Nightmares

When I was younger, 8th grade, I think, I went through this phase of extreme paranoia... just before I fell into deep depression in 9th grade. During this time, I had nightmares every single night in which someone would try to kill me using the most violent (and lethal) means known. I was shot multiple times in one instance, poisoned in another, etc. The amazing thing was that I survived every attempt on my life. The one time I didn't, I was poisoned by my mom, but I allowed myself to be. We agreed that it was something that I must do, and I didn't resist, nor was I particularly sad about it. That evening in my dream, I came back as a ghost. My dad was the only one who could see me, and he was very sad that I was dead. He watched me as I floated out of the house, across the street, and allowed my essence to be dispersed by the wind (and I woke up.)

Lately, I've been having similar dreams (without the preceding feelings of paranoia) in which people try more violent means to kill me than before (either my imagination has grown, or I've just seen that many more violent, sadistic movies since 8th grade.) Only thing is, this time, I'm not surviving, and seconds before I wake up, I see me dead, mutilated-beyond-recognition body laying on the floor. When I wake up, I'm not scared or saddened to tears like I was in 8th grade; now, I just sort of accept it. Maybe it's the depression, or maybe I know "it's just a dream." But as a deeply superstitious person, and one who lays a lot in messages from the subconscious, nothing is ever "just a dream" to me. All the more shocking that when I woke up from tonight's nightmare, I simply went to the bathroom, got a drink of juice, and began writing. I feel nothing.

In my dream, I was a girl, and dressed in a very formal evening gown. I paid a dollar and entered into what was supposed to be an huge state dinner to raise money for some charity. There were partitions in the main room which were like mini stores where the jewelry or trinkets or whatever were being sold to raise money for whatever cause. Anyway, I followed my mom and a few people I knew in the dream (not in real life) through this exit door and found myself in this underground shopping mall. This isn't particularly strange, since they have a underground mall in Montreal where I was last winter. But this mall had a very foreign, marketplace feel to it. Everything was black and red, there were steam vents every few meters, and everyone had that grungy, post-apocalyptical look to them. Even I had on layers of clothes that looked layered and pieced together as I found them. My mom said down and offered my sisters money to buy food at the food court, but I had to wait since there was nothing vegan cooked at the moment. So I wandered off. I was in the 'streets' (the alleys between the kiosks) and watched this undercover Israeli moussad (sp?) agent track down a guy who claimed to be Arab or something, but upon further investigation (the agent said or did something to the guy to make him talk) he admitted to being Greek and actually gave whatever information he had before running away. I guess the guy was an informant, not a threat. Either way, it was interesting to watch. The Israeli agent disappeared into the woodwork.

I was with a couple of friends, two guys and the girlfriend of one of them. We were passing out flyers for a rave party that would take place at a gym that night. It was some protest party, I think. As the evening came, things got scarier. People started 'disappearing' (the polite term for being kidnapped and murdered by government forces) from the very crowded place. They were being turned in by friends, family, strangers, for whatever reason. The four of us decided to lay low until the party. So we went to this hotel room and all layed down on the single king-sized bed in the room. Even the room had a dark, seedy feel about it. We joked half-heartedly about the rise in suicide bombers in the mall. Even one of the guys (oh, I should mention that both were extremely hot, though ethnically ambiguous, guys about my age, of course) had squirted a couple of drops of juice on my shirt as we layed on the bed, and the other pretended that I had a bomb interlaced in my clothes and jumped on me to deflect the blast. We were all laughing, then he suddenly asked, "Yo, where are your tits?" I looked to see the other two were looking at me curiously, too. I told them I thought they knew that I dressed and looked like a boy all the time before I was, in fact, transitioning to be one. The two guys were okay with it. The girl made a horrible face and groaned about how disgusting I was. I expected and ignored her response.

I left the room and was back at the food court where my mom was supposed to be waiting, but I couldn't find her anywhere. I wandered around a bit before making my way out a side door and finding myself in a parking lot (it was about 9:00 at night, I think) full of cars and dirty piles of plowed snow. I didn't see anyone, and as I was about to go back inside, I saw a very pale figure laying on the ground, partially under a pile of snow. It was an African-American woman, and she looked dead. I reached down to look for a pulse. When I touched her, she came to life. She was pissed. I helped her stand up and saw that she was naked and still pale, though not as much as before. I told her not to be afraid of me, that I had used to be a woman (though from her expression, I don't think she saw me as anything but female) and I offered her some of my layers of clothes to wear. She just yelled at me that she was fine and told me to 'piss off' and stuff. So I just slowly backed away as she half-heartedly tried to cover her parts with her arms and made her way toward the entrance door. She continued to hiss and curse at me, which made me think she might have been a homeless woman with some psychological ailment. Once she got to the door, she was immediately flanked by what looked like members of the SWAT team, and instantly she was stressed in full battle protective gear and armed with an assault rifle. The scope of her rifle, along with about twelve others, were all aimed at me.

So I ran. I ran inside another side door and found myself in a sort of maze (for lack of a better description) of partial walls and lockers; the soldiers found me. I told the woman again that I was sorry for bothering her, but instead of the insane gibberish she was yelling at me before this time she said nothing. The soldiers continued to point the guns at me, when finally a small man (the commander?) in a green armored vest pointed a laser at me. I ran again, but this time the laser has turned into very painful, though small caliber bullets. At least five had shot me deep in the back. I dropped to the ground and hid under one of the obstacles in the room until they all ran past, then I crawled in the opposite direction, weaving around all the lockers. I could feel myself bleeding internally, and the blood was rising slowly in my throat. Strange that in my dreams, it seems like I can only die when I give myself permission. I crawled to the doors and became aware of the soldiers circling back to look for me more. There were people, market vendors I think, who were getting their belongings out of their lockers and going home for the evening. I put my finger to my lips to warn them to be quiet and I snuck out with them. A couple of the agents saw me, though, as I ran out because I was shot a few more times. I spit out the blood that had filled my mouth. There were buses outside, and somehow, it was already after dawn because the sun was out. the buses were getting ready to pull away, the doors were already closed but I ran to one, anyway, that had opened up a window for me to jump into. I ran and jumped and grabbed the window and realized that the soldiers had not followed me outside. When I pulled myself part of the way through the window, the bus started to pull out.

The soldier commander from before was on the bus and he pointed his laser gun at me again, shooting me several more time before I was forced to let go. I could feel the life draining from me against my will. As I hit the ground, I found myself in the lobby of some high-rise corporate building, laying on the floor in a huge pool of my own blood. I felt my face hit the ground, and then I was outside my body, looking at the body of a young woman who was clearly not me but a character I was playing in this incredibly realistic video game. A bloody "Game Over" screen appeared in my vision, followed by a 'login' screen in which I could enter a password and play again. I woke up.