illin’
jay got sick last thurs night with what was at first thought to be food poisoning, from what unsure, and he was in bed and didn’t eat for 2 days. which, you now, for a diabetic, is a little scary. we went to a dinner party saturday night, and he sat in a room full of food and didn’t eat a thing. i was feeling fine right up into that dinner party, although sluggish that afternoon, but at around 5AM sunday morning i woke up to a headache like i haven’t had since the last time we went to las vegas and my stomach in knots. i then spent all day sunday and all day monday in bed, under covers, eyes closed, unable to eat or drink a thing without it coming back up, my body literally shutting down. yesterday i pulled myself together to go to work for a few hours and then attend the SF Fashion Feud, where, fueled by a red bull and a burrito, i finally started feeling like myself again.
however, going to bed after having your first meal in 3 days be a red bull and a burrito isn’t a recipe for a good night’s sleep, and i had some seriously tumultous dreams last night. i don’t remember all of them except the one right before i woke up, but i do know that they were all anxious, stressful, uneasy.
this is the one i recall:
i pulled out of the gate of my loft building in west oakland (a neighborhood often riddled with street crime IRL) onto the one-way street, going the wrong direction. i was in some sort of high-speed golf cart type thing. i was driving fast, the wrong direction. i had a machine gun, or some other automatic weapon. i was firing streams of bullets randomly across the plaza intersection of West Grand and Mandela Parkway, in all directions, at oncoming traffic. i was full-throttle. i was alone. i was brazen. i did not care. i was blank. i headed up mandela parkway, still going the wrong way, until i saw, parked ahead, a police car. i abandoned my golf-cart and weapon. i made it look like i was on foot. i went running up the police car, suddenly the victim. i was crying. i was telling what i saw, giving the witness account but knowing that i was the one who had done it, guilt tying my stomach in knots, hoping to not get caught. this went on for a while, me playing the victim while knowing i was the offender. the anxiety, the self-hatred, was overwhelming. i couldn’t tell if i was remorseful about what i had done, or if i just didn’t want to get caught. there didn’t seem to be a lot of remorse. just a lot of not wanting to get caught.
i woke feeling sick to my stomach, some of which leftover from my actual illness, some from the dream. i have never in my life been inclined to such violence. there is no part of me that even wants to play “shoot ‘em up” video games, where one pretends to kill. i have had a few violent outbursts in my life, and they totally caught me offguard. so waking from this dream – in which initially i was utterly void of guilt, willing to kill innocents to express my anger and rage (at what i still don’t know) – i was horrified at myself. that any part of my psyche could even have that ability. and then to flip to the role of being the guilty person pretending to be the victim – a person who would steal and rob and kill and then blame others, and then claim it was an act against them. that mindset was, in the end, even more disturbing than the initial role, more gut-wrenching. to live with that.
my coworker suggests that in our dreams, we are all of the roles, and that in this instance i was 1. the aggressor 2. the cop and 3. the victim. and that some part of me is doing/wants to do something i know is wrong, then another part of me that stops me from doing it, and then i feel restrained, but guilty for even doing/wanting to do the thing in the first place, finally representing my feeling of restraint as being a victim. upon reflection i do not know what this thing is in my life that i could be feeling this way about. i could take some guesses, but there is nothing front of mind.
OR, perhaps i was putting myself in all 3 roles as a sort of empathic exercise. there hasn’t been any recent significant bout of violence in my immediate ‘hood, but i still see signs of it on a daily basis, and reading the news there is no escaping the reality that life for the poor is only only getting poorer, and imaging that frustration is maybe where these dreams come from, as i ride the bus or bike through the city and see the homeless with their shopping carts, the youth with their attempts at making themselves feel big and part of something bigger, the elderly just trying to get by as invisibly as possible, having learned that standing out often only means being beaten down.
regardless of interpretation, i awoke with all of this in my consciousness, still feeling a little ill, waiting restlessly for the day when the entire world can take a global sigh of relief.
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