Hypatia's Dream Journal

My mother revealed to me that while I had been visiting her, she found my IUD in her house. Apparently, it had come dislodged and fallen out. She kept it for months, deliberately not telling me, so I'd give her grandchildren. I looked at myself and saw that indeed, I was pregnant. I yelled angrily at my mother, flabbergasted that she'd stoop so low. I asked her if she understood that I'd been drinking and doing drugs the past few months, unaware of her schemes, and that the baby would not be well. I screamed with despair, and the noise sounded like a baby's scream.

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The setting is a sterile, white, minimal, hermetically-sealed floor of a skyscraper. Small boys and girls, all aged around 10-14 and all blonde, live here, each in their own small room. They're overseen by adult minders and have never been outside of the building. One girl is curious about the outside and manages to leave. She finds she can fly. The building the children live in, she sees, is surrounded by nothing but high-rises in an endless dystopian cityscape.

The girl returns and develops a love of dragons. She orders (or I send her?) dragon toys from the internet, which appear in her sterile room in Amazon boxes.

The girl meets a boy, and eventually both escape. They end up at an art gallery with experimental electronica playing and a circus-like atmosphere. How should the story end, I wonder? Should they live happily ever after? No, the story should end in tragedy, I think. They should meet someone - maybe a tattooed lady? It's been done in Stranger in a Strange land, I remember.

I was in what seemed to be my childhood bedroom, but it was amazing: stone-carved fountains, a spacious garden, and several aquariums with pets. I walked to the aquariums and saw that my snakes and lizards were alive, but that my cat was sleeping on the mesh screen above their cages. This caused the mesh to seep downwards, crowding the lizards and snakes. I thought to myself how careless I had been in maintaining and feeding my reptiles, and how lucky I was that they were still alive.

My mother and I then got into some sort of argument during a social event. My mother, myself, my husband, and several neighbors were all seated and having a conversation, but the tension between my mother and I was obvious. I tried to diffuse the tension and create peace (if not for the sake of my mother and I than for the others present) but to no avail: my mom was thirsty for blood.