Dream # 65

Things That Make Ya Go……What The ?

February 22, 2004

Last night, I dreamed something that’s going to be very difficult to narrate, but I’ll give it my best shot. The dream started out with this man who had recently been in all the news reports and papers. He was accused of kidnapping or murdering his 1-year-old daughter—at any rate, the baby was missing, and nobody knew what had happened to her. The man was out on bail, and he was proclaiming to one and all that while he and his daughter were at the zoo one morning, he turned his back on her for just a second. They were standing in front of the lion cage. When he looked back, one of the lions had stuck its head through the bars and swallowed his daughter whole. There was no blood, and nobody saw it happen, so the man couldn’t prove this accusation. Nobody would listen to him, and although he tried to sue the zoo, the judge had thrown the case out.

So this man had decided to take matters into his own hands. He was crazy with grief and anger and the need for revenge. I was some sort of neutral observer, and I watched the man as he snuck into the zoo late at night and waited for the security guard to pass by the lion exhibit. Once the guard was gone, the man climbed into the lion pit carrying a huge butcher knife. I guessed he was planning attack the lion with it, or try to cut his daughter out of the lion’s stomach or something. He was muttering nonsense as he passed me, and I couldn’t understand anything he was saying.

Then the dream shifted to the path leading away from the zoo. The man with the knife came out of the zoo. I thought he must have been successful in whatever he had wanted to do, because he was still alive and was also covered from head to foot in the lion’s blood. By now, it was early morning, and the man started across the city, back toward his home. I followed him. In the distance, I could see someone jogging. The man recognized the jogger as a friend of his, so he hid, because he didn’t want his friend to see him with blood all over his clothes.

The dream shifted again, and now I was a woman whose name I don’t know. I was talking to Melanie, the mother of the baby girl who was missing. Melanie was sitting in a park, resting against a fallen tree and reading a book. When I asked what she was reading, she showed me the book. I couldn’t make out the title; and now I don’t remember what the book was about. All I know is that when I read a small section of it, I was horrified. Something about the book was deeply disturbing. Somehow, I knew that whoever read this book cover-to-cover would end up completely and irreversibly insane. I said, “There is something seriously wrong with this book!”

Melanie just sat there looking at me with this horrible, ear-to-ear grin on her face. Her lips and gums were bright red, as though she had been eating raw meat and her mouth was full of blood. I asked her if her husband (crazy lion guy) had read this book, too. Melanie didn’t answer me, but I already knew that she and her husband both had read the book and gone insane. I was sure that the little girl was dead somewhere and that these two crazy people had killed her.

I started to feel really disoriented, and I knew it was because I had read a small portion of the book. Suddenly, I remembered that a dozen copies of this book were lying around at my school (which one, I have no idea), just waiting for unsuspecting students to pick them up and read them. There were also a few copies at the church building. (?) I started running, trying to get to those books so that I could destroy them before anyone else read them. Then the dream ended.

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