The Waking Dead

Pink Halo with Blue Vase

Like Dan’s artwork, “A Train Departs the City Traveling 55 mph”, which is a rough transcription of an object someone else dreamt he made; this post is also based upon someone else’s dream. This dream was relayed to me before my trip to New Mexico. At the time, I took some notes. Today, I attempted to clarify some questions that I had about those notes, but the dreamer no longer had any recollection of the dream. From this point on, the reader would be safe to assume that the remainder of this post is just fiction.

I awoke from sleep; or rather I was awoken from sleep. You know how sometimes you wakeup because other people choose to break the morning’s silence? Not related to this dream, last Friday, while still sleep deprived, I was awakened by my neighbor and his rented backhoe. I was trying to transition from my nocturnal schedule to my usual diurnal one. I had slept the night through and had plans to sleep most of the day when the roar of a neighbor’s construction equipment awoke me. My crash/cram recovery course then foiled, it has taken me even to today, to gain even some measure of recovery, in the mean time.

Anyway, back to the dream, I was awoken by a commotion. A cleaning lady was in my bedroom, and she was dumping all my clothes into a pile in the center of the room. I got out of bed, avoiding her and noticed a second cleaning lady asleep on the living room couch. The first cleaning lady noticed me and said, “She’s been working too hard. It’s my turn to do the work.” Moving next to the bathroom, I noticed that the sink was full of dirt, like someone had dumped a wheelbarrow into it. A new racket attracted my attention. A pair of contractors, one in the dining room, one in the opposite computer room, were using sledgehammers to make holes in the intervening wall, a load bearing wall I might add. They were making a heck of a mess. A still greater din was coming from out in front of the house. The street was being torn up. Children, elementary school kids, were tearing up the street, with shovels and pickaxes. They were being directed by their teachers. Finally, a strange man came out of the bedroom that I had just left. He had a pocket watch in his hand. He said that he was taking it as payment for a drug deal that had gone bad.

This dream occurred before the New Mexico trip. It has foretold nothing, while I was gone. When I returned, the house was still standing, the street was intact, there was a pile of clothes on the bedroom floor, but this shambling mound was there before I left and even before the dream occurred. We are planning some home improvement, so it may yet become a foretelling of things to come. 

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