i had this freaky bad dream this morning. i'm puttin it here, cuz it goes here.
(maybe y'all should consider that a warning about potentially disturbing content. in fact, i'm not gonna put this sucquer up on facebook. i have a friend there, les, who is sooo sweet and loving and.. woundable. she was crazy about the beezle, and the beezle was crazy about her. les is the only kath-person outside my family that the beezle ever painted a painting for. she's the same friend that reap tagged in the p.s. of his original 'in memoriam' beezle announcement on facebook. for those of you not on FB, it read:
"P.S. Les - You are absolutely forbidden to freak out / lose it / otherwise spin out over this. We've had a terrible loss, but we're going to be OK. I promise."
i'm worried about les right now. so yeah, fucque facebook.)
a lil set-up. i've talked about my dream life before. i've had nightmares all my damn life. i even remember my first godzilla-with-radar-only-for-my-wee-ass dream when i was circa four years old. my dad was like that. attila is like that. my ma always called it our "celtic imagination." usually, i either have those monsterry, unreal dreams, when it really is all about some core lil me, by myself, dealin with my own, er, monsters... OR i have the hi-def, ultra reality type, when yer in a convoy followin a beluvved's car on the interstate and their car suddenly spins outta control and goes off the side of an overpass. or when yer spawn are babes, a home invader comes in, holds a gun to yer head and pulls the trigger. the dreams that just shake you to yer core when you wake up.
these nightmares have always just been par for the course with me. they've also always been easily outnumbered by the happy, goofy, surreal, riding pink dolphins nekkid with joe perry kinda dreams. my dream brain will make whatever movies it will, all along the range. and my dream brain works by no rules. it'll send in substitute character players mid-game. it'll put me inside the movie one minute and sittin in the theater watching the move the next, that kinda crap.
the weird thing... i haven't had a nightmare since the beezle left this planet. at least not one i actually remembered, which means not one. why now? i dunno. her bday's comin up. maybe that's lightin a few fuses down in the headpipes somewhere.
yeahyeah. the dream:
i find myself plopped into a weird lil sadistic alien overlord scenario, me and maybe fifty other humans, all ages, all types. we're all kept like lil lab rats on a movie set that looks like a parcel of reality. a compound somewhere in the woods. there's a main building for everybody, all made of glass walls and ceilings, presumably for better overlord viewing. several outer buildings. a landscape with paths and trees and densely wooded outer edges, a huge fence all around. a center square of grass where everyone hangs out. the whole thing... let's call it, i dunno, five acres? i aint good with numbers, but enough space to contain all of the above yet still be kinda tight, controlled and alien lab-ratty.
i find out on my arrival that there's a game played by force everyday. there are three buttons on a post in the middle of the square, lookin like a lil doorbell in triplicate. each day, the person with the next number at the meat counter has to hit one of em. the person is announced over an evil, alien loudspeaker in the same kinda tone as "clean up on aisle 5." each button means someone's gonna die. if a button aint chosen or the game aint played, everybody's gonna die, in very bad ways.
the top button is a flood, i dunno, more like a mini-surge wave that's gonna rip through and take out a number of people, probably. the second is the evil alien smackdown button. when it's hit, this giant gleaming buick-sized hockey puck o' doom appears in the sky and starts goin after people with evil alien lasers. the third button is the let-me-do-it-for-you-overlords button. whoever picks that button, that person gets this weird kill bracelet, one that looks a lil like the one in
cowboys vs. aliens, except more streamlined and fashionable for the killer on the go. once the kill bracelet magically appears on the wrist of the seeker, everyone's got a few seconds of lead time to scatter and hide.
look, i'm just the messenger. i can't control what my dream brain does, which means no one can sue my dream brain for copyright infringement on any movie riffin, either.
the thing is, SOMEbody's gonna die, either way, before the game ends for the day, and the game ends for the day when somebody dies. whichever person has the turn for the day, he or she has to hit one of the buttons. if you hit button #1, a number of people are gonna die at once, but in a bizarre twist, according to twisty dream rules, it has more the feel of a natural disaster, just a fluky twist of fate, as opposed to an actual agent or an actual cause-and-effect. if you hit button #2, the hockey puck with lasers is gonna take out somebody, and it's gonna be bloody. but it's just gonna be one person, one random person. if you choose button #3, well, somebody in the room next to you must've realllllly pissed you off with his snorin the night before. or it could also mean that you feel like a sheriff. maybe having the power to choose which person dies yer own self could be seen as a, oh hey, let's make the most of it and take out the guy over there who just hit his kid. right?
obviously, i am explaining stuff that my dream-me just kinda knew in a flash upon entering the dream. y'all know how it goes. i'm also by reflex habit interpreting some of it as i go along. my awake brain always takes a few educated guesses on the dream scene (the glass walls and easier viewing, for example.) but the core script of the dream movie is just as i'm reporting it. i'm not makin up the dream to make a point or to start a killswitch ethical debate or anything. i recall every tiny second of it vividly.
in the dream, i went through a few of the game cycles, with that lil thing of mine thrown in for weird measure, different characters being inserted as replacements here and there, outta nowhere. i didn't get called, but i saw buttons 2 and 3 get pressed. (funny how no one picked button #1... nobody wants a fucquin flood.) on the first 'day', some businessman type who looked like brian dennehy pressed 2. in a matter of seconds, a whirling, zippy killer puck starts flyin around, people are trying to hide, run, scramble. nobody's screaming like in the movies, though. before too long, some poor somebody gets sliced apart. there are just a few brief interlude type scenes of everyone talkin that night, a flash here, a flash there, my friend susan sewing a jacket, sayin sumthin like, "what are ya gonna do?"
the second 'day', a few new cast members appear, my second boyfriend, my neighbor in carolina.. somebody who looks like andrew dice clay hits 2 again. in the scattering chaos, i remember someone had said something about the glass house being safe (kath=sap), so i haul it in there, and the damn puck comes right in after my ass, tearin thru glass, the shards falling in sheets. i get it bad. i'm lyin on my back, people huddlin around me tryin to say nice crap. i look down at my leg, and half of it lengthwise is gone, sliced away. i mean, i don't feel any pain or anything. i just know i'm the one that's gonna die for that day.
usually, when i'm about to die in a dream, i wake up right before i die. i wake up rigggght before i'm about to hit the ground. this time, though, i just got reset in the dream, as though i were part of a damn video game. i even had a momentary semi-lucid response to it: "oh yer KIDDIN me. i'm back inside this fucquery again? where'd the rest of my leg come from, dammit?"
third "day"... add some new people. my tenth grade chemistry teacher. bill murray. the beezle, lookin around age 9. cue goofy brain-logic, and i'm peeved at the beez. "just what THE hell are you doin here, bubba? aren't you sposed to be in school or something?" she's all goofy kid grinny, like she always was then. then suddenly, my dream movie skips like a record, i must've missed a beat, a moment of running time or something. suddenly, i see the kill bracelet appear on the beezle's wrist. she's smilin away. everybody starts scattering. in those two seconds when my freaked brain is goin... wait... i didn't hear her name called on the loudspeaker... i didn't even see her walk up to push a button or which one she pushed... when everyone else is runnin away for their lead time... then the realization hits me.
holy shit, and i start runnin towards her. she's already lyin flat on the field.
that woke me up.
ya knoww... i know there's a part of me that wants to paint her as some kinda cinematic hero, that wants to see her as calmly, even happily, willing to take herself out instead of taking anyone else out. this is not real reality, of course, when it comes to her suicide. (i *do* see her as noble and heroic, just not in that way, the ultimate sacrifice into the sunset kinda way.) but i think there are alottttta things goin on in that dream. things that have nothing to do with how many bloody sci fi movies i watched as a kid or how fucquin certifiable i really am.
there's a screwy metaphor of life behind it all, something about choices when yer confronted with a totally fucqued fate that ya have no power to change. now
that might have something to do with the beezle in reality. (it might not.) then there's my own sense of guilt bubblin around under there, guilt or powerlessness or lack of awareness in that lil record skip when the game metaphor zeroed in on the beezle. (yep.) my dream brain, so unlinear, so swirly and shifting and illogical from the outside most of the time, had its own rather standard narrative sense of cinematic build-up. from strangers... to a few knowns... to the beezle. my apparent death and reset... to hers and final credits rolling. the structure meant increased effect, memory for detail, so maybe there's some point to the effect. (maybe not.) even the no screaming, the no pain, might say something about... something. (and it might not.)
ahhh, who fucquin knows. at least i'm glad i don't think of god as some 'human' 'being' 'interactive' type who would get pissed off at me for
the whole evil alien overlord thing. ahem.
p.s. for those of you not on facebook or who didn't see the original beezle art thread here from way back whenever, here's the painting she did for les. les posted it for me recently cuz the pic i had of the painting was from a mid-beez-draft version.