Dream: wherein the girls are taken...

I developed a new board game and everyone on the island loved playing. There is laughter on the island in the common areas. People emerge from their sleeping areas with a smirk of joy lingering on their lips. We are living in happiness. We know bliss. But under this bliss we seemed to overlooked a sense of foreboding.
Everything seemed to be going quite well until someone changed all the rules. The rule change was gradual and very subtle. You know the kind of changes where you know something is different by yet you can't quite put your finger on it. The kind of thing where your head cocks to one side so that you can look at it in a different light.

So the rules changed but no one seemed to acknowledge any change. Then one day as the game was in high swing a young girl just vanished. She was there one moment and the next...gone.

I asked where she has been taken.

"Where 'who' was taken?"

"The girl. The girl who was sitting here playing the game with me."

"You have been sitting there all by yourself for the whole day. There was never a young girl next to you."

"What? Yes. Yes, there was. Where did she go?"

"I'm sorry, ma'am. If you are going to scream and yell like that you will have to be sedated in your sleeping cove."

In order to save myself the sedate shakes, I move away from the common areas. As I wander back to my room, I notice there are no young girls in the common areas. They are all gone. Well, not all gone. But not here. Not in this space any more.
The space is austere and cold and there is no laughter. Feels like there never was any laughter. Or perhaps like there was laughter, bubbling up and filling the whole space. But now it is all gone and scrubbed away as if someone wanted to sanitize the area of its effects.
Then I realize that it has not that things have been changing. Instead all of the young girls have been removed from the common areas, from the space where people are. The lack of their presence, of their laughter, of their energy has had the effect of a rule change. Their absence has been a barrage of totalitarian rules. Everyone is somber and serious. The space is heavy and viral.
When I ask where are the young girls are, I am looked at as if I am speaking gibberish, as if I have said something a lunatic would have said. Then it hits me. I have understood the problem. But in my understanding I am alone. There is a division between those who have taken the girls and hide the fact from the rest of us and the rest of us who merely cock our heads in order to figure out what is it that is different. I am dangerous in my loneliness. It will not be long before I too vanish.