Quick post, don't want to forget the dream.
I was a black American woman, working for some crime investigation thing. International gang from Morocco? Pakistan? Lots of Adobe looking buildings and overcrowded urban places with dark skinned people. Not tropical African dark, but middle-eastern dark.
I don't know backstory, as I usually don't in dreams. I just started there. The guys had been killing small children and gloating about it in awful public ways. Photos of before and Afters on billboards, leaving mangled bodies in parks or busy stores, dropping them from helicopters into markets, and at least one instance of a live feed broadcast with a projector on my own hotel building of a child in a hot dumpster dying. I didn't know about the last one in the dream, I personally was an observer for most of the dream. Not for certain if I was actually ever her or if I was in 3rd person omniscient POV. Wouldn't have been omniscient, I only knew some of her thoughts and her surroundings. What is that called? 3rd person limited?
Got called back or had to return to the USA for some reason. They're Indian people I think. Some kind of international cartel, into drugs and violence. They were established in my neighborhood back home, so the confrontation continued. I wasn't part of a government organization I don't think, as in the late part, I was trying to think of ways to get the attention of police.
A gunfight broke out after I tried to stop another killing that I happened across. I don't dream often, but there's almost always gunfights. I usually wake up during the gunfight just as I'm about to kill someone, and I've only ever killed anyone in a dream twice. Once was after starting to explore with sumac, another was tonight. No sumac, no melatonin, just a half a margarita with dinner about two hours before bed. I haven't dreamed in a long time, maybe two months.
Towards the end, there was a lot of running through my town where this gang was well established. Reminded me of Euless TX when I lived there. Lots of neighborhoods and apartments, some old, some new. I, or the lady I was observing, had a Beretta M92. Odd, that was the first gun I ever shot in real life, and a common issued duty weapon for folks before Glock took over the handgun market. Most folks trying to shoot me were using AKs or SKSs, some chased me with machetes, and there were a lot of them. Near the end, it was night or very early morning and I was running. I guess as an exercise run? But I sensed I was being followed, and took an erratic route to shake my pursuer. It worked for that individual, but he had a friend on every street it seemed, and I saw them on their front porches, high, awake, and relentless. I stopped at a man's home as he was taking out his trash for the morning. His porch light was on, and it was good to be in the light, but he was scared. Intimidated by the gang, and he left as soon as one of the men was sprinting up the driveway to get me. I used a log to knock him on the head, then took his neck between my knees and beheaded him with a knife or a machete. Then I woke up. Nose stuffy, so I'd been breathing through my mouth. Too many pillows, so I'd probably been snoring. I had to pee.
Sorry if that was erratic. I want to maintain it as one stream of consciousness, as soon as I finished peeing. Don't want to forget, as I often do. I woke up at 4:51 AM after going to bed around 10 PM. Less sleep than usual. I'll go back to bed shortly, but wanted to write this down. Anyone have experience with dreams and interpretation? One theory I've heard is that dreams are the mind's way of healing itself, and this dream brings me back to my belief that our lives need some extreme degree of stress from time to time. I wonder what my heart rate was while I was dreaming. It was a very vivid, lucid dream. I don't know how long I was dreaming it or if there were dreams before it. Most of my dreams include gunfights, like I said, and this is the first time I ever used a machete in a dream. Actually, I'm usually using some sort of scoped rifle at the end, and I wake up as I'm squeezing the trigger with someone in the crosshairs. Before the bang. This one jarred me awake after the beheading.
Anyways. Sunday morning. Maybe someone can make sense of this, but I've got it recorded now so I can revisit it. This is the first dream I've recorded for these purposes.