It was a disturbing dream. Everything was in color, everything felt real, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. However, as a lucid dreamer, I knew it was just a dream.
I was working at a day care that the dream said I had worked at before and was returning to after some time away. I didn’t recognize the place, but I was working there. The actual building was small, just some white concrete with a roof and glass walls to see outside. Everyone but a few people were outside. The back had a light concrete slope leading down to the little pond with crystal-clear water; the area surrounding the water was covered in healthy green jungle foliage.
Occasionally I saw a babysitter or the boss walk through the foliage. During the tour of the facility, I was brought through the greenery, having to fight some of the plants to get through, only to be shown a door leading to an alley on the left side. We had walked in from the right, trekking all the way around just to see this.
The tour complete, we got back to work. I took care of many children throughout the day, varying in age but mostly handled toddlers and babies. I wasn’t told the name of any of them. As the day dwindled and the children were being picked up, I noticed the no-more-than-two-year-old sitting up beside me on the concrete had not yet been picked up by a parent. No one else seemed bothered by this.
I noticed the boy had filled his diaper, so I hurried to gather a diaper and wipes to change him. He wasn’t wearing anything else, same as the other younger children, so I didn’t have to worry about moving his clothes out of the way. As I tried to clean him up, I noticed he was eating a hot dog with one hand and had some green leafy dip and chili dip beside him in a plastic container. I hadn’t seen how he got the food, but since it seemed to be distracting him while I cleaned him up, I wasn’t going to try to stop him from eating.
The first issue I noticed was that it was taking a lot more work to clean him up than I had anticipated. I was desperately scrounging for more wipes when I noticed the dirty diaper was not rolled up and tossed. It was open and had the exact same colors as the dips the boy had been eating. To my horror, the poor boy was dipping his hot dog into the filth instead of the actual food. Any attempts I made to stop him, get the filth away, and keep him from eating any more of it were futile. All I could do was clean him up as fast as I could, pick him up, and get away from the problem.
Holding the baby close, because to me he was clearly nothing more than a baby, I trekked through the foliage on the right side and was making my way toward the other side in this weird semicircle. I was hoping to save the baby and keep him away from the filth. Hopefully it was taken care of, since part of the job was cleaning up garbage.
While in the foliage, I noticed some trash around, so I swapped the baby into one arm and picked up the trash with the other hand. I quickly noticed there was so much trash I was randomly finding that I would need to come back and clean out the area once the child is picked up and is no longer my responsibility. With this in mind, I took the trash I could in one hand and the baby in the other as I made toward the left side of the foliage, intending to exit the plants entirely.
I tripped before I could make it out. I managed to hold onto the baby, thank goodness, but let the trash go to brace myself. Looking around, the baby was safe in my hold, but there was something else under the foliage. It was another baby.
This baby was younger than the one in my hold. This one was clearly sick. The hair on her head had turned white and prickly like a hedgehog, and on top of her head there was a hole in her skin, revealing a purple, coconut-hard, raised growth inside. The word that came to mind was “tumor.” The baby had a tumor, even though I knew that wasn’t the right word for whatever this was. I just knew that the baby was sick and still alive somehow.
Knowing this baby was here, abandoned by someone—I wasn’t sure if it had been another babysitter or a parent somehow—I began to search for more. I found two others, both young. One little boy was sick like the little girl and was so little he couldn’t be older than a month or two. Another little girl was still healthy and closer to the age of the baby boy I was originally carrying through the foliage.
I wasn’t sure how, but I managed to hold all four babies in my two arms and carried them through. I easily noticed how the foliage seemed to cling more, as if trying to steal the babies away. Once or twice a baby or two was pulled out of my arms, but I went back and got them. As I finally made it out of the jungle, hurrying toward the boss, I noticed I was missing the original baby boy I had been carrying and turned to see him stuck at the edge of the foliage without a complaint. I rushed back and got him, then brought him and the other three I found to my boss.
The look on her face when I brought her the babies, worrying about their lack of care and even doubting my own care for children because of the find, made me confused. As I mentioned there might even be more babies lost in the foliage than the few I found, my boss stopped me and had an odd sympathetic and mournful look on her face.
She said there wasn’t really a point to search or even to bring the sick ones I found to the hospital. They weren’t likely to survive anyway. She pointed out how the parents never came to claim the missing children. No one had. She said there was no point in attempting to save them since there was nothing we could really do. This broke my heart.
Later that day we had a funeral for the sick babies in the concrete front of the building with glass windows. I didn’t count how many there were, but there were more than two. The still-living babies were kept in a pen on the concrete slope, playing together. There were more than two in there, but not many.
When I woke up I knew what the dream meant: the children of the world are in danger. They need prayers and help. Those who haven’t been properly cared for don’t know what’s good for them and so are consuming filth. Also, so many are sick, dying, and have been abandoned. Meanwhile, the world is just letting it happen, saying there is no point in attempting to help since there is nothing that can be done. The devil is after the children, and the younger ones are in the most danger.