Hi! I'm a 22 year old female, living in England and studying an MA at university in literature. I have really vivid dreams, which I think is in part due to the large volume of fiction that I read, and in part due to an almost insurmountable amount of anxiety that I deal with on a daily basis.

A bit of background, because I wrote the dream down almost immediately after I woke up, and didn't provide any references. I am an only child, with very little extended family. My parents live 5000 miles away from me. I grew up as an expatriate child in Switzerland, and they moved away almost immediately after I went to university, when I was 17. I am very close with them, but we have an occasionally troubled relationship that has its roots in their relocation (which was not their fault. I came to terms with it years ago, but it is easy to slip back into resentment subconsciously).

I have a very intense love for animals - this dream is in part about that, I think. I grew up with dogs, and at university, I have a cat, Scarlett, who features very heavily in this dream. I have a lot of anxiety that I am a bad pet owner, and as a result absolutely spoil my cat rotten. I also have a long-term boyfriend (referred to as 'A' in this narrative) with whom I used to live. He has recently moved out for the year, (I feel confident that this has been a good move), and I have two new flatmates, who are both lovely girls. I have mixed feelings about one. Being a generally strong person, I feel strangely very small around her, and also desperate for her approval, which is a sense that I haven't had since I was a child. She occasionally makes backhanded comments about me not being around enough for the cat, as I stay at my boyfriend's house around the corner two/three nights a week, but always come back in the morning to feed her. My closest friend, who I refer to briefly as 'K' here, has recently moved away, and I rarely see her.

I think that's all the background needed... Some of it makes sense now that I've given the background, but I still feel very shaken by the dream, and haven't been able to let it go.

Somehow, I become aware that there has been a nuclear explosion somewhere in the world. Possibly in the UK. I am in Switzerland, and France. It feels like Zürich, due to the architecture, but I am definitely also on the border. Throughout the dream, we keep flipping between the French border and Zürich. I have probably heard about the bomb from my parents, or on television - regardless, I’ve definitely not seen it happening.

I have no reference for how we have reunited in Switzerland, but my parents and I are walking in the hills; we’re all three of us using pale wooden walking sticks, carved by hand, like I used to make as a child. We come across a very boxy slate-coloured house, built overlooking a cliff with vast windows. One entire wall is glass. The building appears from the exterior to be open-plan and quite airy. We enter the house, which is strangely dingy from the inside, it is half the width inside as it is outside, and curiously unlike I expected. It becomes clear that we are looking for something, and there is an impending dread that we’re also, for whatever reason, not supposed to be there. We scatter, hiding underneath beds and behind closets. Somebody enters the house, there’s a squabble, and we all run outside. My dad has, in the time in the house, inexplicably acquired a large ginger-and-white kitten that I know is called Alfalfa.

Once we’re safely back on a road, I snatch it from my dad with glee. I hold the kitten up, and the next large portion of the dream is me holding it above my head, calling out every name I could possibly give it, despite knowing that its name is Alfalfa. I am absurdly set on Charlie, my dog’s name. Eventually, I settle on its original name, and somehow we find ourselves in a car. Alfalfa is in my bag. I begin to feel anxious, because I can’t find my actual cat, Scarlett. I am worried that she’s died in the bomb. The disaster seems to be a bizarrely small part of this dream. Despite coming around the corner to A’s house in France, we are also driving to a mountain destination to seek help in a huge bomb-shelter, which is simultaneously the chalet that we used to stay in, and also above the pass where we used to hike with the dogs. Despite never having been there, I can picture the bomb-shelter clearly in my mind’s eye, but we’re still not there. In the car, I am becoming increasingly panicked, and insist that my parents stop at the next house, to check that my cat isn’t there. The driver keeps swapping between my mum and my dad.

The next house we come across is A's mum's house. My dad pulls the car into the house’s living room, its interior matches the previous house’s exterior. Sara isn’t there, there’s another woman who owns the house. I run into the back garden, which I instinctively know is a biosphere, but is also the length of a football pitch (and is more rectangular than spherical). There are tabby kittens everywhere. Alfalfa is still in my bag. I run frantically around the pitch, calling out for Scarlett. There are huge windows corresponding to the cliff-windows of the previous house, about 20 feet high, with matching 20 foot high sickly pink curtains. Many of the kittens are climbing the curtains, and it suddenly dawns on me that Scarlett loves nothing more than windowsills. I am certain that she’ll be somewhere along the huge window sill. I throw all the curtains open, and the windows dematerialise. There is a 100 foot drop down, with another football pitch directly below. I feel sick, I know that Scarlett has fallen down the drop. I call ‘SCARLETT!’ down the drop, like I sometimes do out the garden window, half expecting her to run across the field and meow in reply as she always does. She is nowhere to be found. The owner of the house, a slim middle-aged woman with cropped, greying hair and no face tries to calm me down. Scarlett is both dead and alive, I can see that she’s rolling around in the curtains above me, but she’s also not. She’s also dead and gone forever. She has both died in the bomb, and fallen out the giant windows. Alfalfa is gone, he’s climbing the curtains with the other cats. I am screaming, I suddenly realise that A is nowhere to be found - where is A? Where is K? Where is Scarlett? I wake up.

Age & Gender & Location {Required}: 22/ Female

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