Dreams, can't live with them, can't live without them....

Last night, I had a dream.

Actually, it was somewhere between a dream and a nightmare. I wasn't scared, not really. Not a lot. Really, it was more like just dealing with the sh*t that was happening, as it happened.

I was at a home, a home I've never been to, in the middle of nowhere and no-when. Mom and Dad and I knew that some guys were coming to attack our community's individual houses in order to get us all to move. Maybe I wouldn't have minded all this so much, but that day before, I had put some moss killer all over my roof and didn't want anything to screw that up, not criminals, not fire, not rain, not terrorizing local eminent domain type rejects from the film, Deliverance. Now that was real, that wasn't a part of the dream. I really had put moss killer on my roof. Weather in the Northwest here had been real weird since last Fall and I had to wait for just the right time distribute the moss death powder.

Back in the dream, we could see the shadowy men crossing the nearby shallow river, in the dusk and falling night. "They" were men, long guns, hats, warm coats, boots, dark clothes, mere silhouettes against the dimming forest backdrop.

I was in the house, like I said, with mom and dad (though I'd never seen either of them before). Two of the men came upon our house; we felt that someone had come to one of the dark kitchen windows, the one above the sink. It was quiet though. Too quiet. Of course, it was too quiet, you knew it would be too quiet, didn't you? Okay, so I dream in cliches.

Look, I looked out, but slowly, carefully. Okay, I chickened out and put my hand up to the window to evoke a response (better my hand than my eyeball, or my whole head, right?) and the bastard actually shot me. I had expected they were going to kill us all, but I hadn't expected someone to shoot me. Okay, look, it was a dream. It doesn't have to mean I am being rational.

Does it? Hell, I hope not.

Pain exploded through my hand, up my arm, to my little brain with a, well, an explosion far, far bigger than my tiny mind could handle. I fell back, landing on the floor, sliding a little under a part of the counter.

Then the door blew open. We heard it, you couldn't miss it, but no one wanted to go to check it, either. I wasn't going, my hand hurt like Hell! Just then, two guys with long rifles entered, quite prepared to terrorize the entire household. Okay, the three of us, but that is the entire household, right? What happened then, was pretty tame really, at least, compared to what you might see in a movie. Although, I admit that I had thought they were going to kill all of us.

In fact, I think we all had that understanding. But, they didn't. They glared at us. They made us feel unwanted. Personally? I was ready to move now. I got the point: "Leave, or next time, you ARE dead."

Still, the younger one, the angrier one (and isn't it always that way?), just as they were turning to leave, and I could see it in his eye, he for some reason, saw me as a problem and, he shot me, hitting me in the side below the ribs.

Ow!

It felt like someone hit me with a sledgehammer trying to mash me, nail me to the floor. But, it didn't work, I merely experienced more pain and more slipperiness on the linoleum. Although I tried to stay still, so as not to further piss off this tiny personality, my increased pain and slipping around in yet more blood, seemed to please him in some way, still unfathomable to me.

Then suddenly, they just left.

Someone else from the community came in then and helped trying to clean me up, but they realized, it just wasn't enough. I really needed a hospital.

Then, as dreams do, everyone decided that they just had to go somewhere. It was like, well, he's not dead, so he's probably not going to die, so I have to go shopping now.

?

Hello, hello? Mom? Dad? Sis (yes, suddenly I had a sister, dreams, remember?)?

So I thought, screw it. I'm independent. I'm used to being responsible for myself. So, I got in a car and drove down through what I now realize was University Way NE in Seattle's U District. Yes, "The Ave". I worked there for a little over seven years. I know it. But not so much in the dream, it all seemed...new?

But I realized I was looking for a restaurant (in the dream, right?).

About two blocks before the place I was headed to, I suddenly wasn't feeling so well and I realized something: Oh yeah, I need a hospital.

Funny thing, from where I was, if you turn left, you hit University of Washington Medical Center (one of those places where I used to work). But instead, I turned around, followed the traffic and got lost in a damn shopping center parking lot of all things; which I also thought was attached to a Hospital lot.

I left the safety of the car and went into the store and proceeded to find the oddest people. A cute couple of Japanese girls with two young children. I talked to them for a few minutes, and thought, that was useless, they are useless, but cute and funny, but I kind of have more important things to be doing just now.

I wandered around for a little while longer and talked to a few people while getting weaker and weaker all the time. I was trying to find where the hospital was. I knew it was there somewhere.

Finally, I wandered over a sky-bridge into another bigger store. Then somehow, I eventually ended up at (wait for it and thank God, finally) an ER room. I think I did anyway. Really, it all gets a bit blurry there. No, I remember it clearly, I just remember blurriness. Maybe I was hallucinating and died in a department store?

Died in a department store....

Can there be any worse nightmare than that? Why DIDN'T I wake screaming? But I didn't. I just woke. I lay there trying to wake more, to get out of that dream, to wake up into what I was starting to realize, was a much less messed up reality. I didn't have a suppurating wound in my hand, nor an open gunshot wound in my side. But there was a strange sound I couldn't quite wrap my head around. It was slow waking, but try as I might, I couldn't quite speed up the separation between the real and unreal.

All I know is when I finally woke up, it was raining outside.