Tuesdays With Abhorrent Fiends vol. 34

Last night I had a dream with ghosts in it.

Now, I know this is more properly subject matter for a "Miercoles con los Amigos Invisibles" entry. But I feel like writing about it now, so we'll see how that goes. Dad thinks it could very likely have been ghosts rather than expressions of my unconscious, but allowed as it's hard to be sure with things like this. Besides which, beings don't tend to communicate unless they have something in common to communicate about. So maybe these were angry, pouty ghosts, who figured I'd listen. I've been feeling happy and confident lately, so my frustration and anger are present but on the back burner so to speak. It's damn easy for me to understand what I'm frustrated about right now though. What I don't understand is why I'm so happy! XD So maybe the dream was me happening to contact persons whose frustration and anger were much more powerful and things they hadn't been able to deal with for one reason or another. Emotional content can be symbolically interpreted either way, as straight dream or as communication. Makes for further pondering, is all.

Earlier parts of the dream I don't remember; I've been having non-remembered dreams lately that seem to address my impatience and frustration with my life situation.
After that, I was getting into a boat. Plain boat, either unpainted or paint worn off by time, no oars, no other passengers. The water the boat was about to go across felt like a lake or large river, an inland body of water. Trees could be seen on the opposite bank in my peripheral vision, but in the direction of "forward" as I got into the boat there was lack of perception. Twilight, dusk/dawn sort of lighting.

When I got there, lighting and background trees and such were the same, but the place was definitely a swamp. There was a sort of camp hastily or poorly made, with crappy tents that were completely failing to not fall apart and gradually sink into the mud. There were people; the tents were their places but they didn't think of them as home. They didn't like them and believed it was unfair and horribly unjust that they were there in the stupid crappy tents in the nasty disgusting swamp.

There was one representative person-image whom I was looking at most of the time. Beneath other characteristics which I'll get to in a minute, he appeared male, caucasian, adult but not elderly. He had reddish-brown hair, short, kinda curly, beard along the jaw. I don't think it mattered to them, but I didn't get any sense of non-maleness from anybody else there. They didn't seem very differentiated at all in their misery. Oh! And everything was greyed out there. I mean, yes, I was seeing in color, there just wasn't anything colorful. It reminds me, now I think of it, of the weird rot forest where I met my the little girl in the treehouse. The scene looked flat and grey because nothing was alive enough to grow. (Even if someone was alive enough to complain. ^_^;; That still counts where I come from!)

They were all horribly diseased. There were lesions all over their skin and where there weren't lesions the skin looked black and blue and sallow. I got info packets of other stuff, though these did not show up as sensory data. Which I think was intentional on the part at least of tour-guide-fellow, otherwise I would have been so out of there. Like the weather--when it wasn't raining it was unbearably hot and the mud was always sticky and sucking and trying to pull them down and drown them. There were stinging, biting insects everywhere and they couldn't escape them. The groundwater was all muddy and just had different bugs in it, the rain was too drizzly and the wrong temperature to be refreshing. Their disease (diseases?) made them feverish and delirious and terribly, terribly thirsty, and itchy and ache all over. As they got weaker, too weak to try to re-pitch their tents or swat the insects that bit them or wipe the mud off their faces, their feelings of unfairness and outrage and homesickness and self-pity got stronger and stronger. Until those feelings were the only things left in their spirits as they sank into the mud and suffocated on it.

If they were real ghosts and not expressions of my frustration with stuff, maybe they were Vietnam vets. It'd make sense given all the imagery. Man, it would suck to bring a death-circumstance like that along with you, and not have anything left in you that would help you remember how to be something else. How to be the person who fought and struggled and bonded with others to the point of getting there as a team, but not even knowing how to band together to get out of there as a team! How much would it suck for you and your buddies to be ghosts together and not even remember each other well enough to want to help each other out of the memory of the horrible swamp? To be so focused on staying alive enough to complain that you can't even remind your friends, who died with you, "hey, guys, we may be dead, but at least we're alive enough to complain!"

I dunno what, if anything, they were hoping I could do to help. Maybe just being somebody alive from elsewhere and seeing what was happening to them, making a story out of it, can give their situation enough different substance that they might have an idea of escape. An idea of a hope of escape, rather, which is even more difficult in its way to get ahold of than the hope itself.