The Wizarding World of Panem

I have been re-reading The Hunger Game's trilogy lately, and last night I went to the midnight premier of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two. My dream was a meshed combination of these two worlds, which made for quite the adventure.

In the Harry Potter world, all that happened in the series was done, but it wasn't too long after everything happened. Hermione, Ron, Harry, and Ginny were all still unmarried. I was just staying in Panem, in a place that was similar to one of the districts, but it was more like just a town. The same awful government controlled everything. People had to work 12-15 hours a day for little more than $2.00 an hour, and food was extremely overly priced. The government wanted to remind the citizens, as they do in The Hunger Games series, who is in control. People were getting really angry though, and beginning to rebel, but only in silence. A lot of "muffliato" spells were cast by people who wanted to complain vocally to their friends. Occasionally people would cast spells on the government officials to get them to fall asleep or need to leave so that the people could do things they needed to do, like discuss personal matters in a way that doesn't involve all smiles and peace and always including praises to the government. Because the government was being so controlling that any negative speech about the way things were run could get you in a lot of trouble. They would take you away from your family and you would be sent into holding while you awaited a trial, which would more than likely result in you losing your job, your house, your savings, ultimately ending up with you and your family starving to death.

Sooooo people found ways to get around that by casting spells.

The government was getting really frustrated at the lack of quality of work that the citizens were producing. I was with Hermione/Emma Watson, and I was discussing with her how ridiculous this all is, and she and I (since we were just visitors, not locals) decided to discuss this with an official while at a small convenient store. We were asking why the prices were so high, and he explained that they have to be, because the quality of things being produced by citizens isn't selling enough, so they have to raise prices on things, and this will encourage (force) citizens to work harder and better. I brought up to the man that maybe the reason the work isn't good is because the people are literally starving. They are no longer healthy, they do not have energy, muscle, or enough nutrients flowing through their blood and to their heart and brain, therefor they can't concentrate as well, they get too tired too quickly, thus resulting in poor quality work. I said that if they're really interested in getting better quality work out of the people *cough slaves cough*, they should lower the prices on food, at least for a while (meaning a year or two, enough time for people to gain more strength and stock up in food), and give people a chance to improve. Because also,when somebody's work is consistently terrible, that person will be taken out and tortured and will be paid less.

Some people overheard my conversation with the man and Hermione,and people felt motivated to stand up for themselves and start to rebel.


That's about it.

Confrontation

Bad bad dream last night.

It started on the beach in Florida. This part wasn't so bad. It was beautiful, I was relaxed, just enjoying my the scenery and the warm sand beneath my feet. However, there was someone following me. It was a little person/character thing, and she was part of the family that I visited recently. On the visit I had [in real life], it ended in disaster with my "friend" saying very awful, ugly, hurtful things to me and then dumping me at the airport. I had to fly to Utah. I was in their house (only it wasn't their real house..), and everybody but the girl was there, because she lives on her own anyway. I was there and had to be there to confront her on the argument we had and resolve everything between us. Her dad, who has been friends with my dad for years, wanted to talk to me about it and tell me some things that I should consider when talking to her. Said "you two have been such good friends for so many years, you can't let one incident ruin that!" I had to disagree, but I didn't say anything. All I knew was that I just wanted to go home, I did not want to talk to her, because I knew she wouldn't have anything good to say to me, and I did not want to waste my time getting my feelings and self esteem hurt again. Then she came and I tried to avoid her and deliberately not look at her. She was too involved with her fiance to notice I was there, which was fine by me. Eventually she noticed, but did the same thing I was doing, except she would make faces in my direction when I wasn't looking. I think eventually I got got out of there, but overall I felt awful about the whole thing.

And I still do. I hate that what happened happened, and I wish it could be resolved, but I know there is nothing I can do, because there was nothing I did in the first place.

I hate that I keep being reminded of the whole thing randomly when I'm just trying to forget it all happened. :\

Joliet Rapids of California

I had an adventuresome dream last night... occasionally I will have traveling dreams, and there is always a conflict. I either don't know how to drive, don't know how to get where I'm going, don't know how to drive the kind of road I'm on (sometimes the roads go straight up, sideways, down, upside down, under water, wave around, or just sort of end...), and there is always extreme difficulty in figuring out what to do. I had to go to Idaho, I think. But from Idaho I had to go to California. So I was driving, but I had to go to Platteville, Wisconsin first, and as usual in my driving dreams from Dubuque, the way to get to the bridge was even more complicated than it is in person (which is pretty complicated with all of the construction down town). I had to drive down steeper hills than what Dubuque already has (Dubuque has San Francisco-steep-hills), corkscrew-like roads that went over the edge of the Mississippi, and everyone traveled at super fast speeds so you had to be careful not to fall off the road and into the deep river below. I got to Wisconsin and the only way to explain the environment was that it was like I was on an alien planet. It was light, but the sky was dark dark blue, there were misshapen trees that almost resemble jungle-like/palm trees, and the road was very hilly and very steep. I could hardly see the road it was so steep and my vehicle had such a high profile.
Eventually, I was heading west and I think I was in Wyoming or Montana or Nevada or someplace. It was a flat, dry, hot desert, that's all that matters. We needed to get to the San Francisco area for some reason (I have a ton of family in north/central California, and I know they were involved in it somehow). Instead of driving, there was a more direct route that was far less expensive and meant I did not have to drive. This meant getting into a tube or a one-person kayak/boat thing and riding down a very long river called the Joliet River. This extended from wherever we were, straight down California and into the San Francisco bay. It sounded kind of fun, riding down a long river in a tube, except I had Oliver and Grace with me. Oliver's mode of transportation was a bike, and once we hit deep water, it started to sink. Oliver could not swim. Sally had just her suit, goggles, fins, and a kick board/swimming noodle for flotation (she's a competitive swimmer, so that's all she needed), and Sally had to keep going in and saving him before he drowned. Eventually he got some kind of scooter-like board that he could sit on and balance and it had a little automatic paddle in the back that made him go. Still, it was a long journey with my constant fear that Oliver, Grace or Sally would be sucked down the wrong tributary and get lost or drown and never be found again. Eventually we made it, after going through several man-made tunnels to cut through mountain ranges and passed several tubes that sat in roped off areas that were man-made and they filtered out/pushed out clean water for the travelers. The whole thing was kind of eerie, always made me anxious, and was a trip I was glad to be done with when we got to Sacramento (instead of San Francisco). We then had to head home, and I remember being relieved I did not have to go on the river again, but I did not know how I was getting home.

The end.

Side note... Joliet is the name of the street I lived on when we lived in Lubbock, Texas. Joliet Avenue. Joliet, like all of the other street names in my neighborhood, is a suburb of Chicago.