In the way of dreams, this experience began in the middle and ended abruptly. There’s no way to explain this particular fact. It just happens the way it happens. In the way of dreams. And it happens like this every single time.
I awoke into the dream in the cab of a pickup truck with my best friend. I don’t know why she was driving, since I’m the driver, and that’s how I knew this would be a strange one. Completely out of my control. I was the passenger in this experience. In the grips of some controlling force that I had no idea how to break free of…and frankly, no desire to.
I awoke into the dream in the cab of a pickup truck being driven by my best friend. We came upon a scene of disaster! What appeared to be some kind of missile attack or giant monster stampeding through the area. Police cars, tractor trailers, pieces of building, regular cars and station wagons, pickup trucks. They were strewn all about as though some small child having a tantrum had descended upon the area. Digging holes in the ground. Crushing cars. Tearing people apart. We swerved through the mess. She frightened me with how quickly she careened through the wreckage. The pickup truck had no business driving over that police light bar. That pile of dirt and glass. People crying all around. Police out of their cars trying to figure out what had happened, but that wasn’t our concern. I was going to be late for work. I needed a shower, so I needed to get home.
In the way of dreams, we arrived at the diner. There was no transition. We were at the diner, and that was that. The diner outside of a seedy motel. Walking into the diner, I noticed that the patrons were mostly children. Balloons affixed to the bench seats floated above the strangely-silent situation. Children playing and laughing and screaming and yelling and making no sound at all. A newcomer to the party arrived, leading two baby pigs on leashes. I’ve never touched a pig. I wanted to touch a
pig. So I got up and went to one of the pigs. That pig, somehow off its lead, decided to wander outside and climb into the school bus that had brought all the children, but when I followed the pig onto the bus, it had vanished. Not into thin air. There was no air at all. The pig had never been. I turned around perplexed and reentered the diner. But the diner was empty. All the children were gone. The other patrons? All gone. The food on the plates…the plates on the tables…they were all still there. But everyone was gone. Not wanting to take too much time to figure out the situation, I left the diner through the back door. I still had to get to work. I was still going to be late.
Things get a little muddy at this point. In the way of dreams, of course. I walked around to the backside of the motel and was on the second floor. I didn’t climb stairs, and this has nothing to do
with the rest of the dream. I was on the second floor, walking through the door of the motel, and as I straightened my body, I saw the building in front of me. My home. My apartment. What a shit hole.
The plywood door behind me – a short door – was situated inside a tall, white stucco wall. The courtyard ascended a hill. The short plywood door into the building was locked, but it was my home, so I had a key. After the excitement from before, I invited my four friends into my home. I still needed to get ready for work, but they didn’t have anywhere to be, so I had decided to let them stay. I had plenty of room.
We stooped to get through the door. We climbed the stairs. To the right, on the first landing, was a staircase leading down to the bathroom. And another staircase leading from that landing down to the laundry room. ‘When did they put a laundry room in my apartment?’ I recall thinking. But that didn’t matter much. Not at the time. To the left of the landing was a room with a couch. Just a regular room with a regular couch and a regular low ceiling. Nondescript. Unimportant.
The low ceiling continued up the staircase and throughout the rest of the building. At the top of the stairs, the apartment opened out to the right. It seemed that it encompassed the entirety of this huge building. A living room with a kitchenette and a bed in the middle of the floor. A sealed door to the
right. Heading through the living room was a den. Fireplace in the corner. Sofa and chairs. To the right, a door frame with no door leading through into a den. Another couch facing a large round-screened television set from the last century (haha). Animal heads on the walls. Every surface in the entire place maroon or burgundy or rust or blood red. Everything dingy. Like a scene from a medieval castle, but with all the modern conveniences. But I still had to be at work by 9:30, and now,
it was 8:43. I was dirty, and I needed to take a shower.
I made my way to the bathroom, but I missed. I went too far down and ended up in the laundry room. There had never been a laundry room in my apartment before – I don’t know how I could have missed it – but there it was. Plain as the daylight streaming in through the basement windows. Walking back
to the door to the room was difficult, though. The laundry room had flooded, and I was forced to climb along the many sets of pipes along the wall. As I reached the stairs, climbing above the flooded cellar room, the waters rushing below me, I remember wondering how something like this could happen to me. I didn’t even have a laundry room! And I still needed to get to work! I still needed a shower! I’m no action adventurer! I’m just a guy who’s late for work!
Running up to the first landing, I entered the bathroom. My pants were hanging from the shower rod, but things were not good! The floor in this room was flooded, too, and I remember being angry because I would surely have to clean this up. I had always had a bathroom, so this must somehow be my fault!
Water was running down the wall above the toilet flooding the room. Before I could get too entranced by the water, however, I looked out the window and saw a girl, a beautiful girl, entering the courtyard through the tiny door. Entering the locked door to my apartment! I rushed up to meet her in the stairs.
“Quick! They’re after me!” issued from her lips as she saw me. I ran down to the door to lock it. “I prefer that you leave it unlocked,” she said, “I have my reasons.” She didn’t seem to mind as I opened the door, picked the key up from the hole in the lower door frame, and locked the door because I immediately unlocked the door again and dropped the key back into the hole, closing the door over it. I remember wondering where my friends were as she led me through a hole in the wall
at the bottom of the stairs. A car was parked in front of the door, so I guessed that was why she wanted the door to stay unlocked. I looked across the courtyard, and out of the garage came a gaggle of touristy-looking people who looked suspiciously like the cast from the HBO series Girls. But I had no time for this. It was 9:12, and I still needed to get to work, so I went back into my apartment through the hole in the wall, and ran back upstairs to the the bigger room. My friends were still nowhere to be seen.
There came a knocking on my door, and I walked back downstairs. Opened the door to let in a beautiful young lady. Petite. She climbed the stairs to between the landing and the top of the stairs and opened the wall into a clean section of the apartment that I’d never seen. When I questioned her about this, she told me she was checking on her grandmother. But I never got a chance to check for myself.
She must have been pleased by her discovery because her mouth attached to mine as she leapt into my arms from the passage. Our limbs intertwined, I carried her down to the landing to the room with the low ceiling and the nearest surface, but a friend was sleeping on the couch. Setting her down and grabbing her hand, I pulled her up the stairs behind me, but another two friends were sleeping on the bed, and another one was on the other couch! Frustrated, we laid down on the floor. Her mouth frantically kissing mine as I stripped her of her clothing. Work could wait.
BANG!
I jumped at the sound of the door being kicked open, and the girl was gone. My friends, awakened by the commotion, had already left. I remembered their passage, but at the time, I hadn’t cared. Now, with the girl gone and a new intruder in my home, I wished desperately for their presence.
I reached the top of the stairs in time to meet a furious teenager. Short and stout in a set of gray coveralls, he was screaming and raging about how this had been his home, and he needed to get his things. He had little interest in me, except that I was the audience to his raging.
Stalking through the apartment, he entered the sealed door in the living room wall, and it occurred to me that it must have been his room when this was his home. His behavior was odd, though. He had no interest in trinkets or valuables alike. He was gathering up every likeness of a certain kind of animal – an animal that looked suspiciously porcine – from every room in the place and putting them into a standard white kidnapping-style sack. I was too amazed to ask questions. His jumpsuit was
imprinted with the name of a mental institution, and I’ve learned through hard experience that you never ask a crazy kid questions when he decides to steal all of the pigs from your dream. The clock read 9:34, so I was officially late for work. And, as the child slowed his movements and calmed down, I heard a vibrating from the floor beside the bed. My 8am alarm ringing. My dream was done, and I was awake.
Unlike most dreams, this one ended as I awoke. My mind blasted, I wandered around my home trying to remember what I had just experienced. And, as I looked at the table, I heard an oinking sound, and the dream came flooding back into my memory.
They had stolen all of my pigs.