I had a friend who remembered every dream every night, and recounted them vividly with pages of copy. I think this friend was on heavy doses of antidepressants, ADD, and acne medication, (and was fourteen), so it makes some sense that every night was a trip to him. Me, never. My dreaming was reserved for just before sleep, where I directed great scenes independent of my subconscious: movies that eased me and kept nightmares away.
But this morning I awoke from a nightmare. I will recount it here because it seems decipherable amid this holiday season.
+ I'm in a room. I am me. I am an adult. A man is there. He has a gun. He plans to shoot me. This I know. I feel resigned to it. I must know this is a dream, for I say to him, "I don't know if I'm coming back or not. That makes this tough." I'm stalling the execution because that's what you do in dreams.
The room is a room in my childhood house. I am still an adult. The man is resigned to an outcome. I hear voices in the house. These I think might be the family who live in my childhood house presently, as in, 2012. I have met them recently. I feel scared now. I also feel scared for my siblings, who would have been the voices in the house were this 1987 rather than 2012; though they are grown people who can take care of themselves, (and who can't possibly be here), I didn't always feel this way -- in fact I rarely felt that way when I lived in the house where this dream takes place -- no, back then I thought of myself as a rather poor defense for them, for reasons better left unwritten.
At the last moment I run from the room, and I look through the house for others; I notice I'm barefoot, and there is snow outside the window. And here I wake up.
+ I wake up in my house now. I am alone which is rare at this hour in this place, the comfort one feels from sharing a bed is absent, (and has me feeling out of place). It is the holiday season. My family are on my mind. Many of my cousins have or are soon having children, and because it is the holidays, and I see them on Facebook, I have been thinking of them. And of course my own siblings, who I think of all the time; like many people, retrospection is the theme of this holiday.
And of the dream I think the strangest thing: I wasn't looking for people room to room, I think I was looking for a pistol. A pistol. Sure the bare feet, the snow, this could have kept me from an escape, but maybe.. well..
+ Guns feel large right now by the discussion continuing on television, though they weren't gratuitously present in my childhood. When one parses through some of the many thoughts one has, and writes of them, it reads more obsessive than what it is, for instance the guns, and all memory of them, that I wrote about last year. But then one has this dream extract them similarly.
+ In discussing guns a person said to me, "I don't feel the need to carry a gun.". My response was, "Neither do I." Because I don't carry a gun. When I was in East Hartford a few weeks ago, working at night, in a not very nice neighborhood, just me and the young kid who I work with, I didn't feel naked nor incapable of defending myself because I didn't have a gun with me. In Connecticut, twice in the last few weeks strangers approached me on the street offering to sell me jewelry, I didn't know in the moments jewelry is what they were reaching in their jackets for.
There are more pawn shops in Meriden, CT than gas stations; I went in one out of curiosity -- it was full of the power tools of trade workers, who one imagines traded their tools incrementally for cocaine. What will they do now that they have no more tools to pawn off? Well, naturally, steal someone else's tools. And here I am down the block with a truck and trailer full of tools. A man who has traded in his identity for drugs -- he doesn't care about your humanity. He won't think in the way of rights.
Some telecom companies build on the tops of mountains, and some build on old factories in shit parts of towns -- some companies sell plans for iPhones, some sell pay-to-call throwaway phones. You have some idea of where you'll work by whether it is for Verizon or Ghetto PCS. I have seen all parts of Lynn, Worcester, Providence, Fall River, Hartford, Syracuse, Utica, and, my favorite, Brockton. I've been in all these places, at all hours, and never felt afraid.
That Prince of Denmark said he could be bound in a nutshell and called the king of infinite space were it not for bad dreams. There's twenty meanings for that line; one for me: I feel okay to get by in a strange place, but I'll worry about my people at home when I'm not there. There is a beautiful ease to life lived alone, to life unanchored by the care and worry one has for other people.
+ I'd trade my right to firearms if every victim of every Dateline and 48 Hours Hard Evidence had been carrying a pistol the night some monster put his hands on her.
+ The police carry firearms to protect themselves, not you.
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