Last Updated on: 14th September 2018, 11:05 am
No, this isn’t a big blather session about Stephen King. It’s actually about a nightmare, one of mine.
Barbie made me think about a certain disturbing dream I had when she wrote a post about a nightmare of her own.
I had this dream years ago that scared me, not because of what it was, but because my mind was capable of constructing such a thing. It was right after the whole September 11 thing happened. I dreamed that everybody at the university was in fear of being atacked by terrorists. So they set up this whole emergency response system. they had a special alarm to signal threat of bombs, we practised using this alarm, every classroom had hundreds of gas masks hanging in a cupboard that the professor had keys to, and everybody had to go out a special door to a lead-lined waiting area in case of the presence of nuclear warheads if this alarm went off.
Well, one day, the alarm went off, and it was not a drill! We were in a giant lecture hall, the lights went out, and when I mean it was dark, I mean the kind of blackness that wraps around you and starts to squeeze. The weird part about that is I’ve felt that kind of dark in real life when the hydro went off in one of the lecture halls I was in at 10 in the morning!
Anyway, we all began to proceed as planned. We put on our gas masks and started to move to the exits. But the terrorists were ahead of us! They had locked the exits from the inside! So envision some 500 people, all not used to the dark, stumbling around in panic.
And here comes the super weird part. The terrorists were in the building, and they were playing trumpets, but they were playing the JAWS theme. Somehow we knew these trumpet-playing wackos were the enemy, hell if I know how. Each time they got close to one of the lost souls that were my classmates, in true JAWS fashion, the song got faster.
And it gets weirder. In the blink of an eye, I went from your run-of-the-mill civilized university student to a barbarian similar to someone straight out of Lord of the Flies. For the sake of my own survival, I was willing to sacrifice my classmates. I was extremely relieved and hopeful when I heard the JAWS trumpets speeding up far away because they were after someone else, and while they did their vile things to them, whatever they may be, I just might have a chance to escape!
The rest of the dream was spent running. Up stairs, down stairs, through hallways. I would not let anyone lead me because I was afraid they would sacrifice me as quickly as I would sacrifice someone else. I knew all humanity was gone as long as I was in this building. I think what shook me back to some form of humanity was hearing the JAWS trumpets speed up followed by a scream from a close friend. Then it was over.
Now, here comes the weird part. I have never been through a terrorist attack. I have never been around during a war that was happening here in Canada. I haven’t really read a book where the characters were going through such a thing. Lord of the Flies was a completely different ballgame. So where would I have created such an idea that had such depth that it would make me think for years? I didn’t think I had such savagery in me that I would gladly sacrifice other human beings to save my own life without trying other things, even in my dreams.