June 26, 2014
My parents and I were out in the streets at night. The buildings around us looked rather Mediterranean but I had the sense that we were in the United States. We were on our way to get back to our hotel. We passed by a marketplace when I took out my phone to check the map. In order to get to our room, we had to pass through a building for which the door lay in front of us. My dad thought it couldn’t be right, but I went in with my mother anyways.
Inside was a long hallway of rooms and to the right was an open window and a painting. My aunt greeted us from one of the rooms and asked what was wrong. My mom replied that because earlier when we were walking, we heard someone shout, “Pantomime!” it confirmed one of her earlier suspicions.
I looked back at the painting and realized it was an aerial view of what seemed to be a network of caves. I then glanced out of the window and noticed the rocky walls. I opened the map back up to zoom out and saw that it matched the depiction on the wall. My aunt commented, “The cities you love were in a cave all along.”
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We were in Japan. This time it was just my brother, dad, and cousin. We were in a hotel room and it was late at night so I closed up my laptop and set it on the bed. My brother was holding the controller of a robotic dog that kept trying to climb all over me. It looked real but you could tell by the weight and strength that it was indeed a machine. An iguana with extremely long claws and some kind of device wired to its head was scratching the back of my cousin in a very repetitive motion. I got up from the bed and sat on a sofa on the other side of the room. I looked at my laptop bag. A real dog was sleeping on the balcony.
It was now morning but only my dad and brother were left. I looked at the view of the ocean from the window of our room when I suddenly felt it rocking back and forth. This was quite concerning as our room was very high up. I looked at the water around 30 floors down and a few kilometers out when I asked, “This is actually an earthquake, isn’t it?”
The swaying got heavier while my brother pressed his phone against the window to take a picture. “I wonder if I can get a cool shot from the randomness” he said. The buildings below suddenly started to look a lot closer and blurrier as the sea started turning red.
We were suddenly at the same level as the sea and it felt like our room took off on its own like a boat, rocking among the crashing waves. Many houses and sailboats were around us, which were all painted with a teal and purple color scheme. I immediately thought they must have been sponsored by some brand of chocolate but it wasn’t coming to mind (I later searched it up and it seemed to resemble Cadbury mint chocolate). We got dangerously close to crashing into the many obstacles in front of us until we finally got onto dry land.
It was raining heavily. But we were now in a van of some sort. As we drove up the hill, we passed by some large blue vehicles that were apparently used to drain water.We were informed that we were only saved because we stayed at a hotel funded by the American government. Others weren’t so lucky.
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My family was about to rent out one of our houses and we went to inspect it one last time for anything we wanted to take with us. My mother came across a suitcase and asked who it belonged to. I had no idea. The suitcase was light pink and glossy. It sort of resembled one of those half transparent handbags.
I opened it up and inside we found multiple passports and workbooks. All of them had their corners cut off, as is standard procedure for no longer valid documents. I opened up one of the passports and it turned out to belong to one of my aunts.
My mother was on the phone with a potential buyer about the fee for using the facilities of our house.