Japanese Nightmare

I woke up from disturbing dreams at about 7AM. I decided I wanted to remember them, and have been trying to store them while lying in bed in a half-sleep. It's all a bit fuzzy... I'd returned to Japan to collect some award or a prize, but not connected to my being an ESL teacher. I think, in fact, that in portions of the dream I was the singer Randy Newman; I think I gave a brief concert. Afterwards, however, I ended up somehow lost, stuck at a garage in the city where cars were being taken apart and put back together - some odd quasi-industrial, quasi-scrapyard space where a young Japanese man was excited about showing me things. But he left me alone for a long time, and I wanted to get to the airport, so I wandered off. I ended up in a department store, but the Japanese there were regarding me with a great deal of suspicion and fear; they had me picked up and taken into custody by three black police officers (one woman and two men), who had a brief conversation with me in an office, established that I was allright - though the process was unsettling - and turned me loose. Somewhere during these phases of the dream, I heard about some foreigner being dismembered, but I paid no mind. I set out to find the train station, conscious that I hadn't picked up souvenirs for anyone yet. Strangers - including fellow foreigners - weren't particularly helpful when I asked where the train station was; one woman was flat-out hostile. A current co-worker of mine, Will, suddenly appeared in my dream, and gave me directions; however, instead of finding the train station, I found myself walking on the train tracks -- it was some sort of overhead light-rail, closer to our Skytrain than the Japanese trains. Soon a train was coming, and I was running on the tracks away from it; then I was leaping from rooftop to rooftop. Finally I ended up in some sort of weird gondola, not knowing where I was or what was happening, only able to see the blur of the landscape as I was carried into some other industrial scrapyard and deposited on the ground...

...where a large machine, like some huge piece of farming equipment, ran over me. My point of view shifted to a space in front of the vehicle, so I could see myself being run over. Workers ran over to me, but I was a mess of blood and guts (I could also see, oddly, that I had become a Japanese person, myself - as in, the pile of blood and guts on the ground was now Japanese). I was still alive, but the workers took out knives and began to cut me up. I could see my severed head, blubbering, dying. The dream ended with my point of view, perilously unattached, shimmering in the air above my body parts, watching a worker throw my severed fingers onto a pile of other dismembered fingers. The thumb, with the meat at the base, looked oddly like a chicken thigh.