Austin, MN

That's where I am now...

Dreams are odd things, y'know? I had two of them the other night & they've been sticking with me ever since, so I think I should write about them... to get them to stop nagging me, if nothing else.

Mind you, I can't remember everything clearly, dreams are like that. What was rich in detail whilst I dreamt it has now faded to merely the major events. What made perfect sense in the dreamscape has lost some of the details that made it make sense & may now seem rather... well, nonsensical.

But anyway, I'll try my best to be a faithful descriptor, & let the rest be what it can.

In the first dream I had been given a task by a rather large man. He had a beer gut, & everything that stereotypically goes with it. He was nasty, smelly, and generally gives off that not-a-nice-person vibe. The task he had given me was to capture a smallish snake that was roaming free & place it into a cage he provided. Now, when I say smallish, I mean it was about the size of my forearm, and proportionately slender.

Easy, yeah?

The barest touch of this snake's fangs was death.

Did I mention that it's fangs were always out, and they were very, very long?

Right.

So I'm trying to catch this thing without actually touching it, because touching it means getting bit & I seem to have forgotten that I was dreaming (which was odd too, but whatever). One of my guyfriends was in the room trying to help--but I can't quite remember which one... The aggravating thing was that every time I almost had it caught, something would happen & it would get loose again. The really aggravating thing was that it was always the beer-gut guy's fault. I would get it caught under a bowl, only to have that bowl overturned when beer-gut bumped into the table it was on. I had it trapped in the cage & the cage door was blockaded shut by some heavy books; beergut bumped the books over. (I was trying to figure out how to shut the cage without getting bit, as the snake seemed intent on biting whatever part of the cage my fingers went near--did I mention how huge those fangs were?) You get the idea. Oddly enough, beergut only ever was in the room when the snake was almost captured.

Then I was bit.

Have you ever died in a dream before? Yeah, me either. When I was little, if I didn't like the dream I was having, I put myself in mortal danger (jump off a cliff, or a balcony, throw myself into a line of gunfire, etc.) to wake myself up, and it worked every time. A bit more extreme than pinching myself, but hey, it worked. I heard later that if you die in a dream, you die while your sleeping, because the mind is tricked into believing it's dead so it really dies... but I don't really think that's scientifically testable... but I digress.

So I'm bit, and my guyfriend thinks I'm dying, & beergut kicks us out of his place because he doesn't want us dying at his place, & I think we were being chased by something... But anyway, we wound up on a train. As we were getting to the train I was in more & more pain, I ws getting colder around the edges, and it was getting harder & harder to move. But there came a point when all of that started going away & I knew I wasn't dying anymore. Personally, I think I got distracted by the friends we found on the train & forgot I was supposed to be dying, so I stopped...

Then I looked out the window of the train & saw the snake, flying in the distance. It had grown to a huge size & was flying by magic, like a Chinese dragon. And I knew (somehow, like it happens in dreams), that beergut hadn't been the one who needed the snake captured--and killed--it was everyone. and I still needed to capture it, whether beergut provided the cage or no, otherwise it would kill everyone.

Then came the next one...

It was weird, because I was dreaming a parable... It took place at a farmhouse, in winter (there was snow on the ground), but the story I was being told was about something that had happened in the fall. I had wandered away from the farmhouse and found this strange little puppet theatre where all the puppets were brownies. But when they told be the story I saw the story, not the brownies (& I mean the food kind, not the fey).

The story they told was about a group of four friends who had been staying at the farmhouse in the fall. All was sunshine and happiness until the insurance salesman came. He was evil, and wanted to do something terrible, but knew that before he would be able to he must first divide the four friends. So he gave them each a shirt, saying that if they wanted his insurance all they had to do was wear the shirt he gave them. To three he gave t-shirts, each was a different color & each had a different style of neck. To the fourth he tried to give a t-shirt, but they refused. It was getting cold outside, and a sweater was really more sensible. This did not please the salesman, but he could not persuade the fourth, so in a rage, he gave it up. Then he left, to watch what happened.

At first, all was well. Then the cruel nature of the three was exposed; the three with the t-shirts began tormenting the one with the sweater. Sweater was still trying to be friendly, as before, but the three would have none of it. Little things, at first, name-calling & the like. Then it escalated, until the salesman had enough power that he came when sweater was trying to run away from the three into the house--when sweater reached the door, the one was devoured.

The three that remained were shocked, but not enough to leave the house. They remained outside, not daring to enter, but not wishing to leave, sniping at each other now, comparing colors & styles, never acknowledging their true enemy.

After the story, I pondered over the meaning while thoughtfully biting the head off of one of the brownie puppets.

Then I realized that my family (my dream family) were the heirs of this parable--this farmhouse we camped outside at this very moment was the one from the story, the insurance salesman in the story was the same monster that created such fear & hatred in my people! In a righteous anger, knowing the truth of the situation, I ran back to the farmhouse and the people who huddled around fires outside of it. I tried to convince them of the sanity of abondoning their code of t-shirts to put on some sweaters, then--I could feel myself freezing like I hadn't been able to before the parable--in desperation to be warm, I tried to get into the farmhouse.

I stood on the doorstep, and opened the door. A fierce roaring filled my ears, panic and fear swirled in my mind, I was about to die, then--

I woke up.

There, maybe now the itch to write this will leave me alone. I make no attempt to read these dreams, merely taking them for the usual random attempts of my subconscious to amuse itself while not otherwise occupied. But they might make for entertaining stories, if you're in the mood.