Unloading the nightmare

Tumblr's down at the moment, which is a good thing. I was tempted to post this brain dump there but downtime thwarts what might be a mistake.

Instead I'll park this here in my digital junk drawer, to be revisited at some time in the future when pieces make more sense and I find the other parts to which this oddment belongs. It's like the handle to a pot lid I keep, waiting for the day the pot and lid to which it belongs emerge from a long-stored box.

I had a dream the night before last. I want to call it a nightmare for its subject matter, but I'm not certain that's what it was supposed to be.

The dream had such intensity of feeling and a quality of reality to it that I woke up checking my breathing and for blood on the couch. I actually worried about the leather surface on which I'd fallen asleep while watching an innocuous movie hours earlier.

The story arc of this dream is gone; I can't recover the origin of the story, unless I choose to undergo hypnotherapy. I feel relatively certain that I'd been accused by some authority of a political crime, either written or oral rendering of words caused me to be sentenced to death.

I was panicked, wondering how I would escape being rounded up and sent off to my sure death. At some point a woman appeared, calming me by saying it would be all right.

She put her arm around me; she was no one I knew, but she understood my panic.

And at the point I began to relax, she clutched me closer with one arm and carefully eased/shoved a spike deeply into my chest, like a knife into cold butter. 

The spike did not reach my heart, but instead pierced my aorta. I knew it was fatal, and I knew she was the executioner/assassin.

She hugged me and shushed me, then laid me down on a bed.

Knowing it was futile to do anything else, I shouted my goodbyes to loved ones.

I woke as I began to fade.

And I checked the couch for blood at this point, still feeling the spike deep in my chest.

* * * * *

Now what the fuck do I do with this content? It messed with my head so badly yesterday I was afraid to write. I chattered on Twitter, trying to avoid thinking about this.

Was the dream spawned by unconscious worries about my auto-immune syndrome?

Was the dream a message about life direction?

Was I really the assassin/executioner -- and am I in denial about recognizing myself as a self-saboteur?

What did I do that set this dream in motion? What leftover bits were laying about in my attic that in turn acquired a life of their own?

I have no answers. Nothing seems to click as they normally do when I analyze dreams, whether mine or someone's else's somnolent unconscious escapades.

I'm afraid I will have this dream again; the urgency of the dream is not unlike other recurrent dreams I've had in the past, where something was bothering me so much that a demand for remedy persisted even in my dreams.

For now I will leave this content in this out of the way spot, not to be forgotten but to be left for the day when I remember the rest.