A Dream

I hope everyone is having a great weekend -- or if you're checking this on Monday (or later), I hope you had a fantastic weekend. I'm having fun and I'll write more about that later, but I wanted to pass along a dream I had last night (actually, around 5 AM this morning, because I looked at the clock after I woke up from it).

Sleeping has become more of a dicey proposition as the tumor inside me shifts occasionally and it becomes more difficult to find a comfortable position in which to lie down. I would imagine that anyone who has ever been pregnant is pretty well familiar with what I'm talking about. A couple nights ago, I slept on the recliner downstairs, but last night, I spent most of the night in my own bed. Sleep was intermittent but I managed to grab stretches of 30 minutes here, 60 minutes there.

Meanwhile, I had a whole bunch of weird dreams all night, but I only vividly remember one of them, and as I've gone over it in my head this morning, I realized the symbolism is pretty unreal. I want to share it with you so the armchair psychologists out there can go wild, and you can maybe get a different perspective into my mindset. After I thought more about the dream, I realized that it's probably not incredibly difficult to interpret, but you can take from it what you will.

Here's how I remember my dream (and yes, this is a real dream, it's not an exercise in creative writing):

It was night, and I was swimming in a lake or a stream of some kind. I was with some of my oldest and dearest friends, including one friend that I've been in contact with much more in recent months than in the last few years. The water itself was quite murky, wasn't particularly pleasant, and there was a sense that we shouldn't be there -- that maybe we were doing something wrong.

Then some flashlights appeared in the distance, and the aforementioned old friend yelled "Get out of here now! Just go, go, run, run!" We all scattered and started running in different directions as the lights approached. I stumbled a bit, climbed over some rocks, and ultimately was captured by some authority figure while the rest of my friends got away.

I was taken to a temporary trailer-type of building, like one you'd see on a construction site. Inside, a big group of punk-type kids -- mostly teenagers, from what I can remember, but I do know that there was not any one individual that was overly imposing -- told me that I had been trespassing in their waters and I was in trouble. I asked what the specific charge was, and what exactly it was that I did wrong, but they did not tell me. They only taunted me, and I felt pretty helpless because there were so many of them there.

"I'm going to call my lawyer and sue you guys for holding me against my will," I threatened them, but they only laughed as if it was an idle threat, and told me that they'd heard it all before. The impression I got was that I was in their territory and because of this, they felt like they could keep me in captivity as long as they wanted without giving me any specific reason as to why.

My feeling of helplessness grew, and I started getting angrier and angrier about being held against my will. Meanwhile, although my captors never touched me or harmed me physically, they continued to somewhat taunt me and made sure to reinforce the fact that I was at their mercy.

And then I felt some sort of presence outside the trailer -- maybe a SWAT team, or a trained rescue squad -- and a couple of grenades blew open the trailer doors. There was chaos, everyone scattered, and I took the opportunity to run.

I ran away from the trailer, down some sort of path, and a few of the punks chased me. But now, I was away from their turf, there were far fewer of them, and when they caught up to me, it became apparent how much bigger I was than they were.

And at that point, I unleashed serious violence. I'm not a violent person by nature -- I've never been in a fistfight in my life -- and like I said, these punks had never physically touched me, much less harmed me. But my reaction to them was about one level short of insanity. I literally beat the crap out of all of them.

I vividly remember having one punk pinned on the ground, already clearly beaten, and still pounding his head over and over into the concrete. As for a couple other punks that were down and out of the fight, I still didn't leave good enough alone -- I kicked them around, spewing profanity, leaving them just short of death. It was like something out of a mob movie.

I don't think I killed any of them, but I remember leaving them so thoroughly physically beaten that there was no question of them ever messing with me again. And I remember feeling a bit scared and overwhelmed by my reaction to the whole thing -- so violent and so completely out of line with their transgressions against me. The punishment I meted out to them far exceeded what they did to me, but all I could think was "This is what happens when you screw with me." There was almost something cathartic to me absolutely physically abusing these people, but it was a bit unnerving at the same time.

And then I woke up.

At the time, I thought, "Well, that was a weird dream." When I finally dragged out of bed at 9 AM this morning after grabbing more snatches of sleep here and there, this was the only dream out of all of them that I remembered clearly. It wasn't until later in the morning, when I went back over it in my head, that the symbolism of everything in there crystallized in my mind, and I realized that it wasn't a weird dream at all.

Like I said, I don't think it's too hard to interpret, but maybe you have your own thoughts, and feel free to comment as you see fit. And now you know a little bit more about how my mind is operating in this entire situation.

There's a battle coming, and somewhere, those punk kids have no idea what happens when you screw with me.

With much love,
Dino