This one ranks up there...

I had a very strange dream this morning.

I walk into the youth center of my former hometown of Carrington. About 6 PM, and it's starting to get dark outside. I walk towards the back of the building, and there are about 6-8 people from my past. In the dream, they're all my friends, even though some of them are/were my sworn enemies. And they're from different parts of my past. Kids I grew up with in Carrington, kids I went to high school with on Kwaj, kids I lived in the dorm with at NDSU, you get the point. Mostly female acquaintances, but there was at least one guy there. All dressed in bright blue scrubs, since they are all nurses.

They recently got back to town, after leaving work for the day (for some reason, Carrington is almost a home base for a massive amount of nurses that work in various hospitals within a 100 mile radius, and the youth center is their favorite hangout). They're sitting around, talking, drinking beer. I sit down and ask Carrie (yes, that Carrie) if the "LaMoure crew" (LaMoure is another town in North Dakota) has come back yet. Carrie thinks that they are still an hour away, due to long drive. Then Nick Frye (one of those sworn enemies from my past) says, "Why, what's up?". I respond that I'm looking for a friend, who goes by the alias "Dan Black". Dan Black is really actress-turned-nurse Katherine Heigl. And only Carrie and I know that (at least, out of the people sitting in the youth center). The reason I'm looking for her is that I want to ask her out on a date (I used to have a big crush on her about 5 years ago).

So I sit and debate what to do. Stay and wait for her to show up? Leave and come back later? After going back and forth in my mind about it for about a minute, I decide "Fuck it, I don't want to wait" and start to head outside. As I approach the front exit, I see a group of nurses in maroon, crossing the street and about to walk into the youth center. Katherine is in the group. They must have got back early or something. So I stop her (the rest of the nurses, which includes Jen, my friend Greg's fiance, go inside), and I start talking to Katherine and ask her out.

Now here's where it gets REALLY weird. It's almost like the focus of my dream shifts from the dating storyline to this new one. After I ask Katherine out and she accepts, we hear some loud arguing from the middle of the street, just around the corner of the building. We're curious as to what's happening, but we can't see from our vantage point, so we start walking over (this is the exact moment that the storyline changes). I don't know what they were arguing about, but cool heads prevailed in the end. They shook hands and starting walking up the street together, when an old '50's style convertible pulls up to them. About 3-4 guys and a girl were in it. Two of the guys hop out. Everyone not in the car do this kinda group hug thing, then they all put their arms around each other and walk up the street together. The guy on the left end, which was one of the two original guys arguing in the street, stops, turns around, turns back to his friends (who are about 25 feet up the street from him, continuing to walk up the street), then gets shot in the stomach from an unknown assailant (there were no obvious gunmen in the vicinity; so I'm thinking it was maybe a sniper from across the street or something), and dies.

Then the whole thing starts playing out like a Law & Order episode, complete with Detectives Briscoe and Green interviewing witnesses and whatnot. Right after Briscoe would make his smart-aleck remark before the opening credits, my dream ends and I wake up.