Midnight anxiety theater.

[rivka]

Incredibly vivid menacing dreams, all night.



Dream 1: I was by myself at a party attended by a bunch of alt.poly people. I looked up and saw Trinker, turned around and Ben was behind me, about 25% larger than his already intimidating real size and glowering at me.

In the dream, I was so shocked that I lost the power of speech. My head buzzed and a metallic taste flooded my mouth. I wanted to get up, but I was frozen in place. I don't know why my reaction in the dream was so crazily disproportionate.

I remember thinking, very clearly, that I wished kalmn would notice that Kat and Ben were there and come find me.

Dream 2: It was the middle of the night, and I was on a bus to Boston. The bus was going very fast, and every time we hit a bump the back wheels would lift from the ground. The woman in the seat in front of me was very very ill, physically and mentally. She was trying to engage everyone around her in conversation, and I desperately didn't want to get sucked into talking to a crazy person all the way to Boston. I didn't want to listen to her either, but that was a hopeless case. At one point she slumped over so far that she was half on top of me. She was nearly unconscious, so she was just a dead weight and very hard for me to move.

Dream 3: This was the longest and most involved dream. I was part of the leadership of some sort of underground, and threatened, organization. I learned that there was to be a council meeting the next day, which I was obligated to attend. But in the morning, my bodyguard didn't show up to escort me to the meeting - which made me very nervous. I was waiting for him in the empty park near my usual light rail stop, at the top of a flight of stone steps, and he never came.

I went with Alex and someone else - a man, not Michael - to a ordinary ranch-style house where the meeting was supposed to take place. It was deserted. We went down to the basement rec room where we usually met, still looking for my bodyguard although by that point I was pretty sure that he was dead.

The rec room was a mess, and empty. Alex looked through a door that had been left ajar at one end of the room, and sidled away from the door looking nervous.

"Is Mr. Frank in there?" I asked her.

"Yes."

"...Is he okay?" I had a very clear mental image of Frank - my bodyguard - lying on the floor with his brains blown out, so I was surprised when Alex said yes again. I moved forward to where I could see through the crack by the door hinges.

Frank was sitting down, hunched over, lighting a cigarette with shaking fingers. And just beyond him was a man with a gun. They'd kept him there to trap us. I hadn't thought of that possibility at all.

I visualized myself shouting to my companion to boost Alex up and push her out one of the narrow basement windows set high in the wall, shouting at Alex to run run run. But I also knew that there was no time. And even if he pushed her out through the window, what would happen to her then?

Mercifully, I woke up right after that.

Comments

[redbird]

Yes. When a child was found toddling around on a Queens street a year or two back, her picture was put on the news, and she was identified within hours by her Head Start teacher, and returned to her mother's family.