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Now I'm trying to not sound egotistical, but a) I've had a very interesting/frightening dream recently and b) I want to discuss it in more depth than in the Conversation, so the Temple forae seemed the best place to put it because there are other threads about dreams here. I'll post this report of the dream, all of you feel free to comment and add your own experiences.
The dream ran like this: I was me, aged eighteen. I had been signed up. I was going to Vietnam. Note that I never dreamt the actual recruitment- it was taken as a condition that I had to go to Vietnam, to fight.
I dreamt that I was standing in the stockroom at work, and this is what gets me, the mundane quality- I was looking through all these cardboard boxes and coathangers thinking about how this was the last time I was going to see it for a long time.
Later me and all the males from my college were boarding this enormous, squat, green transport plane, like a huge fucking frog or some such. Inside, it was like a passenger jet- but you couldn't move, you couldn't get out, you couldn't shout. There was piped elevator music somewhere under the drone of the engines. And it was then that the (mental) dam burst: there was going to be explosions, death, shooting- I visualised bullets entering my mate's stomach- I had only just realised this and I was trapped on board this transport plane, shaking and trying to shout but being unable to.
What I want to get across is how this dream did not feel like a dream. It felt real, more real than ordinary dreams do. There was little comforting mislogic.
The only fantastical element was the transport plane: it was huge, I mean bigger than anything that could get off the ground. The ramp into it was as wide as a dual carriageway on the mororway, and the engines sounded like a herd of stampeding terrified elephants. As I said: like a toad. But then, the immense size was merely logical: it was meant to be filled with all these young soldiers, in their thousands.
All the way through the dream: a gently rising crescendo of nagging, unbearable fear: of the death and horror I was going to, that I had no choice about.
It was just before I woke that something in me clicked: "Vietnam" wasn't Vietnam, the country; it was a state of mind, a sort of ireversible crystallisation in the brain, an inevitable irrational fear and hatred of an unknown "enemy", the desire to run and stab and hack. |
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