Surrealistic Multimedia

This one is from October 14th, 2004:

I didn't directly participate in this dream, but watched it like a movie and read it like a book simultaneously. I saw images, heard narration, and read text all at once. The movie was narrated by a little kid, and had the feel of the movie To Kill a Mockingbird.

The boy doing the narration was very small, maybe between 5 and 7. He lived on some kind of estate, not really a farm but there were a lot of animals. The impression was that the family he lived with was not his, but that he was an orphan. There was a younger girl who was not his sister and was also an orphan. The general feeling was that orphans were common due to war or disease or something.

The kid had gone into town, and met a new friend -- an older girl. He had curly hair and she kept wanting to put ribbons in it, which he put up with because he had a mild crush on her. He lost track of the time, then suddenly realized he needed to go attend to something back at the house; what he was attending to was surrealistic and I forgot it within minutes of waking up. It had something to do with animals.

He rode back quickly and was tending to the animals, but something didn't feel right. The music grew tense, and the animals were spooked. The text of the book said, 'death was in the air'. The kid grew frightened and started to ride on the road back toward town for some reason, but it was a different road than he had taken before. He met the father of the family almost immediately. The father's name was 'I', but this was highlighted in orange in the book to distinguish his name from the pronoun. He said, 'I came back as quickly as I could, but your horse was faster than mine.' Then the camera turned, and you saw another horse ride up. On it was the younger girl, but she was dead.