Analyze My Dream

It starts in my apartment. It's intuited that it is mine anyway, the way you 'just know' things in dreams. It's a combination of an actual place in upstate NY, a little red carpenter's house just about everyone I know has lived in at one point or another, and the alien's over-the-garage apartment on Third Rock From The Sun.

I am in the living room half-heartedly tiding up, consolidating stacks of newspapers and periodicals into one large tower, putting all the dirty cups into a group on the coffee table, dumping ashtrays into an empty pizza box. My boyfriend and dog are both in the bathroom, he's having a shower, the dog is laying against the tub enjoying its warmth (as she is want to do in reality), again, I can't literally see them, I 'just know' that's what they are doing. All in all it's a homey scene; the rhythmic rush of the shower and clean-smell carried by the steam, soft brazilian pop music on the radio mixed with the 'scrwish' of slippers on a wood floor, a pot of something curried simmering on the stove.

Suddenly the front door, which is at the bottom of a stairway that descends from the living room (a la Third Rock), bursts open and what sounds like six or seven people come barreling up the stairs, nosily. They have a mangy dog with them that looks as though it may expire any second; most of its teeth are missing, the rest of its mouth is stumps.

When they reach the top of the stairs I recognize they are my friends from high school...people I have not seen or heard from in fifteen years. I was amazed... giddy at seeing them after all this time, I opened my arms, ready for a big 'ohmygodit'ssogoodtoseeyou' hug session but they passed right by me, uttering 'hey' in a short, but comfortable way. I was dumfounded, I had not had seen one of them in years, yet they let themselves in and proceeded to mill around--opening doors and poking around in the kitchen--with all the familiarity in the world, like it was old hat. I began to question my sanity...
(What were they doing here? HAD we shared company recently? Did I still live in the town where I went to high-school? Was I throwing a party? Is that why I was tiding up? This house is a mess! Oh, God, I didn't buy any food or beer for a party. What are they doing? Are they looking for something? Why won't anyone acknowledge me? Am I dreaming?)

The mood immediately shifted from lazy Sunday evening to chaos, and the dream took on that warped time scale that comes from the intermingling of the things you see, and what you intuit. I understood that they were not my friends anymore, and something was terribly wrong.

I noticed Carl, the apparent 'leader' of this home-invasion battalion (and a real character from my high school days), disappear into the kitchen, the mangy dog made a b-line for the bathroom, the rest continued poking around. I surfaced from my shock long enough to get the half-sentence "Hey, guys, what are you..." out, when a series of short barks, then growls, then whines of pain emerged from bathroom. I ran to the room and found my dog yelping and bloodied on the floor, and my nude boyfriend standing over the motionless mangy attacker. His arm was up over his head, ready to strike, in his hand a red stained loofah-on-a-stick. "It attacked her" he said apologetically, becoming aware that he had possibly bludgeoned the other dog to death.

I panicked, began wrapping my dog in towels and screaming that we had to get to a vet. My boyfriend threw on his dirty, now bloody clothes, we started toward the stairs. "Who are those people?" he asked, noticing them for the first time. "I don't know" I answered, honestly. "Where are we going to find a vet at this hour?" he said (because it was now mysteriously like two in the morning in dream-time; continuity issues like six-hour showers are not a concern to my subconscious).

"I know a vet that's open 24-7" Jimmy, another old high-school-pal-turned-? said while poking his head out from our bedroom. "And anyway, I need a ride home." He was holding a personal item of mine up to his nose, inspecting it. I think it was a figurine of some kind.

It seemed perfectly reasonable to give this guy who was robbing us, or psychologically torturing us, or whatever they were doing there, a ride home if it got my dog to a vet before she bled to death. The four of us got in the car. They sat up front, my dog and I in the back. We left the rest of them in the house, the food still cooking on the stove.

Now it was raining. We started out on a large highway that became a two-lane and finally a small side street. "This way." Jimmy said, pointing left down an even smaller street, the kind where all the houses begin right at the sidewalk. I looked down at my dog who was slipping in and out of consciousness. Her tongue was lolling out of her mouth and her big brown eyes were mere slits of white.

The car passed over something with a crunch, I turned to look out of the rear window and saw a cat that had been cut in two by one of our tires. His front half and bottom half spasmed as the life left him. "What the hell was that?" my boyfriend called out. I could see his face in the rear-view, he was already sweating with the stress of the dog, now he looked terrified. "We hit a cat" I screamed, "Oh Christ, we hit a cat and it's cut in two and it's still alive, Oh Christ, Oh God we have to get it, we have to...." Jimmy turned around and looked. "That cat is dead. Or soon to be, there's nothing we can do."

I start blathering, "What do you mean there is nothing we can do...we're on the way to a vet! Can't we bring it with us, or at least put it out of it's misery? We can't just leave it there!! Oh God! We have to do something!..." and so on.

Jimmy pointed right, directing my boyfriend to turn. We made the turn, and as the headlights hit the pavement he breathed "holy shit..." into the windshield. A loud, nearly deafening series of crunches came from underneath the tires. Ahead illuminated in the headlights were hundreds cats, soaking wet, with more appearing each second, like it was raining them. We realized the crunching was the car running over two and three at a time. I covered my ears. The car screeched to a halt.

"Fuck... fuck!" my boyfriend was hitting his head with his hands. "What are they doing here....in the road...there's, god, hundreds....I couldn't see..." I had been clutching the dog for both her safety and my comfort, I noticed her heart rate had slowed to where the beat was nearly undetectable. "We have to get her to a vet now." I said, quietly crying, in shock. "She's dying."

"What am I supposed to do!" My boyfriend yelled, pointing out the window at the thousands of cats that had filled the road as far as you could see in all directions. It was understood that we could neither go forward or back up without killing them. Worse, we realized that we couldn't even walk without stepping on one.

"Just gun it." Jimmy said. "It's only a block away...they'll either move or...well..."

"But what if they don't..." I began.

My boyfriend gunned it, turning the wheel sharply right into the houses. He crashed through the front door of the closest one then followed a series of hallways and stairwells until the car was too big to continue on. We ended up at the base of a stair that rose upward where it split into a "Y" right before the second floor. (In the dream it was perfectly reasonable that we were driving indoors, you know....)

We all got out of the car and Jimmy started to walk away. "Thanks for the ride." he said, kind of cheery and lighthearted, like we had just come from a party.

"Where are you GOING?" we both yelled at his back, which was ascending the stairs.
"Home. I live right around the corner. SEE YA!"
"But where's the vet??!!"
"Oh, right" his eyes darted down to the bleeding eighty pound animal in our hands. "It's, um.... a few places to the left. Two or three." he paused, then tipped an imaginary hat, "SEE YA, WOULDN'T WANT TA BE YA!" and disappeared behind a door.

We started walking left, as directed, desperate, knowing the person who gave us directions was probably (definitely) lying. Each door opened to a stairwell or hallway, each hall to another. It was like an M.C. Escher-land we knew was an endless loop impossible to emerge from. Finally my boyfriend opened a door that led outside. We saw the car about a half-block down to our left, headlights still on, covered with cats.

We stood in the rain. The dog had a slow, steady trickle of blood running from her mouth. I had not felt a pulse in some time.

So that's my dream. All armchair analysts please advise.

Posted by Antigeist at March 19, 2003 02:32 PM