A morning chat.

Recurring Elephant Nightmare #3

As this is the third nightmare I've had (and remembered) about a rampaging elephant, I'm going to go ahead and call it a recurring theme.

In this dream, a mama elephant was stampeding through the neighborhood in Romeo where I grew up. She was looking for her lost babies, of which there were 4 or 5, all abnormally teeny for elephant babies. Mama was huge, probably an African Elephant due to her size, but even then on the large side. As in previous nightmares, I could feel the ground rumble at her approach before I heard her.

I was scrambling through the neighborhood looking for a subterranean nook in which to burrow so that I might avoid being flattened. I had determined that my parents' basement was not underground enough and was moving across Sisson in the direction of Croswell.

I ended up at my childhood friend Anna's house, trying to prepare their basement for the stampede with her mom. I kept changing my mind about where would be the safest place in their basement for me to be, and it always resulted in me running frantically around on the surface with my heart pounding.

Then, to my dismay, on one of these ventures to the surface I came across the wee elephant babes wandering around a field. I was suddenly conflicted, because I wanted to lead the babs back to their mama but there was no way I could do so without putting myself directly in the cross-hairs of the frantic behemoth, who would undoubtedly look upon me as a threat rather than an ally. To reunite the ele family would be to sacrifice myself under the mama's tremendous feet. And it would not necessarily save them, either, because as the rampage continued, police cars began showing up and I knew that even if I helped the babs back to their mama, she would not be allowed to live and would inevitably fall under the gunfire of an inept police force. She would die terrorized by humankind and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I tied the little ele babs loosely together with a long length of twine, like the way that preschool classes will walk through the hallway holding onto a rope to keep the kids all together. Holding one end of the twine, I started out towards North Salem Drive, the five little eles trailing behind me and trying to wander away. I woke up before Mama caught sight of me.

Shot

Another dream in which I am shot (or at least about to be). 

I had this dream shortly after the club shooting in Orlando in June 2016. I'm in a parking lot at night, having just left a venue. A dark-haired man shows up and I don't see the gun at first, but someone else does because they start screaming. I drop to the pavement between two cars in an attempt to hide. The gunman shoots two people, then somehow is right behind me. He drags me out into the middle of the parking lot so that everyone can see us. He has his arm around my throat and his gun is against my right eyebrow, the nose pointing down my face. I can hardly breathe, I'm so scared. I know there's no way that I'm going to get out of this alive so I'm just left in suspense, waiting for him to pull the trigger. I'm sobbing and begging and slobbering. I'm saying "Please, no, please," because I want him to turn the gun and shoot me in the temple, kill me quickly. I don't want him to shoot down my eyebrow because I'm afraid he's going to shoot my face off and I'll die slowly, drowning in my own blood. I don't remember what happened after that.

Nine White Horses

My friend Bel and I are sitting in the field behind my parents' house eating lunch. The weather is fair, there's no snow and it isn't cold but it isn't hot, either. Nine white horses trot out from the woods on either side of the field and group around us. Horses generally make me rather nervous and this is no exception, but I hold out the apple that I was in the middle of eating to the nearest horse and it eats it right out of my hand. Bel follows suit and we feed the remainder of our apples to the horses. The specificity of the dream - nine white horses - struck me as strange.

2 Bad Dreams

I.
I have orthopedic surgery on my leg and Dr. Wilson, who is an orthopedic specialist and also my former boss (important detail: at a veterinary hospital), is my surgeon and doctor.

Then we are trying to find our seats at the opera, which are supposed to be all 3 of us in a row but there's some confusion and then when it turns out to be a free-for-all, devolves into the standard Grace-can't-find-anywhere-to-sit-because-people-are-everywhere situation. The diva sings the "Queen of the Night" aria from Mozart's "The Magic Flute" because it's the only aria I know well enough to hear it in my sleep.

II.
I'm explaining to some neighbors of the Flowers' from church basic animal behavior and why they shouldn't think that the Flowers' dog is a bad dog because she acts aggressive towards them - fear and fight/flight response and such.

Then some asshole has rented an elephant and leads it up into the church parking lot where the Flowers children promptly do all of the things I told the neighbor to NOT do with the small dog and spook the elephant which sends it into a frenzied stampede that leaves a trail of blood and mangled bodies in its wake. The scariest part is right when I know that it's about to stampede but there is nothing I can do to stop it and the perpetrators disregarded my advice that would have prevented it. The elephant starts to buck like a horse, only every time it does so the ground quakes beneath my feet and because I know what's about to happen, my heart drops into my gut at the same time. The Flowers children are immediately crushed, whereas in a grainy, intellectual indie movie they would have been the lone survivors but this is my goddamn dream. Among the many dead is Mackenzie Ings, and when I find out I have a bunch of heart-wrenching flashbacks to my memories of her as a little girl.

The entire dream I am torn between being scared out of my mind of the stampeding elephant and feeling an intense sadness and compassion for it because it is a beautiful creature that was not only forced into servitude but provoked into this reaction by the ignorance of others, and yet I knew that when the dust settled, it would come out looking like the villain. There was no good way to express solidarity with the elephant while also saving my own ass from being trampled. (It was an unnaturally huge elephant, like a mammoth-sized elephant. Larger than an African bull elephant but I don't think it had tusks.)

Hello Again, Nightmares (Which doesn't make sense because I haven't actually published any of the previous nightmares so fyi, I have nightmares now.)

To be honest, a large part of the nightmare-y stuff in this dream was totally incoherent, so I'll stick to the part that I remember clearly.


I was being investigated for murder.


I murdered Olivia Stoneman (a random girl I knew in high school and whom I once helped to re-pierce her lip in the back row of geometry class our sophomore year*) in the downstairs ladies' restroom at the church in which I grew up and to which my parents still go. It was an accident; we were inexplicably having an all-out, throw-down fight inside one of the bathroom stalls and I either broke her neck or knocked her out and her head hit the safety bar too hard. Afterwards, I decided that the only option was to dismember her in the stall.


The other murder for which I was being investigated was that of Emmett Milbarge, assistant manager of the Burbank branch Buy More ...and fictional character played by Tony Hale on the TV show "Chuck." This murder I was not actually guilty of - I was just an accessory. I don't remember any details.


The investigator showed up late at night (and several hours after we were told to expect him). My parents were there and Grandma Lois and Grandpa Jim were asleep in the other room - not entirely sure why they were visiting, but seeing as it's a stressful situation within the dream my sub-conscious probably just threw in a couple of family members who generally make me feel anxious when they're around.


The investigator was this big guy with a very Karl-Marx-ian beard and hair, although his hair was brown and not white/grey.

The hair/beard combo was a bit Hagrid-y, but he was younger than Hagrid and thinner and had an American accent.



He wore a long coat, like the stereotypical film noir detective trench coat but it was military green instead of the classic tan and obviously well-worn. The picture on the left is basically spot-on, although he was not wearing a suit underneath as I recall. Maybe a sweater or something.


It was all surprisingly casual. He sat down on a green ottoman and I was on the couch (also green) with my dad, and he just kind if starting asking me questions about myself that I was able to genuinely think about and answer honestly.


We broached the subject of religion fairly early on and I (probably unnecessarily) expressed my distaste for Christianity, much to Grandma Lois' dismay (although it was less dismay and more confusion). I guess she had magically woken up and been sitting in the living room with us the whole time. Also, in retrospect, it's not a great idea to bad-mouth Christianity when you're suspected of murdering someone in a church.


The setting was relatively tense and uncomfortable due to the fact that I had to say a lot of things about my personal beliefs that I never intended for my rather traditional grandmother to hear and that my parents always knew that I held but preferred never to address and/or accept. (Not to mention that I was actually guilty of a murder, although I think if it was accidental it would be considered manslaughter.)


Eventually, however, the disapproving family members just kind of faded into the (green) wallpaper and I ended up basically having an impromptu therapy session with the investigator, who turned out to be an excellent listener. We really connected. Also we kind of forgot about the whole murder investigation, although I felt very strongly that he knew intuitively that I had done it, and had known from the moment we started talking. It had a strange sort of liberating effect on our conversation because I could tell him all of my most vulnerable and raw, intimate thoughts since he already knew the worst thing I'd ever done.

At the end of the interview he left. It was snowing outside. He didn't arrest me or take me with  him, but I knew that he would be back for me and we both knew that I wouldn't try to run or hide. I would
just be waiting with the same eerie sense of calm that I had felt ever since we'd started our conversation.

It was that sense of zen that you get after finding out you didn't get your dream job or you failed a test after days or weeks of anxiety over the results during which there was nothing you could do to change the outcome yet you agonized anyway - the negative outcome was welcome simply because it put an end to the nagging, pointless worry. Incarceration was something measurable and comprehensible and I felt that it would be far easier for me to handle than a great suffocating void of uncertainty.

It was all rather Dostoyevsky-esque.** The bushy haired/bearded investigator may even have been wearing a fur hat as he left.

There was a confusing and semi-gruesome jumble of dream-bits after that which started in a creepy bath-house and were absolutely unrelated to the mostly-coherent dream I recounted above, so I won't just spew out fragmented images and internal monologue and emotion willy-nilly because that would be dangerously Dostoyevsky-esque. 

So that is, essentially, the end.




*It was as horribly unsanitary as it sounds and was also one of the more impressive things that my geometry teacher failed to notice happening in his own classroom. It may also have been that he failed to care. I went to public school.

**I can say that with confidence because one of my proudest accomplishments in high school was legitimately reading Crime & Punishment cover-to-cover in AP Lit class. The same cannot be said for Wuthering Heights.

Wedding

I was a guest at my high school boyfriend's wedding to his current girlfriend, and having a pretty good time. There was dancing and an open bar and for some reason several hallmarks of traditional Jewish weddings even though I don't think either of them is Jewish. At the reception I went over to congratulate him and he asked me if I was jealous (which I'm assuming he would not do in real life because it's ridiculous and tactless) and I said no, I was jealous of the girl he dated after me because instead of me making him miserable, she was making him miserable, like she had replaced me. But I couldn't be jealous of someone who made him happy. It was a surprisingly sweet moment for my dream-self, especially given that my dream-self is usually quite selfish and illogical, not to mention my tendency to have dreams that easily lend themselves to psychoanalysis that would give Freud a boner. (Recall the dream where I lost a spelling bee because I couldn't spell the word "happy.")

There was a moment of lucidity in which I considered that that is how I would feel if Kevin married his current girlfriend - I've always thought she seems perfect for him even though I've never met her in person. Then, still in my moment of lucidity, I marveled at the fact that I had managed to somehow not make an ass of myself in this particular dream situation, when I so often make an ass of myself in situations with far less ass-making potential. Then I wondered if I had just jinxed myself, which I had, because when I was fully immersed in the dream again, I looked down at myself and realized that I was wearing a long white dress. To a wedding. My high school boyfriend's wedding. Dammit, Grace.



**Update: Apparently I was doing that occasional psychic thing because on like July 10th or 11th Kevin and his girlfriend announced their engagement on Facebook. I'M A WIZARRRRRRRRD**

6-21-15: Beyond the Sea

I'm riding a scooter to Grandma's house (I think) and I figure out that if I move my hips in a particular fashion, I can maintain a high speed without having to push myself forward with my foot. On my way there I end up scootering through a store. While I'm looking for an exit, I end up in a loading area or warehouse-y back room where people come to drop off their garbage and dead bodies, Salvation-Army-style. There's garbage and several bodies lying on the floor of the warehouse and employees are making their way around the drop-offs, going through the unwanted things and examining the dead bodies, often by autopsy. (Again, these are polo-shirt-wearing store employees in a K-mart-like store.)

I stop to talk to this employee about dropping off a dead body that I apparently need to get rid of and casually, inwardly observe that the bodies that I can see on the ground and the ones already in the light-blue shrouds that the employees are using to contain them are mostly of a cinnamon-brown skin tone, which seems strange to me. The employee that I'm talking to (a black man) suddenly accuses me of being racist, which is startling because I have said nothing out loud nor was I aware that I was giving any sort of indication of disapproval or condescension. Defensively, I tell him that I was trying to ask him about body drop-off because I have a dead body of my own to bring in, thank you very much. A dead white body, because white people are not too good for the dead body warehouse place.

Anyway, while I'm hanging around in the warehouse this lady employee is doing a seriously invasive autopsy on a dead body - she has removed all of the skin from the front of his body, even from his face. I can see his ribs and lungs and the muscles in his face and the way that his nose is white cartilage. I notice that his lungs are red. All of sudden, the dead man takes a breath and starts speaking - asking questions, like "Where am I? What's going on?"

The employee stares at him, shocked and obviously totally unequipped for the sudden revival of one

of the bodies mid-autopsy. I'm thinking fast - if by some slim chance this guy is going to stay alive and not die before our eyes, he will have to stay calm. But he obviously has no idea that he's skinned and lying on the floor of a dead body warehouse and there is no good way to tell him that without creating a panic - what can anyone possibly say to distract him from the current predicament long enough for someone to sedate him and call an ambulance? He reaches up and touches his nose, obviously aware that something is wrong. All I know is that the employee will tell him the truth and he'll freak out and die again and I can't let that happen. I run over to where the alive-again guy is lying on one of those light blue shrouds and the employee is scrambling around and I watch his lungs inflate and deflate faster as he begins to panic.

All of a sudden, somebody starts to sing.

Somewhere... beyond the sea,
somewhere waiting for me...

I realize that I'm the one who's singing. I must have just started singing the first song that I thought of, which for some reason was "Beyond the Sea."

The weird thing is, it works. The formerly-dead guy puts his arm back down at his side and looks up at me. My instinct is to put a hand on his shoulder or cheek or something, but he has no skin so I just kneel down next to him and maintain eye contact and keep singing. He knows the song, too; I can see his mouth moving and hear his voice - barely more than a whisper - singing along with me. He has blue eyes. I keep my eyes locked on his so that he can't look away and see what's going on around us. I imagine us slow-dancing in a gazebo on the beach, our arms around each other, both of us smiling serenely and gazing into each others' eyes. (This is a variant of something that I do at work when handling an unhappy critter - I imagine that my serenity is a pool of water and it's slowly rippling outwards and spreading to the kitty cat in my arms. Sometimes it seems like it works, but I might just be imagining it.)

As EMTs come scrambling in with a stretcher, the not-dead guy closes his eyes slowly and they take him away.

Since I woke up this morning, "Beyond the Sea" has been stuck in my head.