The new Hollywood

I dreamed Hollywood was being invaded by giant monsters and tribal peoples.* The city had gone quite wild and was now lush, green, and mountainous, and crossed by fast-flowing rivers. We still had our apartment, but no more electricity or running water; after we’d been cut off from the rest of the nation all those types of conveniences had ceased. Amazingly none of us were looting or fighting each other, for everyone was united (in mind, if not actually organized) against the enemy.

We were roughing it in this new Hollywood: me, Erik, Mommy and Daddo, Shra and Devin, Al, Phyllis, Alex and Angela, Eugene, and Aiyi and Yifu. Really it’s quite a good group for living off the land: a whole passel of engineers, several cooks, a doctor and a few other people with good practical medical knowledge. All my dishes came in handy. We were comfortable, though our futures seemed so uncertain.

At first we’d had an unspoken division of labor in our party, in which the men went out daily to do sentry duty and gauge the situation with the enemy. They’d leave the apartment and climb up the newly constructed wooden towers (bound together with vines, no less, like a bad jungle movie) and float up and down the rivers peering through the forest at the enemy tribes. But one morning Erik simply refused to leave my side, so I went with him, and when we got up the towers we found Shra there too, with Devin and Daddo and Yifu. We were very much all in it together.

*As in the way of dreams, it was first one and then the other.