Dream survival part 2

The second important moment came when we were fed that night.  Our captors all came to throw scraps down to where we were chained, making evil remarks and trying to frighten us by telling us what they planned to do to us tomorrow.  I paid attention, and threw some of the rotten food back at one of them.  The other two laughed at him as he swore at me and dumped the rest of the food over my head.  I threw more of it, at the same man.  One of them had to restrain him from killing me immediately.
It wasn't a victory like before, but the important thing was that I had changed the tone of the story further.  In lots of horror stories, the villain/s are uniformly evil.  They might have a few quirks or personality traits that make them more interesting, but on the whole they're implacable fonts of misery and suffering for the main characters.  By getting them to argue amongst themselves, however briefly, I'd divided them into individuals and diverted the flow of evil for a moment.  They were no longer undefeatable abstract incarnations of evil.
The next interesting thing came when my phone rang, waking me up.  Blearily, I took a message before flopping back into bed.  Still half-asleep, I could feel the dreamworld hovering at the edge of my senses.  I knew I could get up now or allow myself to drift back into the pseudo-horror story.  I didn't feel any temptation to return, but I also realized that I hadn't saved Raven-hair yet.  The torture house closed in around me again.
I found the last focal point of the horror story at the end.  The three made it known that they were going to kill us tonight.  There would be an epilogue, I realized.  The police would arrive early in the morning, too late to save anyone and too late to arrest our killers.  Tragically, they would miss us by only a few hours.  Events had already been set in motion independently of our story thread, and they were already on the killers' trail.  I had to either delay the captors or get the police to come sooner.  The solution came in the form of an old cigarette lighter.  I set fire to the peeling wall paper and burned the house down.
On the surface it wasn't the smartest plan, considering that Raven-hair and I were still chained to the floor.  But the important thing was that the fire both distracted the killers and drew the attention of the police early.  It was the final lynch-pin that collapsed the horror theme.  The killers wouldn't escape.  Evil wouldn't triumph, or even disappear ominously, only to inevitably return later.  And if Evil couldn't win, then the main characters couldn't die.  We were pulled from the burning wreckage by the police, scorched and coughing, but still alive.  Blankets and coffee were provided as we somberly watched our tormentors handcuffed and led away.
I did say it was a strange dream.  Still, very interesting to someone like me who's obsessed with dreams.