Saving the Children

This dream is not a recurring dream, but it is part of a recurring theme. Every so often, I dream of having to rescue, or having rescued, a group of mostly inept or helpless people. I have to get them from where they are to a safer place. Sometimes I'm removing them from the vicinity of a natural or man-made disaster. Other times, there's an enemy or a monster (or several) chasing us. This time I was rescuing kids, and there was a group of people chasing us. The enemy's function and motive were undefined. I just knew that they meant the kids, who they had taken from their families, some kind of harm, and that it had to do with some goal they were trying to achieve.

The kids I am rescuing had been kidnapped by the other side in a war. I don't remember why the enemy wanted the kids, just that whatever they wanted them for was even more harmful and dastardly than the act of taking them away from their families in the first place, which would have been bad enough. I am the only full adult, but the oldest kids are in their mid teens. They are helping me keep track of the younger kids. I am terrified for all of them, afraid that they will get separated from the group, or that one of them will be injured or killed as we hurry away from the site of their captivity. We are being pursued, and even though we can't see anyone, it feels to me like our enemy is right on our heels. I keep trying to look everywhere at once.

I have taken the children from the facility in which they were being held. It was bigger than a house, but I all ready cannot remember what it actually looked like. We are fleeing through a wooded area, where we have to avoid fights between small groups of men. Some of them are so close that we can hear them shouting between bouts of gunfire so loud it is hard for us to hear each other over it. We cannot tell who is on what side, and even if we find some of our own troops, they may not be able to help us. In fact, we would be endangering them. We must avoid everyone. We listen carefully and change direction often to avoid running into combat areas. I am afraid one or more of us could be hit by a stray bullet, but we have no choice except to keep going through this area.

We are headed for our known safe point, which is the home where my parents-in-law live, about 80 miles away from the area where we're fleeing, near where I live now. My mother-in-law is waiting at her house for us with food and a place for the kids to rest. The distance seems impossible, but there is no place closer that would be safe for us to even rest for a few hours. We have to get there, or the kidnappers will catch us... if their allies don't find us and shoot us first.

In responding to what the evidence I can see, hear, and remember from our escape tells me the enemy is or should be doing in pursuit of regaining the rescued children, I keep finding myself actually a step ahead of them. We go through heavily wooded areas instead of areas that would be easy to pass. We come across a scared deer, and send it off through the woods. We go a different direction than it does, but still maintain a close connection to our course.

To avoid leaving obvious footprints, we are walking through brush, rather than on dirt paths. We have fabric tied around our feet up to our knees to keep poison plants (ivy, sumac, etc) from causing rashes. Taller kids are carrying littler ones through higher patches of brush. I am carrying a little boy. We find a dead enemy soldier. We can tell he's one of them by the symbol on his sleeve. It looks like a fat white capital letter U, woven through a red and blue infinity symbol, over top of a black background.

(Kind of like this)

 At one point, I am watching enemy searchers from a vantage point of being one of them. They are totally inappropriately dressed for being a wooded-area search party. Most of them are in business formal dress; suits, or slacks and pressed shirts, ties, skirts and blouses, all in blacks, grays, whites, and dark blues. All of them are wearing various highly polished black dress shoes. Some of the women even have pumps on with high heels. Their hair is neatly styled. All of them have that same patch somewhere on their upper-body clothing. They appear to be ignoring the difficulty they should be having moving through the woods dressed like that.

One searcher has a black brief case with a wire sticking out of it, but I can't see where the wire goes. He is looking for us on a path and figures out our trick, so he starts searching among the plants. While examining them closely, he realizes that he has exposed his legs, arms, hands, and face to the poisonous weeds. He panicks and tells everyone he is extremely sensitive, and they all get these gravely serious looks on their faces. He turns a pleading look at another searcher, a severe-looking lady with a perfectly coiffed brown pageboy cut (not a hair out of place) and a totally church-lady outfit. I get the feeling she knows something about him beyond what has just been said, something the other searchers somewhat know, but do not understand as fully as she does. She looks sympathetic, and pulls a gun from a totally out of place camouflage-patterned  duffel bag she has over her shoulder and shoots him in the head. He actually looks relieved as he falls. It is like he is grateful for being shot. I get the feeling she has spared him an extremely torturous ordeal that would have killed him in the end, anyway.

The scene goes back to us. I know we are close to the city that is our destination. We have traveled over 70 miles, mostly through woods and across farmers' fields. We are filthy and tired, but no one has gotten hurt. The kids are scared, but not as much as when we first left, because we have not had any big scares along the way. We know that we still have some way to go, and the people chasing us are still not far enough away for us to rest. Older kids are carrying younger kids on their backs.

We come to an area where we have no choice but to go in the open for a while, through an area with grass and weeds that only come up to my knees.. There is no one within sight, and the sky seems clear of flying vehicles. I admonish the kids to listen for jet or plane engines, or the chopping of a helicopter. I tell them to keep their eye on me. I show them a signal to watch for, and if they see it, they should lay down in the brush. Our clothes are dirty and stained enough to blend in from that far away.

On the other side of the brush there is a creek. We can easily cross it. Once we are on the other side of it, something about that area will make it much more dangerous, but not impossible, for our pursuers to continue to chase after us. There is something about the kids that would make it worth risking their lives to come into that area, but the risk to us will be much less after we cross. We start across the field. We are too far away from any action to hear people shouting. Off in the distance, though, we can hear gunfire coming from various skirmishes. It sounds almost like firecrackers.

I did not dream the scene of getting to where we were going, but I do not have that "unfinished" feeling that comes with dreams like this when I don't finish them. It feels like we got there and were put in touch with the next step of our journey - connecting the kids back to their respective parents. Basically, it felt like I managed to do the right things along the route we took, and we were "out of the woods," but I didn't get to dream the sequence of the story's happy conclusion.