Mortality Blog

I don’t remember all of it, but here’s what I do remember: I was on my way up a windind road to a church. There was a residential community situated amongst the hilly area surrounding a higher bluff, and that’s where the church was - very dramatic. Everything was sort of quasi-wild-west, broken down, chipping and fading paint, boards and bricks sort of looking. I don’t know why I was going to the church - and in fact, once I got there, it was time for me to go home. It was getting dark, and it was cold, so I walked hurridly down the sloping lanes, twisting my way through the hills towards the highway below.

Then, in front of me, I noticed a man, standing, staring back behind me. I realized that his face was lit by an orange glow, and as I came closer to him, I glanced back over my shoulder, and saw a gout of flame. The church was on fire! It was on fire, and it was throwing this orange light everywhere. I commented to the stranger that it was weird that it was burning so brightly, and he pointed to the moon - which was huge, and a deep reddish orange as well.

I continued down to the freeway, realizing that it was too late to get home the way I’d planned (whatever that was) and I’d have to choose between walking one direction along the highway back to the city, or across the highway and up to a camping station where I could rent a cabin for the night. However, as I reached the bottom I noticed that the man from before was following me - a little freaked out, I kept me hand on the knife in my pocket as I continued along the highway. Eventually, as I came around a bend I saw red and blue lights flashing - an abulance, and some police cars. Someone had been hurt. I run to see what’s happened, and so does the silent stranger - it’s a heavyset man, soaked in blood, lying on the ground. He looks familiar, but I can’t think where I know him from. The man I met before is inconsolable, however - he obviously knew the victim. He crouches and cradles the man’s head in his hands - and then looks up at me.

Nightmareishly (although in my dream I wasn’t at all scared) his face starts to bleed, red fluid squirting from his eyes, and nose, and mouth, running out of his ears, from underneath his fingernails, and everywhere else, I assume. He dies horribly in front of me, lying in a spreading puddle of blood, draped across the body of the other man.

I don’t know how I get home (to my parents’ house, not the HoytHouse) - but I’m pretty shaken up my the whole experience.

The next day, my family is standing outside their house, watching my brother James ride up and down the street on his little razor scooter - and somehow we’re all holding pistols. Dad has a shoulder holster, and he asks me if I’ve found a good holster for mine yet. I show him my leather hip holster, and he approves. Just then, a female police officer appears, and asks James to see his firearm permit. He doesn’t have one, of course. Next she asks to see mine - I obligingly reach into my back pocket for my wallet, and start flipping through the cards. After I’ve gone through one stack of cards without coming up with it, she gets impatient, grabs my arms, and starts pulling me over towards her car, parked across the street. I protest, trying to pull away, which of course counts as resistance, and she slaps a pair of handcuffs around my wrists. She throws me into the car (into the driver’s seat, for some reason) as I try to explain that if she would just look in my wallet, which is now lying on the sidewalk, she would find the card.

She walks back across the street, but rather then looking at my wallet, she takes my whole family inside, then walks right back to me. She tells me to start the car, but I can’t drive it - the front passanger-side wheel is completely busted. The tread is torn off, the little pole that sticks into the middle of the wheel to turn it isn’t even inserted correctly. The hub cap is lying in front of the car. She’s pissed, and goes back inside my house - I manage to open the car door, and circle around to look at the tire. I try to put the peices back together, when suddenly my mom is there - “Why are you helping her?” she asks. I try to explain that I’m attempting to expediate my release, when the police woman comes back outside - but before she reaches the car, a couple of young black guys skate up on their roller blades.

“Is this po-lice bitch giving you trouble, dog?” asks one, circling around. “This is how you deal with the po-lice.”

Abruptly, he pulls out a huge handgun, with some sort of attachment on the bottom of the grip resembling the battery on a cordless power drill, and plugs the officer with several rounds.

“Yeah, bitch, that’s what you get! You’re free now, dog!” he yells to me, skating past her body and collecting the handcuff keyes, then throwing them, along with the weird gun, into my lap. It goes off and fire a bullet into the dashboard of the police car.

So now I’m sitting in a beat-up police car with my mom, with a murder weapon in my lap and my own pistol still holstered at my waist, and a dead police office lying in the street. An ambulance pulls up (just like in Grand Theft Auto, they always seem to know when someone is dead) and the attendant walks cautiously up to the window of the car - I hold both my hands high in the air, and tell him to take the gun off of my lap, and out of my hip holster. He looks scared of me.

So that’s how that dream went. Big and long. Totally referencial too - I was recently chased by a slightly unreasonable cop, I’ve fired a gun before, used a power-drill with a battery attachment like that, I’ve dreamt about the landscape around the crumbling town in the hills and the freeway below before (which would’ve eventually linked into my underground open-car mass transit startion and the secret underground enterance / LARPing dungeon that leads into OMSI) - and I have a knife in my pocket. It was like an adventure. Some of my dreams are almost fairly straight forward ‘what if’ senarios, where I sort of put myself in a situation then work out how I’d respond to it. Is that escapist, or something else? When we get truly immersive virtual reality, I hope there’s a ‘lucid dream simulator’ feature.

Last night, I dreamt I was wandering aroud the basement level of the art institute - but like most dreams, it was a sort of amalgamation of all the things I associate with the non-school-areas of AIPD: industrial decor, twisting pipes and hanging wires, valves with little luggage tags on them, scuffed poured concrete floors.

I was taking a shortcut to get outside after class, when this security guard found me. He told me I wasn’t supposed to be there - then immediatly started shouting at me to get down on the ground or he would shoot me. He was holding a gun on me, and I really thought he was going to shoot me no matter what - I was crying, I was so scared. He took my cellphone and my camera, and I tried to protetest, but he had that gun. Finally he asked for my wallet, and I tried to really slowly pull it out of my pocket in a completely non-theatening way. He pulled out my ID and looked at it.

Meanwhile, class had let out, and there were at least a couple dozen students walking past - but they weren’t doing anything to help me. Most people pretended to ignore me, like nothing was happening.

Finally, the guard accepted the fact that I was a student, and let me go, but refused to apologize or admit that he’d done anything wrong.

I guess the dream touched on a few key elements - my school, the cool industrial decor, my aversion to authority, fear of guns, and recent upswing in reports of abuse of power by people in positions of authority.

In an average round of Counter-Strike I kill about a dozen people, maybe more if I’m doing well. When I was playing through F.E.A.R I would fill twenty or thirty clone-soldiers full of lead per sitting - similar counts apply for Metal Gear Solid, Half Life, Kill Zone, Black, and a handful of others. In the last six months, I’ve probably killed hundreds if not thousands - I have no idea how many I’ve sent to an early grave over my life time.

But you know what? Guns scare me. I don’t like looking at them, I don’t like holding them, I especially don’t like seeing them pointed at people. It could be that I’m scared of fast-moving projectiles in general - rubber bands stretched tight, bb-guns, airsoft guns, all of that stuff sort of freaks me out. I feel like I’m constantly flinching whenever I’m around things with the capability to shoot me - I’m just waiting for that projectile to hit me. I hate how heavy handguns feel, how little effort it takes to squeeze the trigger with your index finger. I can’t quite get over the suspicion that even with the safety on, I could get it to shoot if I just squeezed hard enough. I hate armed guards in airports and outside of banks, and I hate armed police officers.

Today, while I was waiting for the bus, I saw some cops taking down a guy - one officer had his handgun out and was holding it straight armed diagonally at the man’s feet, and as the man held his hands up and knelt on the sidewalk, another officer shouldered a big shotgun and pointed the muzzle right at him. That wasn’t a good thing for me to watch - I could imagine exactly what would happen if the cop pulled the trigger, if he had some perverse desire just to put a little pressure on it, just to see how hard he could press before it fired… and the guy’s head would explode. I’ve shot enough zombies and seen enough counter-terrorists though sniper scopes that I know what a headshot looks like - a burst of red, and the other guy is dead. Only this would be in real life, and the inside of his head would’ve splattered all over the brick wall and concrete.

I felt conflicted - like I wanted to quickly hide behind something bullet proof, where even a ricochet couldn’t find me, and at the same time I wanted to run over to the officers and yell, “Calm down! Put your guns away! Don’t screw things up!”

He was only a skinny guy, no shirt, just a ragged pair of pants, and you could tell he was scared. Of course he was scared - one finger twitch and his life was over. I hate guns.