Purgatory Kids

Date: 10/31/2022

This is a dream about purgatory. Purgatory itself is a small suburban town, where the most important residents are elementary and middle school aged children, all under 11 years old. There are 28 of these children, to be precise, and 3 adults who may or may not be administrators of the children's fate. Everyone else is... filler? I never do figure out their role, whether the kids are the only ones who have died and the adults are constructs or illusions or something. I just know the children and administrators are the most important characters, including myself. I don't know the dream is about purgatory at the beginning. I just know that I forgot to bring my things for the school show and tell presentation -- which isn't just done in a classroom, but up on a stage in the school theater where parents and other citizens can come sit in theater seats and watch the purgatory children give presentations. It's an event that takes place across multiple days, squished into the time after school ends and before we all go home for dinner. I almost decide to postpone my presentation until the next day, so I can make a point of remembering my stuff tomorrow, but my family insists that they can drive fast enough. All I have to do is let them drive me home, find my bag full of presentation supplies, and get back before the other presenters for the day are all finished. I stress over it a little, of course, but I ultimately end up agreeing. When we get to the house, which is more of a townhouse than a regular suburban home -- with the living area all on the second floor above the garage -- I have to briefly step over a sleeping dragon to get to the front door. I love dragons so much that I almost stop to pet it and spend the rest of the afternoon playing with it, but I'd promised to do my presentation. I ignore the horse-sized mythical creature and get my bag instead. When I get back to the school theater, another presenter is just wrapping up. I quietly slip into the backstage area behind them and tell the teacher there that I'll be presenting next. She nods and reminds me to be quiet until it's my turn. Naturally, I quietly nod back. I don't remember what anyone else presented on -- in the dream or after waking up -- but I take my place on stage just fine. I stumble over myself a little, not giving my presentation facts in the right order at the start, then hit my stride. I'm talking about something I love, after all, so it comes easily to me. I spend my whole presentation discussing the domestication of dragons. How we humans -- considering the dragon myths we'd made yp and shared long before coming to a world where dragons truly exist -- should have viewed them as monsters, as threats, as obstacles. By all rights, we should have started a war against them and tried to eliminate them while treating them as fearsome beasts, as terrible pests. Instead, we had done the opposite. We'd seen that the dragons in this place were smaller than houses, and we'd chosen to domesticate them. We'd chosen to treat them like dogs and give some of them jobs while training/breeding the rest to be docile home companions. We have several town-owned dragons that simply laze around wherever they please, like huge cats, when they're off-duty. We have parks where people play with their dragons. Even after finding out some species actually do grow larger than our houses, we'd found jobs for and made pets of those dragons too. We have a track record of fear when it comes to these creatures, and yet we aren't living in fear of them at all. In fact, most children -- myself included-- dream of growing up to work with dragons in various town-benefitting careers. I continue on about dragons, picturing myself raising a whole bunch of them at once or having a riding partner I'd take out on geographical surveys, until my presentation time runs out and I hop off the stage. I'm grateful to not be speaking in front of people anymore, but glad that my family had helped me retrieve my bag. It had been fun to talk about dragons. I even continue talking about them on the drive home, and point out every sleeping dragon we pass. One of them notices me and blows a ring of smoke from its nose playfully before flopping back over in the grass to sunbathe. I'm not clear on whether I'm the same kid in the same town at this point in the dream, but I do know I'm still a kid in a suburban town full of townhouses. Specifically, I'm a kid who hangs out with 4 or 5 other children my age. We'd started out calling ourselves a "Town Detective Team" when we'd first started playing together. We still call ourselves that sometimes, but the name has lost its original weight. We don't try to solve mysteries so much as we feed the local cats (owned and stray alike) so they won't eat mice. We bring them cat food and then just... hang out. Play games. Play pranks. Do homework. Talk. We're normal kids, doing normal kid things. Then 1 or 2 members of our group go missing, at the same time that the adults who sometimes babysit us -- often "secretly" since our families want us to build independence by thinking we're allowed to play on our own without supervision, but not secretly because we catch them every time -- start hanging around more often. All of our families have alsp started to complain abour seeing more mice in their homes despire having cats. Our little team of detectives thinks there might be a connection between the mice and our missing friends. I never see how a member of the team figures things out, I only know we get into a small fight innher living room during the investigation. She insults one of my hobbies by the end of the fight, and we both give each other the silent treatment until our babysitters show up. That's when I hear her explanation about purgatory. She has to clear things up when our babysitters won't let us go investigate, and every member of the Town Detective Team (except those who have gone missing) is there to back her up. They say they're in charge of finding the missing kids, not us. This is a problem for adults to solve. My friend says that logic doesn't apply here. The adults don't know what this place is, as far as she can tell, or where to actually look for our missing friends. This is when she explains that this town is purgatory. The children here, at least, are all people who have died and been sentenced to live out their afterlives here. We spend most of our lives as children, but when we're misbehaving or the mistakes of our living selves catch up to us, we get transformed into mice. This is actually the reason why so many households have cats, so that this world becomes a dangerous and stressful place for our mouse selves. So that the mice will inevitably be eaten by cats. Whether we actually "die" when we're eaten by cats or just return to our child selves to resume the cycle of purgatory is unclear. All she knows is that we do in fact get turned into mice and the ones who overlook our punishment are actually our babysitters. They are, after all, the administrators in charge of purgatory. They remember that they're administrators as soon as my friend finishes explaining all this. Apparently, while our cycle is switching between human life and mouse death, their cycle is forgetting who they are long enough to be immersed in their babysitting role and then remembering long enough to make sure the mice get eaten. They're the ones who orchestrate traps for the mice, where we will have no choice but to be cornered by cats. They can't fully remember how they've set up each trap, only that the traps exist and that they'll remember more when they switch jobs from babysitter to mouse trapper. Having only vague memories of their other job, the administrators decide to help us since their main job is looking after children. We'll all work together to save our friends from being eaten by the cats we normally feed. We're getting supplies together when my friend apologizes for insulting my hobby. She says it had been out of line, especially considering what we now know about the meaning our hobbies carry in purgatory. My dream self knows what this means (though I never find out for sure) and apologizes in return, saying it wasn't right to yell at her in the first place -- and besides, she'd only just learned about purgatory rules herself. She couldn't have known she was insulting something deeper than just the hobby itself. As we're apologizing to each other and filling a basket with supplies, the conversation turns to places that might be mouse traps. We start out small, then gradually expand our concept of a trap. We joke about how it would be ironic if that blocked-off space between two townhouses was a mouse trap. It's huge by mouse standards, boarded up with large planks of wood angled at a corner between the houses. There are also planks of wood coming off the houses themselves, making the whole area into a kind of arrow shape. It's where we often place cat food, knowing they'll venture into the arrow space out of curiosity at some point. That's why we children call it Cat Trap Alley. The moment we say the name, of course, we realize it's not just ironic. It makes sense. The cats are being lured there, but they can get out whenever they please. The ones really being trapped aren't the cats, the predators, bit rather... my friend almost drops the basket we've been filling with supplies. She fumbles and I trip and we urgently rush to find the others and tell them what we've figured out. We'll find our friends at Cat Trap Alley. I'm not sure if we ever do get to Cat Trap Alley and save our friends. I don't know what it does to the cycle of purgatory if we do manage to save them. I never figure out what role all the adults in this place fill, either, beyond the 3 administrators. I can fill in other information, which I might do if I ever write this as an actual short story, but I can't follow the plot past this point. This is where I woke up, after all, and the dream ended. I almost wish it had lasted longer, so I could've seen what happened to the mice. Until Next I Wander.