I'm in a small, but fairly well-off town in California, mostly one-story homes. I live in Ca, but I've never been here before. I'm walking down the street, and as I climb this hill, the sun is going down, so now a number of homes have their lights on, and it looks so cozy that I can't help but envy them. One house has a porch with an old lady in a rocking chair, carressing her rifle. O_o
One house has an ostrich in it. ಠoಠ
And I continue down the street, and a little girl starts following me. I try to send her back, but she refuses and stays with me. So I offer to walk her back home. We walk on, and I have to hold her back so she doesn't run off into the intersection. We end up walking down this path that runs along a river; we're quite a few meters above it, and a fence keeps anyone from falling in by accident. I get to the end of the path, there's a wooden gate covered by ivy, but it's not her house. I look to the right (west) and I realise that's where I should be headed. So I take her back to the intersection, and the fence turns into a wooden wall covered in advertisements, the girl starts reading all of them, or parts of them, rapidly and without exception. And she just won't shut up. And I realise that there's something special about her; it's a compulsion she can't control, and it hurts my heart a little to think about how she has to live with it, and how she's so cheerful in spite of it all.
So I walk her down the street, and we get close to the beach, and the girl runs off ahead of me. And I hear some sad song playing somewhere, and I find a note in my pocket. I look at it, and I see a crayon drawing of a hot air balloon, and a message saying that she was going to find her father, who had died. I take off running as fast as I can down the concrete path down the beach, until I reach the end, and I can't find her. I just see sand, sea, and and the overcast dawn.
This odd, special little girl whom I was supposed to be taking back home was gone, and I knew that she'd never come back, and I knew that I would never see her again, and I start crying. I wake up with tears on my pillow.