I just woke up. It's 5:30 am, and I was asleep for only about 4 hours. I was dreaming I was helping a cop catch a killer. It kept replaying, because each time, one of us would do something wrong and the cop and/or I would get killed. When that happened, the dream started over, like my objective was to catch the guy and stay alive. On the last pass, at a point where the cop usually got killed, I managed to change the dream enough to just get him injured and we ended up getting enough evidence to catch/stop the killer. It turned out it was a very disturbed adolescent boy. When I was confronted by him, anger tore through me and I darted forward and slammed him into the wall, screaming, "I hope you dream about all the people you killed, you asshole."
He looked at me with these huge sad eyes and said, in all solemnity, "When I dream, I'll dream about tomorrow." At that point, he went catatonic, and nobody could get him to respond to anything.
As he was being led away, his aunt - who had been his caretaker - came up to me and begged to know what he said. When I repeated it, her eyes welled up. I asked why. She told me then that every night before his mother had been killed a year earlier, those were the words she said to him when she tucked him in.
For whatever reason, I burst into tears.
I woke up then, crying. For that lost little boy. And I can't seem to stop.
Pepper and her sister are still asleep. I thought typing this all out would help. Put the dream in perspective.
I'm all stuffed up from crying. And I'm not ready/able to go to bed yet.