well in party type situations. I quickly loosen up when I realize that all of the people present (most of them older than 60) are super friendly and like to have a good time. I go outside and find that this house is actually part of a complex of suspended platforms up here in the mountain wilderness, and all of the people at the party live here as well and are part of one big extended family. I feel accepted as part of the family and feel that for the first time in my life I am actually part of a community.

As time goes on (maybe weeks, maybe years) I learn that these people have a very archaic way of living, and almost no contact at all with the outside world. We gather food from the trees and hang around and have a good time. The lady who my dad married is a sort of matriarch - she's in charge of pretty much everything and everyone likes her and looks up to her. My dad is no longer a part of the dream, but I'm still living with these people. At some point I become acquainted with three or four "brothers" (cousins, whatever), all around my age (I'm 20). The youngest is probably around 15, and is retarded.

For some reason I decide to go searching for a lotus flower, and the matriarch lady tells me that there is one in the sewer/basement of the clan complex. With the company of my brothers I go looking for it. Long story short, I find it, but just before I pick it up, BATS EVERYWHERE! My brothers run away, but I'm still grabbing around for the lotus flower. Once I have it I'm just barely able to keep sight of my brothers and follow them out of the maze like sewer/dungeon type place. I'm kind of pissed off that they left me so far behind. I bring the lotus to the matriarch and she reveals that it has the power to change the age of whoever eats it to a random age, and also affects the eater's maturity based on what age they are changed to. Since there are so many old people living here, a lot of people want to try it. The matriarch decides that the lotus will be included in some sort of dish made from potatoes and eaten by whoever wants some. There is much debate about what kind of potato to use. Specifics I remember include indoor potato or outdoor potato, and boy's potato or girl's potato.

More time has passed. I'm not sure what became of the whole lotus thing, but my brothers and I are still the same age. It's nighttime and we are at a kind of outdoor warehouse where the clan stores all of the food that it harvests. Some suburban kids that remind of a lot of the kids that I used to go to college with ("bro" types) come in and start ripping up our food and throwing it on the floor. My brothers and I fight them and they run off. While we're cleaning up, I see one of them has come back and is running straight toward me. I grab him by the arm, whirl him around and toss him into a wall. I realize that I'm still holding his arm, which has ripped off. In spite of this, he and his buddies continue to try and wreck our supplies and mercilessly taunt my brothers (especially the retarded one) for being simple people. We just keep beating the shit out of them, like really badly, but they just keep laughing and saying that the more damage we do to them the harder it's going to be for us in court. After a while they all run away except for the one who's arm I ripped off, who just doesn't seem to give up. We keep wailing on him until all that's left of his face is kind of a bloody, pulpy mush. I'm not a violent person at all in my waking life, but this felt damn good, I'm not gonna lie.

The matriarch tells us that we have to run away to New York City so we can hide from the authorities. I make my way along the coastline with one of my brothers, a young woman about my age who I've never seen before, and a black dude from the 80's. Along the way I find that I'm able to jump really high, like a hundred feet in the air or so (usually this is when I realize I'm dreaming but not this time). I show my companions and they seem impressed. At some point we come across some sort of large building built into a cliff along the beach, and we enter hoping to find something to eat. Upon our entrance we find that we have somehow butted in line for some kind of sex thing. I think this is a breeding facility. Everyone behind us is pissed off but the black guy from the 80's seems to be happy for the chance. He enters some sort of airlock before the breeding chamber, and is killed. I suspect it's because he's black. At this point some kind of alarm goes off because we are intruders, and we have to run through this enormous hospital/mall type of environment, following exit signs until we are back on the beach. As we continue to make our way north towards New York I am sad because there are a lot of power lines overhead, which means that I can't jump super high like I could before.

Eventually we find ourselves in New York City, and I realized that it must have been a VERY long time since I had contact with the civilized world. There didn't seem to be any ethics or morals at all anymore. The buildings were all enormous, like twice as tall as the skyscrapers in New York now. I saw a lot of billboards and commercials for agencies that men could sell their wives to, and other's encouraging women to adopt eating disorders (not too far from real life I guess....). There was an article in the paper I was reading about how the majority of dentists torture and sexually assault their patients... I dunno it was a lot of weird stuff like that. It was clear that one single catastrophic event had catalyzed all of these changes in values. No one really seemed to care though, in fact they were all loving it.

Anyway.... that's pretty much it. We checked into a hotel and hung around for a while and then I woke up. Again sorry for the length. But thanks for reading if you got this far! Or even if you didn't.