Weird Mouse Arcade

[Elyse]

I had this dream a few nights ago. I can't remember the beginning of this dream, but at some point I was following a group of people around in an old fashioned arcade and I saw something that looked like one of the old pinball games... so I walked over to it and popped a quarter in. It was not pinball... instead this game was full of mice and you had to control this thing above them and press a button that would make it squirt cheese out. I thought this was such a cute game! Why couldn't there be more games like this because I had ASSUMED that whoever built this game had put homeless mice in there and the mice would be fed and cared for this way. I mean, the game SHOULD in fact cover all cost of the mice being sheltered and fed and then some! I played the game several times feeling like I was doing a good thing and fell in love with one mouse in particular. A very pretty white mouse with pink eyes and nose. Anyway, after playing this game for some time and feeding ALL the mice I was feeling pretty happy until a maintenance man came over and needed to work on the machine. He said it would take a second, so I stood back and watched as this man put a bucket under the machine and started to unlock it. Of course mice would poop and the machine would need to be cleaned, I thought... but when he opened the machine, hundreds of dead mice poured out of it. I was horrified. I asked what was going on. I, at first, thought that maybe not enough people were playing... but the man explained to me that the cheese being fed to the mice was actually poison. SO, the people that played the game were actually poisoning these mice rather than helping them as they were led to believe. At this point I started feeling sick and started crying asking the man if there were some sort of antidote. He said there was not. I asked for the mouse that I had gotten attached to and he begrudgingly gave it to me and i held and rocked it while freaking out about having poisoned all these tiny, cute mice I meant to help. I asked if there was ANYTHING I could do to help these mice and the man said that they were all fed a poison that would slowly and painfully kill them all. It would make them even more hungry and the more cheese they ate the more suffering they would endure... and the ONLY way to help the mice would be to pay for a special "treat" that would instantly kill them. At this point, I couldn't take any more and ran away with the mouse crying. At home I had apparently adopted lots of random homeless animals, to include a white snake who also had pink eyes... it followed me around the house like a dog and I wondered to myself why I would save such a creature since I am not fond of snakes and prefer furry creatures... but the snake was beautiful and even sorta glowed. I took the mouse into my bedroom and shut the door and sang to it as I pet it and waited for it to die. I woke up feeling pretty sick with myself and very guilty.