Dream 3/24/97 Note: The following is fiction. It is a story that came to the author in dream state, but none of the events are true. Although, they do bear a small resemblance to events happening in her life at the time... but that's a little more information than you need to know. Any similarities to people you know or those just in your head is purely coincidental. Oh, and the names have been changed for my own black widow reasons. Of course I don't really know anyone named "Judd". *shudder* Crowded airplane. It's a very large plane, one of those international flights. Judd and I make our way towards the bathrooms, which are strangely...outside the plane. Walking towards the back, the plane begins to rumble and shake. We get down and crawl on our hands and knees between the aisles, the packages, the feet, the bags. Just as we approach the doorway leading outside, a flight attendant opens the door and comes in. I see dark clouds whizzing by outside. The wind whips in the plane furiously but we don't lose cabin pressure. She angrily tells us to return to our seats, immediately. We begin to crawl back but she picks us up like small children and tells us we must hurry, and to walk as best we can. As we stumble around back to our seats, I see out the front of the plane that we are landing. I had no idea we were close to landing. I could see the ocean, the sand. We were landing in an airstrip along the coast. Blackout. I wake up, and it's like that whole trip scenario was a dream. I haven't gone anywhere, though I do have a trip scheduled in the coming weeks, but I can't remember to where. As I'm lying in bed pondering these things, my mother comes in, wearing her pajamas. She smiles and tells me it's time to get up and eat breakfast. I tell her I don't feel like getting up yet; that I'm just going to lay around, maybe sleep some more. She gets angry and tells me that I must get up because I've been in bed too long. This just makes me mad, and I shout back, "Mom, I'm in college! I have to get up myself every morning to go to class. I don't need someone telling me when to get up!!" At this she bursts into tears, cups her face in her hands. I don't understand, and I feel guilty. I concede, "Alright, I'm up now. I'll get up." She's thrilled. She takes me downstairs, sits me down at the table and brings me food, something with a small lump of cream cheese. Then suddenly Judd appears. He looks happy. I ask about our upcoming trip, plans and such. He looks at me, sympathetically, and whispers, "You don't remember anything, do you?" I am confused. "About the plane?" he continues. I begin to have this uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. "What about the plane?" I ask, my heart quivering. He begins to recount the incidents surrounding our flight and especially our descent. As he talks I am remembering. I see things clearly in my mind, not a dream, but as reality. The plane was tossing to and fro as we made our way towards the airfield along the coast. The plane actually touches ground on the runway but something happens with the landing equipment. Some failure. The plane veers out of control off the airstrip, into the ocean, and explodes. The next thing I remember, we are indoors somewhere. We are battered, but we are conscious. The sun is shining brightly outside on the face of a beautiful landscape. I am suddenly pulled out of reverie by the sight of many black skinned people running feverishly out to sea, yelling, screaming. As we walk outside, I see the wreckage. It is horrifying. The nose of the plane is gone. The body of the plane is broken in two, like a child's toy, down the middle. Smoke and flames rise up from this center point. "How did we survive?" was the question that kept running through my mind. My feet begin to move, carrying me towards the plane. I begin to run. I feel the sand underneath my feet give way to water and ...grass (?). I feel as though I am running through a rice paddy. But as I look down, I see there are large pockets of dark spots in the water, as well as obstacles fallen from the plane. Taking evasive action against these things, jumping, sliding, leaping, I realize what the large dark pools are. Human feces. Dumped out of their storage bins. The stench hits me then. Ammonia, bodily waste, blood, fire. I feel sick. I can't go on. I must get to the plane, but my feet won't carry me. A tidal wave of nausea washes over me. I come to a stop, bend over, and wretch, adding to the soupy mixture in the sea. I turn around and begin to walk back. I feel guilty, and cruel. Judd tells me I've been asleep for weeks, in and out of consciousness, speaking gibberish. It's nearly driven my mother to the brink of a nervous breakdown. I ask how we got home, if we were in Bengali. He looks at me strangely and corrects me, "Barbary Coast". OK, so there are still a lot of things I don't remember. He says once I was stable enough, they flew me back home. Me? I wonder. He must be catching my drift, because he looks away, guiltily. "You went on the trip?" I shout. "You went without me?! While I was in limbo, maybe dying?!" Of course not, he says. He went a few weeks later, when it was apparent that I may not wake up for some time. My heart is filled with rage and hurt. "Who did you go with? He stares at me but refuses to answer. I raise my voice and ask again. I feel as though he is trying to think of the least offensive answer to the question, but still he doesn't answer. Dammit! I raise my hands in the air to strike and he cowers back. "Who do you think I went with? I went with Dave," he finally says. I lower my fists. I slump back in the chair. Calmly, I ask, "So, how was it?" But I don't care at all about it. As he begins to recount his adventures on the Barbary Coast, I get up and walk away. With my back turned I hear him still talking to my shadow. I find my mother. We sit quietly together and she holds me. I ask how my dog is, and where he is. A cloud of worry and sadness covers her face. My heart begins to race all over again, and I begin to fear the worst. While I was away, she tells me, Rudy began to act strangely. He was anxious and jittery and would not be soothed. He ran away one night. Ran onto a neighbor's property. A neighbor that didn't take kindly to trespassers. Or dogs. She tells me how they found him, with a spike that had been driven into his little skull 3 times, and plunged into his chest twice just for the overkill pleasure of it. I can't stand it. This is too much to bear. My dog is dead. My best friend, brutally murdered. How could this happen? I begin to shake, and then the tears come, and I wail. I wake up crying. Final Words: Incidentally, I was already graduated from college at the time that I had this dream, so I'm not sure how that came into play. Also, just so you all know, I'm not in the habit of dreaming about my mother. Or my dog, for that matter. I personally feel this dream is fraught with symbolism. However, I am not someone who attempts dream analysis. I tend to think that most of the times dreams are just your brain taking a shit. But I think this one was particularly poignant. So, if any of you armchair psychologists out there want to give it a shot, please email me your interpretations or comments. Much dysfunction, Jennifer Chung Back to IceBox