Hey y'all. I wouldn't mind some help interpreting a pretty fucked up dream I had a few months back (4th March, to be exact). It may be more than one strung together. Ask any questions if you need stuff clarifying.
I am in some kind of exaggerated Albert Square (purely as an observer). The tension between Phil Mitchell and Steve has become murderous. Steve attacks Phil, thinks he has the upper hand for a second, but Phil responds with knives and meat cleavers. A badly injured Steve tries to escape out into the rain. Phil follows him in slow motion, and dispatches him with a meat cleaver to the back of the neck/shoulder area. The blows fall in realistic ways, not the clean body blows you might expect from films. While this takes place, the rest of the residents of the Square are in a party. Steve is killed, and hidden in a basement by Phil.
The rest of the Square go looking for Steve, assisted by Phil, who pretends to be concerned and on their side. A number of them go into the cellar to search. Phil walks behind them, and kills Mark Fowler with knives. I do not remember how or if he attacks the others. The dream closes with Phil putting Steve's body into an upright position in a car, to hide the body by setting light to the automobile. I think I wake at this point - it's an awful image, one man acting out his psychotic fantasies without other people's knowledge or reprisal.
I return to dreaming. I am now standing outside Iona Abbey (although the island is much smaller and flatter than I remember, seemingly bleached of some of its character and wild aspects). Mull has been developed - a town has spread to nearly the shore on reclaimed land, and here and there bridges connect the two. There are only a couple of metres of channel left between the two. The town is a bustling little community, with a largish modern church built in beige stone on the sea front, very near the abbey. I feel sad, that the character of the place seems to have been robbed by the development.
I turn and walk back into the abbey. There are people in the book/shop, which now doubles as a coffee shop/foyer. I sit with them. They seem Rabbinic, Jewish. At this point the scene is hazy and difficult to remember. Knowledge seems to be downloaded - I may wake up and return to this place with new knowledge (or enter a different sphere of awareness).
I know the Nazis are coming, although they feel far more horrible. I see a montage of horrible images or execution and torture, one remembered peacemeal of an old lady meeting with a nasty, unremembered fate.
Finally, images settle into a relationship between a young English poet and his oriental (probably Chinese) wife. They have a tender, sweet relationship in the 1940s. They are both in a shop (perhaps a barber's). She leaves first, and eventualy he stands up from reading/looking in his book and makes to walk out. He is interrupted by a man wearing black leather and small circular glasses walking into the shop (he looks like the cliche Gestapo official from Raiders of the Lost Ark, only somehow twisted and far nastier than any man has a right to be). He is surrounded by soldiers. They all wear shiny black leather, with black clothes underneath.
The Gestapo official starts to ask the poet questions. At this point I enter the poet, although I have a perspective that seems to be at once inside him and slightly external. The Gestapo asks if I have time to speak with him. I say yes, perhaps genuinely surprised that he's obviously going to question me, perhaps being prepared for it (the two opinions seem to tally up with my simultaneous perspectives - the former belongs to the poet, the latter to me). I am identified with him, but allowed a knowledge of what is to come... the impending atrocities (although this seems to be using historic imagery in order to tell an amplified, symbolic story).
I sit with him in the sun. At first we seem to be in a sunny town centre. The poet is incredibly naive, gentle, honest and genuine. He smiles, is genuinely horrified by the question about whether he is a spy, or knows any spies. The questioning continues half remembered. He is asked a series of questions relating to the possessions the poet has on him. I can remember that he has a colouring book, a book of old fashioned erotic images, and a communist/socialist pamphlet (the Gestapo imagery seems to be archetypal, blending in witchhunts, McCarthyism, the Spanish Inquisition, etc). All the while I/the poet jokes with the Gestapo official, as though he understands that I could never be a threat. The part of me with the external perspective knows what will happen. One by one the poet is scrupulously, naively, stupidly honest about each of his possessions and his political leanings. He is utterly harmless (apart from his ideology), the official knows this, they both laugh and joke about how stupid and pointless the interrogation seems. They stand up, and suddenly they are no longer in the town centre but in a war torn ruined and deserted township. The buildings are made from a sandy beige stone, doorways are partially blocked with sandbags, windows are ragged blackened holes.
The camera pulls back to a distance - the Gestapo pulls out an old fashioned pistol and shoots the poet in the head. The camera pulling back indicates I am no longer inside the poet, but I am seeing this from the perspective of a girl. She is wearing a beige jumper, with long wavey brown hair. She does not appear to be the poet's wife in every detail, but seems identified with her (her apearance is more like Minnie Driver). I seemed to see the exeuction from her perspective - she is horrified (I do not know if she knows the poet), turns and runs. The soldiers give chase (but not the official). She is an incredibly fast runner. They fire off shots which narrowly miss her, the chase spins round many tight turns. They almost have her, when she vaults through an open window. However, she has miscalculated, and falls many feet below into darkness, landing a second later with a sickening thud. The window lead onto a shaft or basement. I know she is badly injured, and will not be able to evade capture.
The scene shifts. She has been pushed against a broken window frame, and is pained, gasping for air. She seems unharmed from the fall, but when she pulls back from the frame she is horribly tortured in her upper body. Knives, shrapnel, fragments of wood, glass, and cleavers jut out from her at awful angles. As she moves back, the soldiers can be seen. They pull the weapons out of her and strap her to a chair.
The camera focuses on her face in close up, looking blank, as though her consciousness has retreated for her own saftey, so is less able to feel the torture. Her expression is fixed and stricken. She is in shock, and her pale complexion is becoming more and more flecked with blood. The camera pulls back, the footage of the soldiers sped up while she is fixed in place. They labour around her with cleavers and knives in high speed, cutting at her arms, which are laid out flat on two tables. She is fixed in time, a constant, her arms being slowly cut into sections, worked from the fingertips to her forearms, elbows and shoulders, being cut apart slowly and in sections. They are dicing her. The camera pulls back further, and as they chop off the final stumps of her shoulders they slowly decapitate her, blood staining her beige jumper. She is an armless, headless trunk, even sections of her torso removed when the head and arms met her body, as though killing her was not enough and they had to go further. This is where I wake up, perhaps retreating from the image. It is horrible, seen in vivid, graphic detail. She is consious until the decapitiation, seemingly conscious through it. |
- just refecting on some stuff you reminded me of.