Saturday, April 23, 2005
I thought that after my weird baseball player dream I wouldn't have another one about dying, but indeed I did, last night. I wasn't pleased with its genre/theme switching, but as usual, I'll refrain from cutting it and report it as it happened:
I was walking along a desolate border with a ranger and we were charged to protect it from anyone crossing. At the border itself was a trench with a fence on our side extending a little higher. At one point I looked into the trench and saw a skeleton from the waist up and the spinal chord just laying out as if the bottom half of the body had been ripped off and I decided that I didn't want to do this job afterall. Just as I decided that, I looked up and saw a friend of mine (not from real life) was looking at me regretfully menacingly. I saw that he held an M-1 (bearing no resemblance to a real rifle by that name if one exists) rifle in his hand just like I did. He began to raise the rifle to point at me as if he was putting some duty above all else. As a last ditch effort to prevent the worst, I swung my rifle into position and pulled the trigger, and... click. How I could be out of ammunition while on patrol with nothing happening I could not fathom but it was the case. Sickeningly I looked up for the inevitable. The friend calmly pulled the trigger and hit me square in the chest and I was knocked to the ground and shocked. I began to try to reload my gun which loads like a revolver by putting the bullets into slots, except it was a straight clip rather than a round one. The friend started walking steadily closer, periodically releasing a round into my body. As one of them went through my cheek and shattered one of my teeth, I came to the realization that this was probably the end. I began to wonder what it was going to feel like to die and realize how powerless I was to stop it and wonder if there was an afterlife or if going to nothingness "felt" like something. The dream then took a genre shift turn which I didn't like and feel like disrupted this meaningful continuity. As the friend was standing a few feet from me preparing to fire a final round to end me, I raised my rifle, and blasted him in the forehead. When he fell, he landed near me with his face in the dirt. Somehow I gathered enough strength to not only stand, but walk over to him put the heel of my foot on the back of his neck, and use a knife to slit his throat open. I then collapsed to the ground and told the girl friend that had been with the traitor friend, and who had been watching the whole episode in horror, to call 911. Where the ranger was in this whole situation I do not know. At this point, it shifted genres again into kind of a black comedy. I was riding in the ambulance and had put myself into a kind of torpor where to the emergency personnel, it looked like I was not going to make it, but in reality I was turning off functions to divert energy to repair. I had to repeatedly come out of this state to insist that god dammit, I wasn't dying yet and not to pull the tubes. This persisted in the ambulance and in the hospital until the dream shifted scenes. The last scene before waking up was the hospital calling my mother to announce that I was in the emergency room of Hell's Bells Hospital and that I had sustained 18 shots from an M-1 rifle.