camwyn | Two dreams last night... (Reply)

The first dream I had last night was one of my long, plot-driven ones. I was with a group of people somewhere in Pennsylvania - at some kind of a very large old, rustic hotel / resort complex, I think - near a shopping town. The hotel got taken over by the kind of unnervingly almost-sane cult or anti-government leader who'd be played by Christopher Walken, and we got taken hostage. We were allowed to roam around the grounds, just not try to get out; if we did he'd . . . I don't remember what he'd do, but it had a lot of the other people crying and some of the others simply numb. I tried talking to a few of the other people, but they were mostly afraid. I wasn't sure how to go about escaping, because he had minions or something on guard. Not a whole lot of minions, but enough that whenever I looked towards the edge of the property, I could see them watching for us.

At some point while he was negotiating with police over the phone, I went poking around in the sprawling hotel and found a gun. Surprisingly shiny and new, this gun. All black. Made by Glock. I have never fired a gun in my life RL, but in my dream I had handled one exactly once before, so with this one I knew what to look for to make sure it was loaded and that the safety (which in this case was labeled 'management') was on. For some reason the gun also had a number of batteries necessary to fire it. Since I planned to conceal it in my purse, I knew that even leaving the 'management' switch on was a danger. Something would probably bang up against it and I'd get shot in the leg, which would not be so much of a problem as a chance for the hostage taker to find out and take the gun away. I took the batteries out, dropped them in my purse, and hid the gun in there as well.

Shortly afterwards I found out the hostage taker had a revolver of his own. Since he had no reason to dislike or suspect me, I went up to him and faked a case of Stockholm Syndrome, talking about how sensible he seemed. I asked if he would let me fire the gun once or twice, since I'd never shot one before, and he was about to let me shoot at an empty patch of land on the edge of the hotel's property when something called his attention away. I'd somehow acquired the sense of aim and kickback that I needed to fire my gun accurately, though.

After that it was a matter of moving through the hotel trying to find a place where neither one of the minions nor one of the hostages could see me sticking the batteries back into the gun. It was very important that no one see me do this, because the hostages would turn me in to save their own skin if they recognised what I was doing (this was a big if - some of them wouldn't have been able to tell). I went through a door to what was supposed to be the women's restroom, only to find that it was one of about eight doors to the vestibule to a single very large women's restroom, and had to wait for a girl who kept checking every single door to see if she could get into the bathroom alone to leave. Then I started fishing for the batteries - my purse is a mess even in my dreams - and had just started reloading them into the gun when I woke up.

Apparently my subconscious is well aware of my physical limitations. I have told my uncles several times that I do not think I can defend myself with karate; I'm an orange belt, for crying out loud. That's like being a cook who's allowed to make soup, but nothing more advanced than that. The goal of my having the gun was to find the hostage taker and shoot him without his minions noticing. Then we could leave. Shooting him in the presence of a minion wouldn't work. Also, in the dream I had decided to shoot him in the head, to make sure he was dead.

I'm a little surprised I knew what to do with the gun - checking for ammo, chambering a round, finding and turning off the safety, etc. I'm going to rank that up there with the dream in which I knew how to hold and smoke a cigarette, something else I've never done.

Can't remember much of dream #2. I was walking on an arched stone-and-concrete footbridge in a wooded park when I saw a cardinal (the bird, not the churchman) flying over the stream spanned by the bridge. The lesson of 'eater and eaten' being the same, of all creatures being one, came into mind from the first Mary Poppins book - and as I looked up and saw a cormorant flying overhead, I could hear Mary Poppins telling Jane and Michael about the cormorant and its wings (although in the dream some of the story she was telling was clearly more applicable to albatrosses). After she finished with the story she started singing, and I found out that I'd just stumbled into yet another Mary Poppins book, one where she said she'd 'leave when the song ends'. And she did, by spinning until she simply vanished from sight...

And that's why I put up with my subconscious; every once in a while, it turns out fun stuff.