Don't mess with the Joker

WEIRD dream last night.

I was spending time with 18 (I think?) small children. I'm not really clear on their relationship to me. At one point, I'm pretty sure they were all my siblings somehow... but at different points of the dream, they were from an orphanage or something like that. Most of the dream was fairly innocuous... but towards the end, the Joker made an appearance. And he'd amassed some kind of child army he was training to do his bidding.

Anyway... at the end of the dream, I was in a barn with all of the kids and all of my coworkers from HRC. Then the Joker showed up and let us know he'd set up some kind of explosives, so the building was about to burn down. He left. We were all a little startled by how bluntly he gave us that news. But of course there was nothing else for it. We started evacuating the children and clearing out the furniture (??? in the dream this seemed like an important step).

I grabbed five little girls (including a baby---maybe one year old, but who could speak as well as an adult) and herded them outside, but I wasn't sure where to take them. I didn't want them to stay too near the barn, or they might still be hurt by the fire. But I didn't know where the Joker was. I didn't want to leave them somewhere he could snatch them. I was really stressed out, trying to find a place to take them, knowing there were still several other children I needed to go back for (although in real life, with that many other adults present, they would all have been taken care of). Finally I took them to another building across a field... some old abandoned pioneer house.

One of the little girls said, "But... you know the Joker never says what he really means, right?" All of a sudden I remembered how he worked, and I realized by evacuating the children from that building, we were playing right into his hands somehow. He was probably going to kidnap them or worse. I needed to go back and warn the others, but I didn't know what he was really planning and I wasn't sure how to protect the children. I was stressed out of my mind.

The baby discovered a trap door in the house and crawled down some stairs. When I followed her, I discovered Joker's child army doing drills in the basement.

Weird, yeah? A random dream, but I wonder a little bit... am I feeling helpless in some important aspect of my life or something?