"The Silent Yes"

Last night's dream:

I was working undercover and entered into a huge game being played by thousands of youth world-wide called "The Silent Yes", the purpose of which was to weed out fascistic tendencies in the youth and to test their decision-making powers in complex situations.

First I entered a locker room decorated with propaganda posters celebrating the winning teams, shunning the losers, and advertising missing children. The posters were all red and white and had "YES/NO" and "YES OR NO?" emblazoned upon them, along with graphics of planes dropping bombs, people screaming, or flowers and puppies and peace signs. Every decision within the game was a Catch-22; situations in which some population stood to suffer whatever the decision would be... such as, a plague would be released on a neighboring village if residents of the already-infected village was not exterminated quickly... WHAT DO YOU DO? Whatever the youth teams decided would actually happen. Genocides, wars, etc.

I was given a new name (my sister's name, Jaimee) and some money to get started in the game. Before I'd even entered the playing field, I made my first mistake and made eye contact with a more advanced player. Eye contact with any player who had been in the game longer than you was against the rules, so it was safest to never make eye contact with anyone, ever. This of course made it very difficult to solve a crime within the game, due to the fact that I couldn't identify anyone very well without risking "losing".

"Losing" was awful. There were these pixie-like creatures that were about 1 foot high, reddish colored, and rather beautiful. They had elegant, delicate hands with long, slender fingers and incredibly sharp nails. Whenever anyone broke the rules, a Pixies would be released on them and while a gentle wave of their hands their sharp nails would literally split the "loser" right open. The Pixies would playfully swat at the bodies in innocent glee while skin and guts spewed everywhere and the person was instantly killed in an incredibly gory manner.

Whenever someone had a "birthday" there would be a huge party in which all of their best game moves would be shown in a cinematic montage on a giant movie screen. Every single thing that anyone did was videotaped.

The point of the game truly was to find the few pure, peaceful souls in the world that could make the right peaceful, loving decisions even in the face of tremendous pressures and hardships. Only these people would have the ability to speak The Silent Yes... and it was the Silent Yes that could save us all.

And after all that..

I dreamed that my tortoise died. :-(