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.