The scene begins with a wide open shot of the little chuck wagon driving across wide, flat prairie. There’s Pa and Ma up front and in back are myself and the two older daughters. Also riding with us is an older brother, on his own horse. And we are in a hurry. He holds a rifle and keeps looking behind. We are running away. We’d never intended to go out and settle the great wide america. But now, with Them after us, we must start a new life. New names, new hopes, new dreams, and a new world. (at this point in the dream I was like “wow, I didn’t know any of this!)

The sound of hoofs on dirt come behind us and Pa shouts “Hyahh” at the horses and we race away. Our brother stays behind and shoots at them. I watch from the back of the chuck wagon as they shoot him and his horse down. We clutch each other and cry for him. We have to get to the next town, where we can disappear.

They chase high-speed, and our wagon wheel comes off, we fall to the ground and must run for our lives. We promise to meet again, and separate into the town.

I hide in the doorway of a chinese restaurant. The 12 year old son of the owners tells me I can hide there if I do his chores for him: knit a new curtain for the doorway and hang it using a fancy two-part locking curtain rod. I sit and knit there for days, hiding. He brings me congee and talks to me, and are secret friends. I wonder what has happened to my family. One day I peer through the window and see the army marching by. HOWEVER it is more like the prussian army, with spiky helmets and pre-nazi paraphernalia. And there is my brother, marching with them. He has become one of them. I am shattered. I must finish the damn curtain and hang it up before he betrays my family’s secret hiding places. So, I desperately bind off the curtain and try to figure out this stupid two-part hanger rod, which has to lock together in a certain way to make it stay stuck. I finally get it locked into place and start to sneak away, aware the army is just on the other side of the small garden wall. Just as I am sneaking, the curtain rod unlocks and breaks in half with the loudest sound ever. The chinese mother starts shouting about an intruder and the army changes course. I RUN.

Cut to Pa carrying Laura on his back along the side of a river, careful not to misstep and slip on the rocks. Ma and Mary are hiding somewhere else – he hopes – and he so carefully walks along the river rocks with laura’s little arms tight around his neck. Suddenly he and Laura are surrounded by soldiers and captured.

I hear of their capture and try to find out where they are being kept. The jail is run by a korean family and is on the other, darker side of town. I go there and find my whole family behind black bars in this small room. They are guarded by a single, sullen, teenage girl. She is excited to talk to someone other than a prisoner, and invites me to sit with her. She is angry with her mother for reading her diary and wants to get back at her. Her mother brings us tea and cakes, which we eat, and the girl tells me how she hates working in the family business and just wants to do her own thing. I tell her I’ll help her, trade her a black cloak for the key to the jail. She can use the cloak to run away, do her own thing, with no one knowing who she is. She frees my family.

The ingalls family runs away, down a brick stairwell, to disappear into the night.