Dream survival

I had an interesting dream.  Not last night, but the night before.  Last night I didn't sleep, which accounts in part for my rambling narrative.
It's all become a vague haze of thoughts and impressions now, but I remember the important parts.  I found myself in a world with a psychological horror/thriller theme.  A woman and myself were being held captive in a strange old house by three psychotic people.  There was all kinds of various psychological torture going on as they toyed with us.  We came damn close to escaping more than once, only to find it was all just a set-up by our captors so they could cruelly crush our hopes repeatedly.
I never learned the woman's name; all I really remember is that she had very black hair.  There came a point when she finally just gave up on escaping entirely.  It was then that I started worrying.  I'm not the biggest expert on horror movies, but I've seen enough to know that giving up all hope is a good way to mark yourself as the next one to be picked off.
This was the first point where the dream started getting interesting.  You see, I've had those moments before in dreams where my subconscious mind puts two and two together and realizes what's going on.  Zombies?  Quick, what characters are left at the end of zombie movies?  Vampires?  What kind?  Various movies and books spring to mind, and how the main character managed to survive (if they did).  It's just how my subconscious works, all full of plots and stories.
I immediately realized that even if I did find a way to live through the story, raven-hair girl wasn't going to make it.  That was a result that was unacceptable to me, so I did something I haven't tried before in a dream: I tried to change the story.  Instead of taking the situation as it came and trying to make the most of it, I started trying to change the rules.
Even after that revolutionary decision, I still somehow understood that this was a story, and I had to keep in mind how stories worked.  It wouldn't be possible to escape or fight our captors directly, we'd already been trying and failing at that for a while.  In horror stories, no matter how completely the main character seems to escape or win, it inevitably turns out to be pointless.  What I had to look for were the focal points of the plot that defined it as a horror story.  In order for both of us to survive, I had to disrupt those moments so that the theme shifted to a theme where more than one person barely escapes with his life.Most of this wasn't a conscious thought process.  These are conclusions that I came to after thinking back on the dream.
The first crucial moment came in the form of one of their psychological torture games.  Raven-hair and I were chained to the floor, each on one side of a room.  They made sure the chains were just long enough that we could almost touch fingers across the room if we stretched.  I was wearing a shirt with long sleeves, and even though I cried and cursed at them that I couldn't reach Raven-hair, I didn't stretch as far as I could have.  My arms were still slightly bent inside my sleeves.  As soon as they left, I was able to reach several inches further than they had intended.  We were able to touch and even hold hands in spite of the chains.
However we were supposed to have been tortured, it failed.  In most horror stories escape is the only real victory that counts, which only makes it that much crueler when it's snatched away.  By achieving this small victory against our captors, we'd already shifted the tone of our story a step away from the horror genre.

To be continued