This is disjointed, but it’s what I remember.
KrisDi and I were in the house that we lived in (but it’s not our actual real-life house). The kids weren’t there because they had been abducted by aliens. KrisDi and I were kind of in shock. Alien “invasion” was all over the news all over the world (I think they even had the classic saucer-with-a-dome-on-top spaceships), and we weren’t the only ones whose kids had been stolen. I don’t know the exact means, location, or timing of their abduction — their absence was just a precondition of the dream.
One of the aliens came to talk to us. It was a remarkably peaceful conversation. It was tall (maybe 8 feet), somewhat squid-like except that it walked on land on its tentacles and didn’t appear to be sticky or slimy or anything like that, primarily dark gray. The tentacles it walked on made up about 5-6 feet of its height.
The aliens had only recently learned human language, so this was one of the first times they actually communicated with us. We asked it if it had taken our children, and it said yes. We asked if we would ever see them again, and it told us no. KrisDi sobbed, I was filled with a strange combination of grief, anger, and terrible fascination. I might also have been sobbing while talking calmly to the alien, in the way you can simultaneously do two mutually exclusive things in a dream. There was some other discussion to the effect of “Are they OK, where are you taking them…” etc with no answers that I particularly remember.
Then there was a major shift in the dream, and now some people and I were in some kind of underground structure, under the impression we were escaping from the aliens. We made it into a kind of open room near an exit, and there was an alien there (now it looked mostly like a big, strong human male — except for being a dark gray and having some kind of unusual collar that may or may not have been part of its body). It was acting peaceably, and saying something along the lines of “We mean you no harm”, but I felt the need to attack it anyway.
I grabbed it by the throat and tried to strangle it, but it was a bit like trying to strangle a tree. It seemed perplexed by my aggression and defended itself by pushing me away with its tentacles (which were also simultaneously human-shaped arms), coating me in some kind of a slimy material that was poisonous, sedative, corrosive, or something similar.
The other humans and I got out of the door and into an open area. I never actually saw these other humans — I just knew they were there.
The area reminded me a little bit of a 50s-era public pool in California. There was a bunch of tile and it had a kind of Mexican vibe to the decor and architecture. Somehow we knew a bomb was going to go off, and we went into some nearby buildings for protection. I went to try to wash off the slime, and had to go through three or four doors in the bathroom to get to an area with a sink, whereupon a found an old man in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, pulling up his long, black socks, and looking very puzzled at my appearance.
Then I woke up.