I've never killed someone in a dream before...
Monday, Sept. 09, 2002, 10:07 a.m.

I had the weirdest dream the other night. I was debating writing this just as a plain entry, describing my weirdo dream or to do it in a more entertaining manner and write it as the conversation I had with Anthony explaining my dream to him. ("Did your boobs jiggle when you ran?") On second thought...maybe it'd be best just to write it as I dreamed it...

I was in this house with my family, a make-believe family (as in, they didn't resemble my real family in any way, but they were solidly in the dream, they weren't imaginary friend-type family members) in which I had a younger sister. Her age fluctuated somewhere beteween 5 and 10, mine somewhere between 10 and 15. There was a dad and a mom and we were all nice and happy. Then something happened and my mom was killed and my dad got blamed for it. The mysterious "they" were going to hunt down all of us, kill my sister and me, make it look like the father did it, and then kill him. Everything is semi-futuristic, as in the vehicles are all some sort of hover-craft, all the houses and streets and everything look pretty much like normal. People are driving at the same speeds and same height (none of this Jetsons stuff for me!) as now.

The next thing I know, we're in a movie theater (?) of some sort. It's dark, and there are rows and rows of mostly empty seats. We're going down one of the aisles toward a particular room (my sister and I are following the dad) when a door opens in the theater and this piercingly bright light shines in. Then there are men with flashlights, dressed all in black who come thumping down the aisle we just left, following us. The dad gets us into this room (barely more than a closet) and tells us to stay there while he runs off, to lead the people away from us. My sister and I sit there and I can't sleep because they'll find us and hurt my sister but I'm SOOOO tired because the mom was killed in the middle of the night, and the dad woke us up and we've been running ever since and it's late afternoon and I'm scared. I tell my sister to go ahead and sleep. She puts her head on my lap and curls up around me. I run my fingers through her hair and struggle to stay awake. Several times someone comes incredibly close to finding us. There's a door behind us that's hard to see. No one comes out of it and I want desperately to go into it, hoping it will be someplace safer, not so exposed, but the dad said for us to stay here, so stay here we would.

Suddenly this huge man comes in to the room where we're hiding. My sister is awake, and I push her behind me. The man is bald, or maybe his head had been shaved, it was hard to tell. He easily makes three of me, but somehow, I am not frightened. I have to protect my sister. He smiles evilly and pulls out a knife (a steak knife, of all things!) and starts coming toward me. I push my sister farther back, if I fail she won't be safe at all, but at least I can keep her away from the knife. The man lunges toward me and I manage to evade him. My heart is pounding, but I'm still not scared. Adrenaline? (In a dream?!!) The man turns back toward me, and suddenly, I don't know how, but I've gotten the knife away from him, and I'm slashing at him, stabbing at him, and somehow, it's not about keeping my sister safe anymore. I have this vicious urge to HURT him, and my world narrows to that. The knife doesn't seem to be particularly hurting him, although I can see blood welling up where I've slashed at him. All of a sudden, he just...falls over. On his face. And he doesn't move at all. I know, somehow, that he is dead, and I throw the knife away. I get violently ill.

I look up to see if my sister is there. She is. She's cowering in the corner, hands over her head, like she's in a tornado drill. I think she hasn't really seen any of what happened, and I'm glad. I don't want her to have seen the man die, and even more than that, I don't want her to have seen me WANTING to hurt him. I am (amazingly) unscathed by the encounter. I go over to hold my sister. The man just disappears. I don't know where; it doesn't matter. I don't think it's strange. She cries into my shoulder and I just hold her and stroke her hair. After a while, she falls back asleep, and I no longer have trouble staying awake.

It's hours later, all of a sudden, and someone else is coming into the room. My sister is still asleep, and I think my leg is numb. I gently set her aside; she mumbles and reaches toward me, but I slip away. I stand up, and I have the knife, still, but I'm tired, so tired and my arms and legs feel like lead.

It's the dad. He looks like hell. He's exhausted and there's blood on him and he looks like he wants to cry or sleep for a million years. I collapse against him with a cry of relief and he holds me close. I try to babble about everything that happened, but nothing coherent comes out. Then he keeps his arm around me, stoops down to pick up my sister, and we go through the door at the back of the room. That's where he had been trying to take us; this was the safe room. There's a huge armchair, and blankets. I realize how cold I am. The dad sits down and my sister and I crawl into his lap. He knows what has happened. There's no need to explain. I am wrapped in warm blankets and the dad's arm. I'm safe. I can finally go to sleep.

[On a side note, I think this is when Anthony was coming to bed. I'd tossed off the blankets because of how restless I was with my dream, and he put blankets back on me and was snuggling with me.]

A split second passes that is actually about 6 hours. The dad even got a chance to rest because the door locks from the inside and the hinges aren't greased. There's no way to open it without making noise. We have to move somewhere else, somewhere safer. There's a vehicle, it looks kind of like two triangles, with the point of one at the base of the other. Where it narrows is where the dad's legs go, and all of a sudden, I'm the dad (except without any of his emotions/thoughts) and I'm controlling the vehicle. We almost get into an accident. Some kid, taking his dad's vehilce out for a joy ride, didn't know how to drive, and he swerves all over the alley and ends up crashing into a telephone pole. He's fine, but the car is not. We don't have time to stop and even though we'd normally help, we can't. This will only draw attention. We speed off.

We're at a place, out in the country (kind of) in front of a huge house, a mansion. We go around the side of the mansion, to the back. There's a small house there where the dad/I drop off the girls/myself and my sister. (Somehow, I'm both the dad and the girl at the same time.) [The small house looks remarkably like the play house my dad built for me when I was about 7.] There's another mansion, right next door to the one that we're behind, and there's a black lady who looks out the window at us. I can't see her very well. She has two kids, a boy and a girl, who are older than my sister and me. I/the dad have/has to go and...I think kill the people who are trying to kill us. I/he say(s) that you/we will be safe here, and I/he leave(s). Then I'm neither the little girl or the dad. The next thing I see as the observer is two men (it's "them") with a small baby. They kill the baby; the older girl sees it, but the younger one doesn't. Then it's sometime later, and the girls have a baby doll. I (the observer) have this terrible suspicion that the older girl has taken the body of the baby that was killed and turned it into a doll for the other little girl. Then I'm the older girl again and I know that it's just from the lady next door. I buried the baby after the men left. They didn't know we were there; it was just coincidence that they came to this place. We stayed quiet and still as mice when they killed the baby. (I was back to being about 10 and my sister was back to being about 5. It never even crossed my mind that I might be able to stop it.) I watched and made sure my sister couldn't see anything. I cried for days afterward. The lady next door is beat up, she has bruises and blood all over, but no one seems to be able to see it except for me. She smiles and pretends she's not hurting, but she is.

The dad comes back, he looks even worse than he did when he came back to the movie theater. He sees the baby doll, somehow he knows about the baby that was killed (although he didn't before he saw the baby doll) and he thinks the same thing I did when I was an observer and he starts freaking out and shouts at me (the older girl). The lady next door looks out her window and sees all this. She comes down and explains to the dad that she was the one who bought the doll for us. She looks terrible, even more beat up than usual, but no one seems to notice or even see it except for me. Her two kids are somewhere in the background.

The dad thanks her for being so kind, but tells her that she can't get us any more toys because, somehow, that will draw attention to us.

I keep thinking that I want, somehow, to comfort the black lady, but I don't know what to do. I'm afraid even to hug her because she's so beat up I know it will hurt her, so I just reach out and squeeze her hand. She smiles at me, like she knows I can see how hurt she is, as if she's thanking me for caring, and kisses me on the forehead.

And then I woke up...

Like I said, pretty weird...

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