Saturday night, I had a dream that I bought a new suitcase, but it had obviously been returned. I thought it felt kind of heavy, so I looked inside, and there were some floppy diskettes, a paperback book (Sworddancer by Jennifer Roberson), something I can’t remember (I think it was a book or journal or something), a bunch of photographs (loose), and an empty photo album. I looked through the pictures to see if I recognized anyone, wanting to get them back to their owner, and eventually hit on a photo of Catherine and Kevin’s wedding. So I decided I would ask them later on about it.
Last night, I had a very disturbing experience, followed by a disturbing dream.
When I went to bed, I closed the curtain in my bedroom. I do this at night in the winter to stay warm (especially with the whole blanket scandal), but I leave the curtain open in the summer because the light helps me wake up. Last night, somewhere around 3:45 in the morning, John got up to use the bathroom and stop the water filter from beeping. I am sure that the dog licking his lips all night did not help him sleep.
Anyway, I woke up, looked up, and realized the curtain was open again. I got out of bed and walked over to it and checked, and sure enough– it was open. Normally, I would assume this meant the John had also let the dog out, but I could hear him smacking his lips on the other side of the bed.
John came back, told me the beeping kept him up. I went to the bathroom.
I came back and got into bed. John had already gotten into bed and was almost asleep. I looked over at the window– the curtain was closed!!!
Okay, I’m a PTS survivor and enough of a control freak– this totally freaked me out. I remembered closing it at night. I was so perplexed by it being open, I got out of bed. I don’t remember closing it, and while I think I could have closed it without thinking about it, I would have remembered the sound, since it was less than 2 minutes earlier.
*shiver*
Then, I went into a restless sleep. Between bouts of waking up to check the window curtain, I dreamed that John and I were used as a diversion– we killed someone while the Columbine kids set up the school for their massive destruction. I had gone along for the ride, not thinking we were going to hurt anyone, [break to check the curtain] but when we left, there was a person’s dead body stuffed into our luggage. [break here to wake up and check the curtain.] We drove off with the body and a Very Large Weapon in our bag– something on the scale of a bomb or missile, not just a gun. We were at a Denny’s or some similar restaurant, with me confronting him about the original plan, and didn’t he know that we were going to kill someone? And how were we going to explain this to our son (in the dream-world, we had a teenaged son)? I knew that the kid would have a hard enough time without having convicts for parents. In a tangental side-dream, the son found evidence from the murder in the form of a garden hose that we used somehow in the killing. When we came back out to the car, we’d left the door wide open. Fortunately, nothing was missing (the Luggage of Death was with us in the restaurant), and the dog was still sitting calmly in the back.
[break for curtain-check] We took a short flight home to San Jose, where we were about to leave when a bomb-sniffing security detail stopped us and asked to look in our bags. We deferred, saying there were private items we didn’t want to expose. She insisted. We said we’d come back, and returned into the terminal. We spent the rest of the dream trying to come up with a plan that would get us out of the airport without the dead body, and in such a way as to be untraceable. Each of my plans had a potential “Well, we might get caught, but then we’ll just face the consequences” clause to the plan. John wasn’t happy with any of them. He was fine with any plan that resulted in me taking the heat– not especially happy, but okay with it. He was not okay with going to jail himself. Eventually, we realized he needed to get onto an international flight (without me!) and he decided to just abandon the luggage once he reached his foreign destination.
I woke up shortly after that, very disturbed by the feelings it raised in me and wanting very much to punch my loving husband for abandoning me to whatever fate I would have.
