Thursday, March 12, 2015

A DREAM

It was one of those dreams that, when you wake up from them, it takes you a while to recover and realize that it was just a dream.  That vivid, that compelling.

It was set in a small town that seemed to be in Northern California.  Green hillsides, rocky coast line.  For unknown reasons, I teamed up with two women (whom I didn't know) to murder a man (whom I also didn't know), dismember his dead body and stash it in black plastic trash bags.  We hid them on a high shelf in the house where we were living, but after a day or so I began to worry about the smell.  We put our heads together in the attempt to come to a decision as to where to find a permanent hiding place, but found objections to all our plans.

In the end it was I, I think, who decided that we must go to the police and confess what we had done. The three of us were greeted with strange stares from uniformed policemen as we arrived, and asked to speak to a senior officer.  I was the spokesperson.  We sat at a table with a very calm woman officer, tho listened to our story without surprise.  In fact, she seemed quite undisturbed by the whole thing.  At the end, though, it now dawned on me that I would likely have to spend many years in jail.  At which point I also realized in the dream that I was much younger than I actually am, and that I had a little daughter whom I would only be able to see as a prison visitor.  I worked out that if I got twenty years I would be fifty-nine by the time I was released...

As I say, it was one of those dreams...  On waking, I was terrified that I'd be going to jail; it took me several agonized moments before I recovered consciousness enough to realize it had been a dream.  I guess I've been watching too much television: thinking back on it, my mind seemed to have conflated Broadchurch with The Jinx.  They say that every person in your dream is a projection of yourself.  Why should I want to murder me?  And who were my collaborators?  It's a mystery.

No comments: