Who is the hero?

I dreamt that we could be in movies. We'd buy tickets and popcorn, enter the theater, and then be in the movie.

I was in a movie with four other friends (Martin was there), and the movie started out as a parody of epic movies but quickly became the real thing. We were a band of warriors helping a prince complete his quest, and I got to be the tough girl.

There were five monsters we had to kill. The first was in a prison, where the soldiers of the prince's own kingdom wouldn't let us go. They battled us and brought out a balrog-type monster to help them once the good red nuns and red knights were out of sight.

The second monster was waiting underneath an overhang, near the opening of a chamber where I think there was treasure. As we entered, we passed a screeching bird with the head of a woman on its shoulders. It looked harmless, but I had the feeling it was the monster. Sure enough, it attacked once we had all entered that dark and narrow chamber.

The harpy became another woman in armor, and she was beautiful (her head actually resembled the Sphinx in Subnormality) but still out to kill us. She did battle mainly with the prince, but it was i who found her weak spot, under her arm, and there I plunged my sword to the hilt.*

She looked at me a moment as though impressed, like I'd passed some sort of test, and then she stumbled back out of the chamber and (I think) she died.

We didn't take any treasure and almost immediately followed the harpy. In the bird's place on the natural stone table was an old woman. We had to walk past her in single file to return to the road. I led the way because I knew she was the harpy, and sure enough, she pulled out a shiny new butcher's knife.

I blocked her attack with my sword, and the others slipped past us to retrun to the road. The old woman didn't try to kill me, only pushed with her cleaver so she could lean close. She hissed at me something about fighting and love. She made me repeat it to her and, satisfied, she got off the stone table and joined us on the road.

(I'm kicking myself right now because I can't remember what she said. But I suppose my subconscious does, so I'll be okay.)

The harpy walked with us only a short way. Then she quietly took the other path when we reached a fork in the road.

Then we left the movie theater, happy with our achievement and eager to return for the other three monsters, but shaking inside form how actually life-threatening it was. Martin, tired, went to the concession stand for a large soda. Lemon-lime.

After that, I'm not sure if we went home and started a new movie there or went back inside the cinema.

It was supposed to be a children's movie with a similar theme. We were helping five toys prepare for an epic quest. As we were about to leave, the youngest toy, a little yellow potato-like ball named Weegle, disappeared into the house to get his favorite hats. I took the pirate hat to give to a tough little Lego girl, only the hat turned into a dead Lego pirate mummy that she sort of had to carry piggyback.

We set off on our quest--it wasn't the toys anymore, but us, and we rode in our choice of cool superhero vehicle. I had kind of a hog bike.

We ran into a bunch of black bikers in the desert, and they challenged us to a race (a deadly one, of course). They brought out their big cars and bikes, and something was wrong with the vehicles of the guys on our side. They wouldn't start, or they wouldn't go fast enough. I decided to try anyway and took off on my hog.

There was a slim chance I'd win, but I was having fun. Just as I started to speed up, though, I suddenly had no bike. I was walking down the white track, and there was a tall, black-as-night man walking with me. His bearing was noble, even if he was completely naked. Maybe because he was naked. We walked at a normal pace.

When we got to the cluster of bikers, they parted for us, and I knew that the black man was a prince and a god, maybe a lesser god, but still a god, and I was safe.

But not for long. The biker men couldn't do anything, but an older woman came out of a hut by the track and began performing a ritual that would capture me and the god. There were purple chalk circles on the track, and I knew if we both stepped in them, we were lost. The god walked on as though nothing was happening, even though I knew he knew perfectly well what was happening. It was me protecting him now. He got weaker with every spell, it seemed.

i did things to break the circles, I really had no idea, just did what came to mind. Picked up the cloth edges of the track to shake it and scatter the chalk. Stepped on or kicked purple flowers. At one point, I thought to mix dust into the chalk, and the elder woman wailed.

She got more desperate now. She cried out that she could give me shelter from the rain. For some reason, this made me cry. Scared, I ran to the god, and I curled up at his feet, and he covered me with his body and said the only thing he ever sad that whole walk, "Take shelter in the rain."

When the woman's magic passed over us, we continued on our walk along the track. I was weak now, but the god was weaker still and leaning on me for support. The elder woman, still following, must have been really desperate. "You must be hungry!" she cried. 'I have siopao. Do you want siomai rice?" Because this was really ridiculous, I gave her my snottiest "No!"

She followed us to the end, right up to the edge of our homebase. Up to this point, the men of either side had done nothing and had simply watched our progress along the track, because this was the way. Once the god and I stepped over the boundary line (really, a low cement line sticking out of the dirt) and onto our own damp soil, our warriors closed ranks around us and kept the woman out.

She continued to make her pleas, but I ignored her and lifted the god up against a crumbling rock the size and shape of a pyramid brick, or a tomb. A young man came to help and began wrapping the god up in fresh linen bandages. By then he was rotting and struggling to breathe; he would be dead before the young man finished. But it was okay, because we were with our own people.

The men were chanting something, three alien words, which were still booming in my head when I woke up.

In that fading phase where you can still feel the dream even though you're awake, I returned to the tomb rock at night. The god-prince was standing there in his bandages and a tricorner hat. I somehow felt that he was one of the monsters, but also that this part of the quest was past. He embraced me and then kissed me, and then the next moment it was morning and I had to take his body to the sea.

Later in the morning, while getting ready for work, I realized that it was actually the second time I've walked with this figure in my dreams and escaped those purple circles, but it wasn't such an elaborate, ritualistic even the first time, and I didn't see all this bandaging stuff.

Interpretations, anyone?

--
*This is only the second time I've ever dreamt that a strike had the force and effect I'd intended. The first was when I kicked that gangster in the balls. But that's another dream.