I had a very strange dream last night. In it, my girlfriend and I are walking along a very dark city street. There are no lights from the street. There is no moon in the sky. Everything consists of shapes of blue and black. We are returning from somewhere; I don’t know where. We come to my car. It is at the front of a small parking lot. While I can’t see much, I can see that something has happened to the car; it rests at a steep angle. We walk around the car and see that the tires are gone. The car has been raised to a forty-five degree angle. As we continue to walk around the car, I can see that the rear bumper has been torn halfway off the car. It’s been peeled back as though it was the lid of a tin can.
I stand in front of my car and I begin to howl, a steady sound like “oooooooooooo.” I am unsure whether this is true rage or theatrics. My voice doesn’t seem to carry.
After a moment, my girlfriend grabs my arm. She hurries me away. She’s indicating that someone is coming. As we walk to the far end of the small lot, a light shines nearby. There is a truck. I can’t see it well, but as it circles around my ruined car, I see it is filled with men. The truck pulls around and somehow the light falls on a man, sitting in the back of the truck. He is wearing a machine gun strapped over his shoulder. My girlfriend and I begin to run.
At the back end of the lot is a small stairwell. As we run toward that, the men in the truck shout. I know at this point they will shoot at us. I begin to wonder what the bullets will feel like as they pierce my flesh. I consider whether or not I will feel pain, or if the velocity will make initial impact painless as bullets pass through me. There is a sharp burst of rapid gunfire, but it sounds distant, not as close as it should. In this moment, I reflect on the fact that while I have heard gunfire, I have never been shot at.
My girlfriend and I reach the stairway and descend. We enter into a dark, cluttered backyard. It appears to be the ruined area behind black apartment buildings. We coast along, effortlessly. We don’t see the men in the truck, but we seem to know they are following us. They are perhaps at the edge of the dark buildings. We seem to easily hop over small chainlink fences, dashing across interconnected yards in various stages of ruin. Everything is deeply immersed in the gloom.
Now we cut along a small house. Weeds cling to the sides of the dark slats, but I can see that windows are lit. We pass by a warm yellow square and a woman disappears from our sight. We walk along the side of this house further, through the patchy foliage. On the other side of us is another low chain-link fence. It occurs to me that there is another road on the other side of that fence, but it is not visible. I do realize, however, that the men in the truck may appear here at any time. We keep moving quickly. In this moment, I believe that we must get inside the house with the yellow windows. We move to another window and I raise myself up, peering inside.
Inside the yellow room, a man looks up and catches my eye. He is a dark-skinned man with black unruly hair and a patchy black beard. His eye is liquid obsidian. I realize he’s looking at me over a lit candle on a table, which is why the room seems so yellow and warm. He looks at me and does not blink.
I awaken. I am not scared, but the image of the man staring back at me lingers in my mind. I go to the bathroom, pee, return to bed. I sleep again, but that dream does not return. Instead there is a different dream. A casino. Gangsters acting out a sting operation just as it happens on the TV. In another scene, I am in a women’s restroom and I am given a baby to hold. The child is the size of an infant, but she seems to have a toddler’s head, features, and verbal ability. She gives me a note she has picked up from the ground of the restroom and asks me if she has deciphered the letters correctly. I look at the note, the strange symbols. Yes, I tell her, you are correct. I turn the note upside down and I realize that the letters actually spell out words. I read the phrase:
“U R Great.”