Go North for Freedom

Unlike in real life, I had a whole lot of fun in my dream last night. I dreamed I was the type of girl who goes to parties every night. Some friends and I were getting drunk and dancing on tables in a run-down old house, well on our way to trashing the place. Once it was trashed, we moved on to another house, the one I lived in when I was 10. We started up the party again, an ounce of pot was spilled out on a table, and I was exploring the old rooms with a bottle in my hand. I came to what was formerly my parents' bedroom, intending to claim it as my own, but things felt different. The room had a creepy, hair-raising vibe it didn't used to have. After a few minutes in there, I started to hear voices coming from the ceiling, and once I heard a baby crying. My instincts said to get out of there, but I hung around a bit longer, trying to make sense of the voices from the ceiling, but they were just muttering disjointed phrases, like the hybrid in Battlestar Galactica. As I listened, the voices resolved themselves into a woman. She walked out of the shadows in a corner of the room, took hold of my hand and squeezed it. She said, "Go north for freedom," and a pilgrimage began.

"End of line."

My party friends and I set out on an epic trek towards the north. The whole world had been turned into a neverending series of malls and hotels; we never go outside. But this new world is populated with large spiderlike robots that lie dormant under staircases and in darkened rooms, waking up whenever they sense movement. They attack my friends and I. Our pilgrimage to the north becomes similar to a first person shooter game, where we scout ahead for robots and fight them whenever we can't avoid them.

Eventually, my entourage and I find new digs in an ultra-modern building, all glass and stainless steel, where all the cool features in the apartment are controlled with buttons on a sleek silver console. There's one in every room. I stand on the bed and play with the buttons that are supposed to move the window blinds into myriad stylish arrangements. Instead, they fall on my friends' heads. They are not amused, and they start listing all the ways in which the automation in the apartment will not work. They say the track lighting will leak and the windows will turn dark. Somehow, one of the cushions from a charcoal Danish modern sofa goes flying out an open window, and I can't go out to retrieve it because my keys have gone missing. To punish me for the falling curtains thing, a friend makes me drink gin from his cupped hands.

We do eventually head outside to look for the flying cushion. We walk all around the building and its in-house fine-dining restaurant in a quaint, old fashioned annex. Clear on the other side of the building, we find several people gathered on a patio overlooking a garden. Piles of detritus line the concrete walls of the garden, including my wayward couch cushion.