This morning I saw the following dream that my friend Dan posted on Facebook and thought it so rich in detail and cognitive meddling that it seemed deserving of a wider audience. I myself used to keep a dream diary when I was growing up, from seventh grade till I went to college. Even though I broke off from the practice, I still occasionally recorded these nocturnal diversions and twenty years ago placed a few of them on my original website at ennyman.com.
Here's Dan's unusually distinctive dream:
My powerchair had a loner control box recently installed due to a malfunction of the old one. Kaleb Anderson had emotionally blackmailed me into going to some sort of social entanglement that was "for my benefit." Of course I knew what that meant. It was backhanded Kabe-speak for "I want you there to make myself look better as I yammer on in agreeable platitudes to exotic cultivated women you'll never talk to." I knew this was going to be a sticky tar pit and I might not get out alive. But as always, just to shut him up for 5 minutes was worth risking ego death.
We exit the accessible taxi cab and entered some sort of cultural center. It was a cross between The Louvre with brown ochre carpeting and a shopping mall for David Bowie fans wearing comfortable sweaters. There were no stairs in this place, which I'm sure made everyone sparkle with diversity awareness. However instead of stairs it was an MC Escher maze-work of very steep ramps. Supposedly all these various intriguing events were taking place, of which I saw no signs of. Yet that was never really the point was it? What there was ample supply of were groups of bundled subcultures mingling within one another. They all seemed to communicate in a subdued officially uncodified syntax of auto-positive. This was coupled with steely exclusiveness in their eyes.... as if they had daddy's car keys and no-one was going to take them away. What terrified me the most were the numerous disabled people there with that same unspoken exclusiveness in their gaze. It was unclear if I were behind enemy lines or I was the enemy in friendly territory.
Immediately Kabe disappeared. (I knew exactly what he was up to.) This both relieved me in not having to witness his industrial motor-mouthed machinations, but it also provided that all too familiar hopelessness of being stranded like Tom Hanks in 'Caste Away'. I had no choice but to figure out the ramps of treachery to escape the unsettling eye gaze maze. So I tried going down a steep ramp on my own. This resulted in my wheels skid-sliding down the carpet uncontrollably, ending with my control box smashed and damaged on a hand rail. I was trying to ask for help but I wasn't able to describe the help I needed because the damn control box that had been replaced earlier had buttons and settings written in French.
Just when I thought the horror could not be out-climaxed I noticed my catheter bag flopped out on the floor. It was the size of a giant parachute laying flat and limp oozing urine all over the cultural center. People began screaming and fleeing in terror, some were frozen like petrified deer, others were angry at me like I was a terrorist who just murdered their chances of sex that night. I was getting yelled at and I snapped back, "Fine, I'll be your effing Villain!" At that point I had a nervous breakdown. My control box started shape-shifting into various console game controllers and 80's toys such as "Simon Says". I yelled out, "Can you see that?? It's CHANGING! Do you think I'm crazy?" I heard a couple female voices say, "I see it." Mostly I heard men yelling out, "Yeah, he's crazy." That's when I blacked out from system overload.
When I came to I was surrounded by lab coats and mental health specialists trying to "normalize me" Clockwork Orange style.
The End.
* * * *
I found it especially interesting how Dan wrote the title of the Tom Hanks film as Caste Away, instead of the actual Castaway. People with disabilities are treated as a separate caste in our society, and in many cultures are indeed castaways.
Thank you, Dan, for granting permission to share this dream story with a wider audience.
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