Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Odd, long, rather personal dream: disaster in progress

I do not know if this is a particularly meaningful or interesting dream, but I remember a much longer chunk than I usually do, so I'm relaying it.

I was with someone else, who, at different points in the dream may have been a friend of mine, but towards the end, definitely became my father.

We were in a strange town. Someone else was with us, but I forget who. We had been drinking, but ran out of supplies, and came to a grocery store, to buy orange juice and other necessities. The person who was either my friend or father started to flirt with a girl who worked at the store. They began to make out, at the back of the store. I tried to get them apart so we could pay for our groceries and leave, but instead, they actually lay down on the floor, took off their clothes, and proceeded to have sex. Myself and the other person with us tried to run interference, standing between where they were and the customers in the grocery store, hoping no one would notice. I vividly remember as one woman asked me a question ("where do I find the lemonade," or something) and then saw over my shoulder what was happening, her face changing, me still trying to block her view; but she got a good eyeful, then ran to the front of the store to complain.

There was an eruption of activity and store clerks came rushing to the back to stop what was happening and fire the girl who worked there. I shied away from the scene and went to pay for my groceries. The checkout stand was, somehow, outdoors on a film shoot. As I was standing in line to pay, a black actor that I've actually seen in some movies - he might have been one of the assassins in Scanners - was pretending, as part of his role, to stomp a snake to death, after which he was fighting with someone or such. As he moved to another part of the set - basically a big dirty field - I looked to see that no animals were harmed, and was delighted to see this large black snake, a beautiful animal, crawling off on the ground. There was a hole in the ground - almost a tunnel - and it crawled into it and away.

I went to pay for my groceries, putting the basket on the checkout, and was just taking a jug of milk out, when there was suddenly a rumbling and everyone stopped and looked around. We were on the side of a mountain, and very conscious that an earthquake could lead to an avalanche. I began to run from some perceived danger, found myself - still clutching the milk - on a mountain road, and saw that there was a gigantic tree rolling towards me. I leapt into the forest and was running like hell, cradling the milk. The log came crashing into the forest, crushing smaller trees as it came, and rolled closer and closer, huge - then suddenly hit something, bounced, went end-over-end, and came down vertical in front of me.

I remember thinking, as I walked down the mountain, that it was good that I had the milk with me, in case I got lost. I do not, for the record, actually drink milk - the taste of it sickens me.

Somehow after that we got back to the room where my mother and another relative, I think, were staying (there was some weirdness about a TV and a sign in the foyer, and some complication about opening the door, but I don't remember these details so well). I told my mother and the relative what had happened, and that I wanted to play a recording of a song I wrote about the experience, while it was happening. (Apparently I'd had a tape recorder with me and was singing throughout the earthquake). My father - he was now definitely my father - expressed skepticism about my doing this, and I threatened to tell my mother how the story really began, if he didn't let me continue. (For the record, to my knowledge, my father was entirely faithful to my mother for the nearly-52 years of their marriage, right up until his death). He backed off and I played the tape, but towards the end the sound of me singing was overwhelmed with noise and the sound of panicked people screaming and such - the sound of the disaster in progress - and I squatted closer to the tape recorder so I could decipher my words over the screams and rumbles. 

I suddenly looked at the milk jug and felt guilty - we were drinking stolen milk! My father reassured me: don't worry, in this case, they'd understand. If it was a large supply of some massively popular drug, maybe not. "Yeah, like Oxycontin," I said. (I have not actually done Oxycontin). 

He then told me he wanted to show me something. He lifted a flap on some sort of stage or platform, and underneath were several consumer products, unopened, and a note he wrote saying something about not buying things from certain countries, because they contained contaminated metals. There was a list of countries, and some sort of big toy hockey game or such that was among the taboo items, and I guffawed inwardly that my father subscribed to such an absurd conspiracy theory - it was apparently a really foolish conspiracy theory of the sort that flourishes among the deeply uneducated, ill-informed, and disenfranchised, with a smidgen of racism in it, to boot. I felt contempt, but said nothing.

Oddly, on waking, the first thing I remembered about the dream was that my father had been in it; I generally like his visits in my dreams. This is a rather unflattering one, though. 

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