Sketch

Date: 6/16/2020

I had a dream where I was running around a city with some other people. I had run away from home and had joined a secret revolution. It was like an Underground Railroad type system, except instead of running to freedom we used the system to get around quickly from place to place in order to wreak havoc and do general revolution things. The group of people I was with were very diverse, and very ragged-looking; I don’t know any of them in real life. One was a dude maybe college age, deep tan skin almost brown with almond eyes and thin black hair. He had a personality like he used to be very fun-loving and carefree, maybe even mischievous, before he joined the revolution thing. Another was a woman in maybe her mid-to-late 30s or early 40s maybe, she was white but had slightly slanted eyes and was very mom-like in the sense she was sassily protective (she reminded me of Mrs. Weasley in terms of personality). There were a few others but I only remember those two. We stuck together, generally, and went through back alleyways and through houses of people helping (kind of like the Underground Railroad that way), and didn’t have much except the clothes on our backs, plus the bags that a few of us carried. I had a bag that carried a black jacket and mask, a sketchbook and a pencil, and some crumpled papers containing coded plans for the revolution. In the sketchbook I sketched various things, with the free time I had. We all looked worn and were dirty. Our clothes were stained and ripped. We had dirt or grime smudged on the backs of our necks, under our nails, on our knees and elbows; and fresh scrapes were on our knees, elbows, palms, and even our feet. A few of us had small wounds on our cheeks, foreheads, or arms which were stitched with makeshift stitches, and a few more of us had scars from similar (but previous) injuries. A lot of the older guys smoked cigarettes which filled the air of all of the places we stayed with smoke, though I didn’t mind because it covered worse smells; of blood, dust, garbage, plume smoke, gasoline, plastic; I never slept well. I didn’t seem like I wanted to get out at all though. I wanted to be there, in the revolution, regardless of conditions. Generally the small group and I— maybe 5 people total, including me— stuck together, but occasionally we split up. We were family in a very strange way. Also, we met and worked with lots of other people when we travelled, but those were other groups and we always moved on after a month, max. The group and I formed a lot of plans having to do with breaking unlawfully arrested criminals from jail. We also provided distractions for other groups to do so (we robbed stores or put on fake criminal shows to draw the police away for a moment). We stayed in dingy ‘abandoned’ warehouses that were ‘run’ by nearby ‘allies’ of the revolution, or in secret rooms in the backs of stores where store owners gave us spare (and sparse) food, and hid us from the police. There were always others at the places, though. One time, we went to a big city, where we were going to rob a huge jewelry store (it was a towering building, the store was near the top, and below was a mall-like collection of clothing, shoe, and purse shops. We were doing it so that one of the biggest jails, which was nearby, would hopefully lessen its security / not as many police would be available for when another small group of revolutionaries broke a bunch of innocent people out of the jail. I remember running across the rooftop, shouting and making noise as some people from my group broke windows and smashed open cases below me. The boy (college-age) was above with me jumping from rooftop to rooftop as helicopters descended on us. We all quickly jumped across the rooftops to another building which we’d planned out ahead of time, slid down the staircases, and out into the back street near an alleyway, where we all ran in a different direction. I definitely remember this part of the dream because it was like a movie: we all came from different directions and met at that alleyway (two of us came down one staircase, another from down the street, a few people bust in from another building, etc.) and then from there we nodded at one another and, without stopping, split; I saw all of this from a narrator’s POV, from the sky, where we all ran down a different path. The paths of the alleyways were like a maze, and we each took our own way. It kind of reminded me of that scene in The Croods where, after they’ve met Guy and are traveling, they find themselves in this huge maze-like area made of cracks of the tall cliff formations around them, and each is on their own path. We eventually met up at the warehouse place where we’d been staying. It was a success, and we moved on to another city after checking in with the other group (who now had a bunch of new ‘recruits’ from the jail). At the new place we arrived in what used to be a library. It was run down and mostly empty, and the shelves were replaced with sleeping cots, coded radios and computers, and similar stuff. There were still a few bookshelves, mostly worn down and with random books on them, and there were a few mismatched tables and chairs as well. Some of them looked new, others were obviously old, and they were put together hastily. The windows were boarded and the door had a bunch of extra locks on it, and there were like five planned extra escape routes from the building for in case we were found. We came to this area and chatted with a few of the people. It reminded me of how survivors in a post-zombie-apocalypse would meet up; in dingy places, with scraps of random things, making plans and, although not all of them are together, obviously grouping when they can; and with extra security precautions and tools, by the dozen. While me and another guy talked to an older woman who stayed at the hideout a lot, the rest of our group went around, seeing what plans we could get in on or help out with, what was going on around the area, and other stuff. Eventually we came to this older white guy, he had short-cropped but thick salt and pepper hair, gray stubble, a square jaw, and a hardened face. He seemed the type to have been a soldier in some big war. He had a wound with stitches on the side of his face, along his cheekbone. His clothes were as ragged as mine. The man talked to us shortly about some plans but was very blunt and didn’t seem like much of a talker. Our group decided that I’d stay and see if I could find anything else out from him along with the college-age boy, while the rest of them went and did other stuff. I ended up finding out that he had a sketchbook and pencil, just like me. I started asking what he drew and he flipped through to show me. Near the end of the sketchbook, I saw something I recognized, and asked him to go back. When he went back to it I was shocked. It was a drawing that exactly matched one I had in my sketchbook. I took out my sketchbook and showed him. It was like they had both been printed, they were almost exactly the same (we both sketched slightly differently but like it was the same otherwise). The drawing itself was the lightest sketch of a humanoid monster. It’s face was similar to a flower, like the monsters from Stranger Things. It was very simple though, no details. Otherwise it had a human (if not frail) body, just an outline with some sketch marks (but the sketch marks were the same for both drawings, too). The head was round with petals coming from it, that was it, no detail. The man started talking about a sketchbook and I got excited because I used to have the same one. It’d been about whatever, but both of us almost agreed, without saying it, that the sketchbooks we’d grown up with were the reason why we sketched so similarly— and somehow, why we drew the same thing. He seemed friendlier to me after that and explained that he’d fought in the war to stop slavery and would gladly fight again to stop racism, I told him I hadn’t fought in any wars but I was with him on the second part. Then the dream ended.