Mazes, celebrities in trailer parks, Japanese food courts, condom commercials, and cannibalism: what's not to love?

Ok, I just have to say, I am *really proud* of myself, because this was a super long and detailed dream, and when I woke up I immediately spoke aloud some of the most prominent features of each segment of the dream so I'd remember them long enough to write it all down.  And it worked.  Here, in all its glory, is the longest, most detailed dream I've had in a really, really long time:

Mom, Dad, Bev and I were driving through the hill country to a piece of land owned by Mom and Dad's church.  We were going there to meet a former priest of the church (who has since moved away in real life) but Mom was the only one who'd been to the property before.  We parked in front of this field that was full of grasses that were waist tall or higher and was enclosed by a fence made of galvanized wire laid out in 4"x4" squares and framed by unstained 2"x4" wood.  The fences were about 8' tall.  We walked through a door in the fence, made of the same material, and on the other side realized that a series of narrow passageways had been made out of that same fencing material, all jutting off in different directions, like a maze.  Some had clear plastic doors, though, while others were made of the same galvanized wire and wood.  Mom was leading us through the passages, which were complex and convoluted, and I was afraid we were going to get lost.  "Don't worry," Mom reassured us, "I've been here several times.  I know the way."  I commented that I was surprised that people didn't get lost out there, to which she replied, "Oh, lots of people do.  Parishioners have to call me all the time because they get lost.  Even people who live out here get lost.  That's why you'll see people pissing in their own front yards out here; they're so lost they don't even realize how close they are to their own homes."

Suddenly, we were back in the car, and it was parked in a dirt lot across the street from a row of rundown country houses.  Our headlights were shining on a dude who was pissing in his front lawn while talking on his cell phone to someone, saying, "I just don't know where I am!"  I could hear the voice on the other end of the phone going, "Just turn around.  Turn... around!"  Then I realized the pissing guy was Judah Friedlander from 30 Rock:

Then I turned around and looked behind us and realized that the lot we were parked in was in front of a row of food trailers that were all, like, country cookin'.  You know... one was BBQ, one was soul food, one was cajun food, etc.  There were picnic tables between the food trailers and the parking lot we were in, and gathered around the picnic table directly behind us were Jack Black, Bob Odenkirk, David Cross, Amy Sedaris, and Amy Sedaris again, but this time dressed as Jerri Blank.  Yes, Amy Sedaris was there twice, simultaneously, standing right next to her other self.

As we were driving away, I looked at Amy through our rear windshield and said, "I love you, Amy Sedaris!"  She saw me, we made eye contact, and I could tell she was a little creeped out by it.  Bev, who was sitting next to me in the backseat, started laughing hysterically: "You totally freaked her out just now!"  "I know!" I responded, "I can't decide if that's the best or the worst thing ever!"  "Well," Bev replied, "At least Jerri Blank doesn't look too upset." While Amy-as-herself was still watching us and looking pretty disturbed, Amy-as-Jerri was leaning over to David Cross and pointing at our car.  Both of them were laughing at us.

We drove to another dirt lot not too far away, also filled with food trailers, but this one had Christmas lights strung up between the booths and over the picnic tables.  Dad wasn't with us anymore, so it was just Mom, Bev and me.  Mom and Bev wanted to go to the seafood trailer, but I wasn't in the mood for anything on that menu.  I walked down to the next trailer, but everything on the menu was smothered in chili: chili burgers, chili fries, chili baked potatoes, etc.  The next one over, however, was called "Baconlicious!!1!" (yes, with the number 1 inserted among the exclamation points) and served a wide variety of foods in large paper cups along with strips of bacon.

I read the menu thoroughly and couldn't decide what to get.  In addition to obvious items like bacon burgers, bacon baked potatoes, and bacon and eggs, they had lobster/artichoke/bacon, penne/sundried tomatoes/bacon, truffles/risotto/bacon, sardines/bacon, sweet potato wedge fries/mayonnaise/chives/bacon, sushi rolls/bacon...the list went on and on.  The menu was written in Japanese, and I was very proud of myself for remembering enough Japanese to be able to read it.

Suddenly, Baconlicious!!1! wasn't an outdoor food trailer, but was in a food court at a mall, and I was with Jay instead of Mom and Bev.  Actually, even though it was a food court at a mall, supposedly, it looked a lot like the Jack in the Box on Guadalupe--or at least, what I remember of it from my old UT days.  Or maybe it was the Burger King on Guadalupe.  I can't remember.  It's been a while.  Anyway, there were signs posted everywhere warning that certain scenes from Avatar may be awkward for people with interracial friendships.  Jay was disgusted, saying that anyone who felt awkward about interracial friendships should go back to the 19th Century where they belonged.  I was just about to agree with him when these two teen boys - one black, one white - walked up to the soda fountain where Jay and I were standing and very loudly and obnoxiously said exactly what Jay had just said, verbatim.  Jay looked at them with irritability and said, "Uh...yeah...I just said that..."  The boys started laughing hysterically and walked off.
(As a side note, when looking for photos to go with this section of the dream, I found these two gems:

So, ok, apparently, my brain isn't the only one that likes to make up stupid shit about Avatar being racist.  Good to know.)

I was super thirsty, but the only beverage that worked at the soda fountain was Coke.  I didn't want Coke, but I was desperate, so I filled my cup.  They didn't have normal straws there, either, just those thick, narrow, candy cane shaped straws you can find in the holiday section of grocery stores during the Christmas season.  The Coke kept getting stuck in the straw at the highest point, but would not come all the way out.  I kept sucking harder, but it would just suck the straw flat, and nothing came out.  I was super thirsty, and my neck was hurting from having to tilt it in that awkward, upside-down position to get to the mouth of the straw, but it never occurred to me to just take the lid off and drink directly from the cup.  Apparently, dream-me was rather stupid.

There were jumbo screens suspended from the ceiling all around the building, and one of them was above the soda fountain.  A commercial came on for condoms that were meant specifically for your car, and it was shot in the style of those obnoxious toy commercials from the '80s: the voiceover dude was talking in a really exaggerated, aggressively excited voice, the music was super-pumped up flying-V guitars, and the camera would zoom in and out repeatedly in quick, jerking movements.  Also, the actors were dressed like horrible '80s soap opera stars with horrible '80s clothes, makeup, and hair.  Everyone was shot in soft focus.  The voice over dude was talking about how these car condoms were versatile, and worked great for:
*"Men going down on women!" - cut to a dude in the passenger seat moving his head down to the driver lady's lap
*"Women going down on men!" - cut to a woman in the passenger seat moving her head down to the driver dude's lap
*"Sex in the backseat!" - cut to this couple in a backseat making these really over-acted, unconvincing O-faces

*"Making pit stops at your boyfriend's house for a quickie on the way to work!" - cut to a woman tearing into a driveway in her maroon Cutlass, jumping out of the car with her gigantic brown leather purse, and rushing up the driveway towards the front door
*"...and there's even a special tip for sucking on nipples!!!" - cut to a dude placing a still-rolled-up condom over his girlfriend's nipple and then sucking on it through the condom.  She looked right at the camera with her frizzy blonde perm flying everywhere and gave the camera a thumbs up.  I asked aloud, "Why the fuck would you need a condom to suck on nipples?  Mouth herpes??"  No one answered me, though, so I never found out, sadly.

After the commercial was over, a short film came on that was made by Jay, making fun of the condom commercial we'd just seen.  In the film, lego men played the parts of the director and all the film crew.  I didn't get to see the whole film, but the part I saw was making fun of how their location scouts picked the house for the boyfriend quickie scene.  The lego man director stood in the middle of the street and the lego man location scouts turned him round and round while he pointed his uni-digited yellow hand at the houses and did, "Eeny meeny miny mo."  The score for the film was FlyLo's Adult Swim music.

Painting by Evan Lovett

Suddenly, I was in Jay's truck with Nick and Benjamin.  We were going to Thunderheart to get a bison. I was driving, Benjamin was in the passenger seat, and Nick was sitting between us.  Nick turned to me and goes, "You smell like chocolate."  I was like, "Dude, I told you I was going to start using that cocoa butter on the tattoo, remember?"  He goes, "You know I like to eat chocolate.  Can I eat you?"  I replied, rather emphatically, "I am NOT a kangaroo, dude!"  But then I jutted out my hip and pulled my pants down just enough to expose a few inches of skin and said, "Actually, I'm too fat around my hips and belly, so eat as much of that as you want."  He pulled a fork and a knife out of his back pocket, leaned down, and actually bit the shit out of my hip.  I looked down and there was a perfect full dental imprint on my hip, and it was starting to bleed a little bit.  "Ow, dude!  I can't believe you actually fucking bit me!  That fucking hurt!"  He sat up straight and looked at me quizzically: "Sorry, but you told me I could.  Are you mad at me?"  I looked at him for a few seconds and realized he was being sincere.  "No, actually, I'm kind of turned on," I replied, "Who knew that being bitten super hard would be such a turn on for me?"  Then I woke up 'cos my hip was actually, really hurting.

That last part of the dream is entirely due to an actual conversation that Nick and I had about cocoa butter and my tattoo, and this picture of Nick, in Australia, looking at wild kangaroos, with a fork in his back pocket:

Lucky bastard.

WTF?

I had crazy dreams last night, but I don't remember anything about them.  Even the bits and scraps that were still hanging around my brain when I woke up have all slipped into oblivion.   However, the last voice I heard before I woke up said, "This is coming right off of Jesus' headband."  I mean... WHAT?

And while googling around for an image to go with this entry, I stumbled upon this gem of a website:

http://hipsterorjesus.com/

Not really a dream, but...

...well, maybe it was a dream.  I really don't think so, though.

This morning I woke up to see a young boy standing right in front of me, right next to my bed--inches away from my face.  He was maybe somewhere between 10 and 13 years old (I'm terrible at guessing kids' ages, especially pre-teen boys, who can vary so wildly from one to another).  He had straight brown hair, was wearing aviator glasses, wore an Izod or Polo shirt with red, white, black, and blue horizontal stripes of varying width, and I couldn't see his pants because the bed went above his waist.  His arms were at his sides, and he was looking toward my window, but downward, towards the floor.  He had a slight frown on his face.

I was completely frozen--internally freaking out so much that I didn't know what to do externally.  I looked at the Ekkies, wondering why they weren't pitching a fit about a stranger being in the room, but they were both sleeping soundly, heads tucked under wings, fluffed up, standing on one foot.  I looked back at the boy and was wondering how the hell he got into my house, who he was, why he was there, but still couldn't think of anything to say or do.

The boy slowly turned his head until he was looking directly at me.  I couldn't see the expression in his eyes because he was wearing those aviators, but the rest of his face wore a frown of disapproval.  I was searching his face for some kind of hint as to what he was thinking or why he was there, but then he slowly dissolved into nothing.  Just completely disappeared.  The birds didn't stir at all.  I picked my head up and looked around; everything else in the room looked exactly the same.  I really don't think I was dreaming because I felt awake the whole time and there was  perfect continuity between what the room and birds looked like when the boy was there and after he disappeared.  But then... what was he? A hallucination?  A vision?  A ghost?  Can you dream while fully awake and with open eyes?  Inquiring minds want to know!

Because hot pink capes are, well, hot.

I sent this to a friend on September 13th, 2010, but forgot to include it here until just now:

I had a dream last night that you were dancing/wading rhythmically through a waist-deep creek wearing a hot pink nylon cape and doing jazz hands, but the music playing was like neo-industrial prog or something equally dissonant. But then I could hear this like tribal beat underneath the totally-un-you music and I was like, "Oh, he's dancing to the pebbles in the creek! That makes so much more sense." But... does it, Will Wiesenfeld? You tell me.

Subconscious, meet Freud. Freud, subconscious.

I was in the corridor of a stadium or conference center---you know those places with tall, wide halls that wrap around the main auditorium but are sometimes used as rooms themselves for trade shows, job fairs, conferences, etc.  This particular corridor was bustling with people walking in all directions, doing different things.  Some people were moving large stage props; some people were sitting at booths; some people were pushing around carts of food; some people were just walking.

A woman approached me and told me that she had made a deal with a demon and needed my help.  For some reason, I agreed to help her--even though, you know, she was a total stranger and clearly stupid for making a deal with a demon.  So she took me to the demon so we could discuss the terms of their agreement.  He was an extraordinarily beautiful man: blonde hair (I'm not particularly partial to blondies, but when they're beautiful, they're beautiful), big blue eyes, chiseled jaw... you know.  I asked the demon, "What is this deal you made with this woman?  What does she have to do for you?"  He replied, "Every day, at 11 am and 11 pm sharp, she has to bring me a hot, delicious meal of sea bass, asparagus, and potatoes au gratin, with a nice chianti.  And you should know that since you are helping her with this, you are bound to it yourself."  I felt incredulous: "Seriously?!  That's it?!  That's the deal she made?!  Uh, ok..."

When the woman and I walked away from the demon, I was like, "First of all, why did you make that deal, and secondly, why do you need my help?  There are caterers walking all over this building who are carrying around whole carts of food.  You don't even have to cook!"  So she went her merry way and I did my own thing, and every time it got to be almost 11 o'clock I'd just go to a passing food cart and pick up a plate of sea bass, asparagus, and potatoes au gratin, as well as a glass of chianti, and would take it to the demon.

Eventually I got tired of having to do this twice a day, so one time when I brought the demon his dinner I asked him, "What are the consequences you laid out for this woman if she doesn't comply?  What will happen if we don't bring you your food?"  He looked at me threateningly and said, "I will be very hungry, and very angry."  Again, I felt incredulous: "Seriously?!  Those are the consequences?!  Well fuck this, then!  You go ahead and be hungry and angry, dude.  That is not even remotely scary to me."  The demon replied, "Oh, I will terrify you.  You will be terrified.  Not now, perhaps, but it will happen soon."  Undaunted, I walked away from him and started looking for a way to leave the conference center or stadium or wherever I was.

Suddenly I was at home.  My home was a huge, sparsely furnished house with concrete floors stained a dark brown and the walls and doors were all windows, save for the narrow dark wood beams between the windows and framing the doors.  All of the windows around the house, though, were covered in dark brown vinyl blinds that were mostly but not completely closed, so I had the unnerving feeling that people could see into the house but I could not see out.  It was also nighttime, which enhanced that feeling.  The dining room of the house, which created an open L-shape with the living room, had a massive dark brown table that was filled with paper bags that had meat in it for all the members of our wild game co-op, and people were coming in and out of the house to pick up their co-op orders in a steady stream.  "Good," I thought, "There's always at least one person here, so I'm not left alone."  All of the co-op members were wearing these neon orange reflective vests, like traffic cops or crossing guards.

The last person to come get his co-op bag was my friend Nick, and he and I were chatting for a while.  I could tell he wanted to stay and hang out, and I didn't want him to leave, either, because I was afraid of being left alone in the house, but I didn't want him to think that I was trying to seduce him, so I started slowly walking him to the door and wrapping up the conversation.  When he said goodbye and walked out the door, my heart sank and I being to feel this inexplicable fear creeping in.  I could see his orange vest through the small slits in the blinds walking along the south wall of the house, and as it disappeared from view I felt deflated and sad and wished I could call him back.  But then I saw the orange vest coming back up the south wall, and I was so excited and happy that I ran to the front door right as the orange vest reached it as well.  It wasn't Nick, though.  A different demon from the one I had been taking food to, this one ugly and disfigured and with red eyes, broke through the glass of my front door and lunged at me through the blinds.

I woke myself up by bolting upright in bed with a loud gasp.  My heart was racing, my legs felt like butter, and I was shaking all over.  My immediate thought was, "Well played, demon.  That actually did terrify me."  And then I realized, "DUH, Emily!  The demon isn't real!  It was a dream!"

Recurring Dream #3: dream within a super mundane dream (Backlog, pt. 8)

The other recurring dream I've had since childhood is a dream within a dream.  Actually, I've had several dreams within dreams, but the only one that happens recurrently is that I'll have some dream (always something different), and then I will "wake up" and start my day.  I feed my birds, I'll check email, I'll take a shower and brush my teeth, whatever mundane tasks usually happen in the morning.  Then I'll go to the bathroom and start peeing, but the peeing never ends and the more I pee, the more I have to pee.  That's when I realize: "Damnit!  I'm not awake!  I'm still dreaming!  And I really really have to pee!"  Then I wake up and go to the bathroom.

Recurring Dream #2: Flying to a pirate ship (Backlog, pt. 7)

Another recurring dream I have had since childhood is that I can fly - I know, that's a pretty common recurring dream for lots of people - but I am specifically flying for a purpose.  There is a massive pirate ship docked next to a massive, gorgeous, lush park with thick green grass and ancient oak trees.  The park gently slopes upward from the shore to a broad hill, and on the other side of the hill is a cloud city  that is for some reason on the ground instead of in the sky, where one would expect a cloud city to be.  It's a bright, white city, so bright that I can't really make out the details, but my job is not to actually go into the city, so I never get to explore it and find out what it's like on the inside.

My purpose in this dream is to fly onto the pirate ship, invisible, and free the citizens of the cloud city that the pirates have captured.  For some reason, though, I can't just open all the doors and let them all out at once.  I have to go into each cell and carry one citizen out at a time, and take them back to the cloud city.  The part of the pirate boat where they keep their prisoners looks exactly like a modern day prison: gray concrete floors, steel cage bars, etc.  No problem, though!  When I am flying and invisible, I can move through solid objects.  So I fly through the cage bars, pick up the prisoner inside, and when I do, they become invisible, too.  So I fly back through the cage doors, out of the boat, across the park, and deposit them at the border of the cloud city, then go back to get the next prisoner.

The whole dream is just me going back and forth, rescuing the prisoners.  I always rescue exactly half of the prisoners - all the ones along the left wall - and then the pirates are waiting for me at the top of the hill when I'm coming back from delivering the last freed prisoner.  I realize that the pirates can see me because I'm losing my invisibility, and THEN I realize that I'm dreaming, and the reason I'm losing my invisibility is because I'm starting to wake up.  "No!"  I think, "I still have to save the rest of the prisoners!"  But it's no use,  The pirates are chasing me down the hill, I'm becoming increasingly visible and I'm getting heavier and heavier.  It's harder for me to fly so I'm slowing down, getting closer to the ground, and the pirates are closing in on me.  Finally I'm just inches from the ground and I can hear the pirates' boots crushing the grass right behind me.  By that point, I'm aware of sounds from my room and the real world, and right as my chin hits the ground in my dream, I wake up.

Recurring Dream #1: Tornadoes (Backlog, pt. 6)

Since I was a little girl, I've had several recurring dreams.  Sure, we all have dreams about our teeth falling out and being somewhere in public and showing up naked, but aside from the common recurring dreams that everyone has, I have some unusual ones.

The first is about tornadoes.  In the dream, the setting and specific circumstances might be different, but the common thread is that there are always multiple tornadoes - often 7, but not always - and I am rarely scared.  Most of the time I'll feel a mild anxiety at worst, and then feel matter-of-fact about it.  The other common thread is that I always end up either getting caught in one of the tornadoes, but it turns out to be really weak and even if it destroys the building I'm in, I'm able to hang onto something and stay put, OR, the tornado gets smaller as it gets closer to me, so that by the time it's in front of me, it's only about 3 feet tall.

The version that I dream most commonly is that my family and I are in our old house in Leander, which was on 4 acres of land that backed up to hundreds of acres of virgin land, and the entire back wall of the house was windows.  In real life, we loved watching storms through those windows, so in the dream, as a family we're standing in the living room watching the storm outside.  As it progresses, several tornadoes start touching down all around the house (like I said, it's usually 7 tornadoes, especially in this dream).  Suddenly we realize that one of the windows is open, but when I go to close it, a little baby tornado, about 3 feet tall, hops in through the window and starts spinning around the living room.  Dad hands me a broom and says, "Break it up with the broom, Emily."  So I start hitting the tornado with the broom, waving the broom around inside it to disrupt the airflow, and it dissipates into nothing.

Inception is totally messing with my dreams. (Backlog, pt 5)

(this happened about a week ago)

I had fallen asleep watching Amelie, so in my sleep I could still hear the soundtrack.  In my dream, the Amelie score was kind of like the air in a balloon, keeping the dream world inflated.  The "world" was just southeast and east Austin, except that, instead of a sky overhead, we were obviously enclosed in a milky white, semi-translucent film that was not uniform in shape and consistency, but bulbous and rounded the way a child draws a cloud, with occasional wrinkles and creases like those you sometimes get in your chewing gum when you blow a bubble.  Anyway, the physics of this world, which were entirely dependent on the Amelie score, were not a prominent feature of the dream.  It was just sort of understood, in the same way that we all know that our lives depend on the oxygen and nitrogen in the air, but we don't constantly think about it.

The dream was not a single plot, but several disjointed vignettes.  I don't remember all of them, but these are the ones I do remember:

* My brother Jay and I were at an ugly brown Protestant church in that triangle between Cesar Chavez, Airport, and Springdale, where they were having some kind of young people meeting.  Some guy with a thick west Texas accent and dressed in cowboy attire was telling Jay and I that our parents didn't raise us right because we didn't have the same religious beliefs as the rest of the people at the meeting (they were all members of the church; we were just visiting).  Jay and I, instead of just recognizing that the guy was an idiot and not worth our time, or instead of attempting to argue the point that just because we have different religious beliefs doesn't mean we are bad people, were defending Mom and Dad's parenting skills to the ground.  And then we started doing gymnastics, as if that would somehow prove our point.

* I was at Springdale Farm, but no one else was there, and I really needed to get some spinach and cilantro.  I was walking through the gardens, trying to find and harvest my own, but all the plants were jumbled together and unlabeled.  A thunderstorm rolled in, which made it even harder to find my desired produce because the atmosphere got a lot darker and the rain was falling pretty heavily.

* I went to a client's house that is near the park next to the river off of Chicon.  She told me that she had discovered/invented underwater breathing without needing any equipment, and invited me into her house to show me.  The house was completely filled with water.  When she opened the front door, though, the water stayed in place instead of spilling out.  "See," she said, "The secret is making the water more gelatinous.  That's how you can breathe while submerged."  So we swam around her house, and her bird was "flying" with us underwater.  It was beautiful and a lot of fun, and I thought to myself, "If we had made the pool water more gelatinous, Zoe would have lived instead of drowned."

* I was at a different church farther north on Airport Blvd., near Oak Springs, but also an ugly brown Protestant one, and I had a plate full of food.  Some people were trying to find me, though, so I had to hide the plate of food from them.  I was in a room where they had vacation bible school, so I was pulling open all these drawers that were full of arts&crafts supplies, but couldn't find a drawer where I felt the plate of food would be hard to find and also not contaminated or spoiled by the contents of the drawer.  I finally settled on putting it in the drawer with the glitter, "because," I reasoned, "the worst that will happen is that the food will just look prettier and sparklier."

At the end of the dream, I was walking and chatting with a girl (she was not someone I know in real life) down Cesar Chavez, towards I-35.  While we were walking, I heard Nino knock on Amelie's door and say, "Amelie?" (you know what I'm talking about; at the very end of the movie when he shows up at her apartment while she's daydreaming about him).  I turned to the girl and said, "Oh, shit, we gotta get out of here.  The movie's almost over, and when the score ends, this world is going to collapse.  I have to wake up ASAP.  You better go."  The girl thanked me for the heads up and took off down Waller St.  I started running towards I-35, but instead of the highway, it was a blue door.  I could hear the final song in the score, the one that plays during the credit sequence, and I noticed that the sky was deflating, getting closer and closer to the ground.  Just as I reached the door, the sky was touching the ground behind me, sagging over all the buildings.  I opened the door, ran through it, woke up, and the credit sequence ended and the movie went back to the main menu.

It's raining oil! Hallelujah! (Backlog, pt. 4)

(from some time in May, 2010)

My family and I were all in this huge all-wood, homestead-style ranch house out in the desert of West Texas, where there was absolutely no vegetation whatsoever, just miles of dusty beige rock as far as the eye could see.  We were inside the house for the first half of the dream, but then Dad and I went out to sit on rocking chairs on the porch, and we were just talking and staring at the old timey wooden oil derrick that was just a few yards in front of us.

Suddenly, oil burst out of the top of the derrick and started raining down onto the yard.  Dad and I just looked at each other calmly and I said, "Well, this isn't much different than the oil rain we'll be getting from the Gulf pretty soon."  He just nodded his head in agreement, and we watched the oil rain for a while longer.

After a while, Jay came out onto the porch and he and I stepped into the yard and stood in the oil rain, looking out at some of the other derricks farther off.  Suddenly, way out on the horizon, there was a huge explosion of dirt and rock shooting into the air.  It made a loud booming noise, so we thought that someone had set off some explosives.  But then another one happened closer, and then another one even closer, and we realized that the earth was splitting in half, one half rising up into a sheer cliff wall and the other half sinking down.  Every time a piece of the ground would split, it would cause the big booming dirt explosions that we were seeing.  We realized that the split in the earth was coming directly towards the house, so, logically, Dad told us to all go inside the house.

Once inside the house, Dad told us all to huddle towards the side of the house with all the windows, nearest to the porch where we had been sitting.  But I wanted to go to the other half of the house, because it was closer to the well, and there was some kind of escape tunnel on that side of the house.  No windows, though.  So there I was, on one side of the house by myself, looking at my entire family on the other side of the house.  The ground was already starting to part and my side of the house was starting to sink, so I felt an urgency to make a decision: do I stay where I know there's water and an escape route, or do I join my family?  A dirt explosion happened right outside the kitchen window, and I woke up.