This morning I woke around my normal time, about five AM, maybe a little earlier. Coffee, oatmeal, a conversation with T.R. and then I decided to go back to bed and read for a while. I read a chapter in "A Clash of Kings" by George R.R. Martin, and then fell back asleep. While I was sleeping, I dreamed. Let me give you a warning, it was a strange, violent, and graphic dream. I haven't had a particularly violent dream in a long time, so it was striking.
In the dream I was walking through a parking lot with a friend of mine in a crowd of people, all coming out of a building complex. It had the feel of the end of a concert or the end of some other public event. There was the usual jostling of a large crowd and at one point I went to my right and bumped into a young Asian/Pacific Islander couple. I immediately apologized and stopped to let them go by. The young man bristled and his friends around him immediately bristled as well. There was a bit of posturing going on and I tried to stay calm and extract myself from the situation by apologizing and moving away.
Suddenly, one of the young men reached over and grabbed my testicles very hard. The move shocked me and surprised me and we wrestled about a bit. His friends were laughing and taunting. Still not wishing for a violent encounter I warned him several times, but he was laughing and playing for his friends, who had gathered around - about a dozen younger people and a half dozen older people as well. At last I resolved myself to the act of violence and when the young man who had a hold of me turned to talk to his friend, I swept his leg, took him to the ground, and broke his jaw with a solid descending punch to the hinge. It was a brutal and violent blow, intended to do exactly what it did, incapacitate him quickly. With that onset of violence my friend suddenly took off running into the night, leaving me alone.
Chaos erupted as he howled in pain, a wounded and broken animal. The older adults urged the younger ones to attack me. I moved clear of my fallen opponent so I had room to maneuver. Two of them rushed at me. Using Jiu-Jitsu moves, I tangled the two of them up, sending one crashing into a border chain at the edge of the parking lot, and capturing the other in a wrist lock, pushing it all the way through until I heard the bones of the wrist pop and grate and he went white with shock.
At about this point one of the older women pulled out a small automatic pistol, a .32, and fired a shot at me. She missed. (It's far harder to shoot someone than you might think, even at close range, if the target is moving.) I immediately closed with her, struck her ruthlessly several times, and disarmed her, capturing the pistol. As this short and violent encounter was happening, one of the older men reached under his coat and drew a Beretta 92SB. I shot him three times with the .32 and he staggered and fell. People were now screaming and running in every direction. Several of the people, men and women, were now drawing pistols, so I scooped up the pistol on the run and kept running into the parking lot, ducking and dodging and weaving among the cars. Bullets were popping into cars and through windows as I ran. I ran long enough to convince them to chase me.
I turned and ran straight back at the group following me. I caught three of them by surprise and shot them all at nearly point blank range. I reversed and sprinted off into the parking lot again. They continued to pursue, urged on by older people, but far more cautious. This enabled me to begin an orderly retreat, firing, retreating from covered position to covered position, and firing again when a target presented itself. I was very much aware that I had one magazine of ammunition and no reload, so I was trying to work my way back to where my car was and make a getaway. Unfortunately, they spread out in a crescent and began herding me toward the edge of the parking lot, which appeared to back up against a railway storage yard. I had no choice but to fall back before them.
There was a berm at the edge of the rail yard beyond which I could see the tops of Conex containers. I knew that I was going to be horribly exposed as I crossed the berm, but I was running out of options. I reached the last row of cars and figured this was the end of it all. I waited until they started to advance, shot one, who fell screaming, and then turned and sprinted over the berm, expecting to feel the bullets tearing into me at any given moment. I reached the top of the berm and dove over, rolling, spinning and turning.
There were a dozen people yelling, howling, and running from the parking lot after me, firing pistols. I went to shoot and realized I was out of ammunition, the action of the Beretta locked back and open. I turned and ran for the Conex containers, which were about fifty yards away and separated from me by a single rail line, rising up on another, smaller berm. As I desperately ran for the cover of the containers, my friend, who had abandoned me at the beginning of the dream, suddenly rose up from the ditch behind the rail line, waving me forward. I sprinted toward him as I heard the harsh buzz of bullets flying past me.
I sprinted over the rail line and discovered, to my surprise, a long row of crouching Civil War soldiers, in three ranks, rifles in hand. An officer, bearing a saber, suddenly stood up and commanded his men to fire. In ranks, they rose up and let loose with a volley of black powder rifles, a deafening roar of fire, catching the charging people behind me in the open. The Civil War soldiers let off a second volley and a third volley and then, with a yell, charged over the rail line.
It was at this point in the dream that I woke up, about seven-thirty in the morning. It was a very graphic dream, full of the sights and sounds and sensations that make some dreams very real. I am not sure where the civil war soldiers came from in the dream, but I am glad they were there. The fear, the adrenaline, the sensations of the dream - being grabbed in the testicles, breaking a jaw, wrestling the gun from the woman, shooting at people and shooting people, the sheer terror of running and dodging through the cars, expecting to be hit - all of these things were very real. That sensation of running for cover and expecting to be shot at any moment was also very real and very terrifying. The tremendous sense of relief when I crossed the rail line and saw the soldiers waiting in ambush, that sense of floating, floating through the world, your heart pounding in your chest, seeing things through pure tunnel vision, your ears roaring, all of these sensations were very real.
However, I would not call the dream a nightmare. It was violent, it was graphic, it was very real and in it's own way it was terrifying, but it never had that sense of unreal helplessness that marks a nightmare. I woke from the dream, not with the residual terror, but rather with the simple thought of "wow, that was a violent, vivid and strange dream". It was vivid enough that now, eleven hours later, I recall it well.
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