A disconcerting dream.

I don’t have very vivid dreams. I sleep really well and usually don’t remember what my subconscious has gone through by the time morning arrives. Saturday night, though… On Saturday night, I had the scariest dream I’ve ever had. Like a lame sitcom dream sequence, the difference between what happened during my waking hours and what happened in my dream are not clear. Even now, I can’t separate where the dream started or how it began.

I know, for sure, that I went to bed early for a Saturday night. Laziness won me over and I didn’t head into the city as originally planned. Also, I was being a bum because I was missing Bongo, and the last time I went to Bubble Lounge with him, there was a creepy old Chinese man in a leather jacket following us around, and I didn’t want to risk running into that guy again without the protection of B. But Bongo’s back now, so I’m feeling better. Tangential oversharing, aww… Anyway, I went to bed around 10:30. I know I was tired, so I probably conked out fairly quickly.

Suddenly, I was awakened by a sharp and long repetition of loud blasts. Unfortunately gun shots were the first thought that came to my mind. Also unfortunately, gun shots are not terribly out of the realm of possibility for my neighborhood. (See “It’s time to move.”) I also considered the source of the sounds being some kids with fireworks, but the sharp blasts didn’t have the fizzing sound that burning strings of fireworks do.

I’m fairly certain all of that happened, anyway. I thought I woke up, drew my hands to my chest, gasped, and looked outside my kitchen window through the crack of my bedroom door. No sounds followed the gun shots. No screeching tires, no crying babies, no barking dogs, no nothing. Doesn’t it seem like some combination of the above should have occurred? Bongo brought up the good point that maybe those sounds never even happened for real.

Anyway, I lay there for what must have been two or three tense minutes, debating what to do next. According to some studies presented in The Tipping Point, the probability of a witness to a crime reporting the crime is lessened when there are numerous witnesses present. In my case, I was weighing the probability of my next door neighbors calling the incident into the police. I’d called the police before for other issues, would this incident then be their turn?

Though I was scared, my heart beating fast, I eventually just closed my eyes and tried to burrow back into sleep. It was 1:56 in the morning. (This I knew because I had to put on my glasses to look at my alarm clock.)

Things get fuzzier here. I heard the blasts again, the rat-a-tat going for a good 15-20 seconds. I jarred awake again.

I slipped out of bed, wearing just my pajamas. I walked toward my living room. I stopped once I reached by bedroom door. A strange White man was in my living room, crouched down, staring straight at me. It was very similar to when Bruce Willis opened the bathroom door on his patient (Eric Bana?) in Sixth Sense. He stared at me with wide eyes. Both of us were frozen. In front of me, the stranger had placed my music stand (which is actually in my bedroom, so at least I know this part isn’t real) with a note scribbled on binder paper in trembly letters:

My name is

David Petersen.

Please don’t call the police.

My phone number is …

Somehow, I was supposed to have known this person, because my subconscious convinced me this David Petersen was the brother of a girl I knew in elementary school. (Only, when I knew her, she was an only child.)

I looked up from the note. I looked back at him. I didn’t call the cops. We just kept staring at each other, knowing fully well we were both trying to guess what the other was going to do next. Somehow, wearing nothing but a nightgown made me feel more vulnerable than if I were naked. The tension, the entire experience, was palpable.

Then a face popped into my window. A White woman with brown curly hair. Next to her, a couple of uniformed faces appeared. Two cops.

Though I was too stunned to have called the cops, the door opened. The inspector (I’m guessing the woman was an inspector) and the two cops tumbled in. They seized the man. They barely had to enter my apartment to get David Petersen, pulling his arms and picking him up from his feet. His eyes stayed glued to me. He said nothing. I said nothing. The door closed.

And that was the end of my dream.

My nocturnal mind moved on elsewhere, and I was left in the morning with an intense feeling of WTF.

As I drove to Bongo’s Sunday afternoon, I noticed the chow who usually lies at the corner of my block (I saw him on Friday night around the same time that my supposed sounds went off on Saturday night.) was not hanging out outside. What if whatever made those sounds got him? It certainly got me.

Nigtmare? Yes.
Recurring? God I hope not.