I just woke up from a screenable dream. I didn't get enough sleep every day before today this week. So when I finally took the time for a nap, I got reworded with a long, intense dream. I love this feeling of extra REM sleep. (Although it wasn't extra of course. I really missed it throughout the week.)
I don't usually write my dreams down. And I won't include the actual detailed content, scenes, what I saw, who did what, etc. of this one either. And I won't even try to put the feelings that I had into words. But I just could not go on with normal everyday life without addressing it. I tried, but it felt like letting an entire civilisation die in my head. One with a bunch of kitties among them even. I won't take on that guilt.
Rough story overview: Stuff happens, people live their lifes, have interactions, make mistakes, hold grudges, are sometimes angry with each other, love, work, try to enjoy life anyway. Then something happened. I wondered throughout the dream what it was exactly. I don't know. Lets say some scientist in a secret laboratory messed up and started a chain reaction of really bad events. It (the world) very quickly gets worse, like fires everywhere, soon no electricity, people disappear (nobody died in this story, they were just suddenly gone somehow). An undetermined apocalypse with the result that every city, town and village and most people are gone. Few people find themselves on an earth that has nothing of the things they were used to just a few days ago. They soon find each other and work together to figure out how to live now. They are the people we met at the beginning. There are people who hated each other, but they have to work together now, and they do. Our protagonist wanders alone for a day until he meets this new small tribe and is instantly assumed part of it. They are a cheerful group of friends now. Nobody hates each other. Everybody helps each other. Everybody acknowledges each others quirks and lives with them. They travel together, presumably to find a nice inhabitable piece of land. Along their way they find ruined cities, a displaced ocean, pieces of their old civilisation that they can use as tools. They share, they laugh together, they build a society.
This dream felt so good because of the intense feelings that I got from it and that I woke up with. But I found the story worth telling, even if it's just in this short, rough form. I don't think I've ever heard of an apocalypse movie where people didn't try to kill each other or trick them out of their belongings afterwards. Ignoring the facts that this wouldn't fly with Hollywood and that it might still be too soon after waking up for me to judge this, I'd love to watch that movie!
Parts of the story that I didn't include above: The people somehow also were animals, like in "The Animals of Farthing Wood" maybe, but they were also humans most of the time. They didn't shapeshift, they just were both but mostly one of the two at a time. In the new society one member started a newspaper. He didn't have any tools or paper. He just made it his job to be the newspaper. He ran around telling people the news. Some thought it was annoying, but they just laughed and liked him anyway. The new tribe had a huge float when the protagonist found them. I don't know what they were floating on, but it was light red. The float wasn't in the rest of the dream. There were still forest fires when they traveled. The protagonist discovered at some point that they weren't traveling away from the fire because they were surrounded by huge fires now. They were fine where they were currently. But they had to find a way to get out of that entwining fire. He was telling the rest that I they started to run when I decided to wake up. Maybe better that way, could have continued badly.