Warning: long post.
Okay, I’m getting off the Dope after this or at least seriously cutting back, I swear. But I wrote a fantasy novel (that I realistically assume will likely never be published) during a long span of chronic pain that kept me in bed for months a while back, and though now my schedule is picking up again, I wanted to keep at it. In search of material for a new book I recently started several little habits. This includes making an effort to remember my dreams, with considerable success so far. I’m surprised my how fast I went from remembering a single line worth of stuff (“it was about Ernest Hemingway’s wife”) to a full page of detail (recently an epic Aesop set in India with a talking dragon that was concerned for the environment). I just had to share last night’s though. Be warned: laughably inaccurate and implausible scenes ahead.
For some unexplained reason my best friend and I are in the army. No particular army, just an army. We’re forcibly drafted in as exactly we are, her a tall scrawny weakling going to school to someday lead a nonprofit organization and me a tiny little bookworm who hasn’t gotten in to paramedic school yet- clearly neither of us fighing material just yet. And there’s no physical conditioning, the vast majority of boot camp consisted of sitting at desks arranged in a U-shape in some kind of classroom setting while the drill sergeant stood in the middle of the room and lectured, occasionally wrote shit on the board.
She does, however, bring a rifle with a bayonet on the end to class every time. Sometimes it’s in her hands as she teaches. She keeps being about to show us how to properly use a bayonet but either getting sidetracked or getting interrupted. Finally the day before we’re to go to war (apparently right in the literal backyard of the boot camp) she does it again and I say something like, “Ma’am, I still don’t know how to use a bayonet, ma’am!” loudly from my seat. No idea whether dream-me was trying to be a smartass or not. But this time she outright refuses to teach us, and sends us all to our bunks right now even though it’s like 2pm in the afternoon. I’m so frustrated you could boil water in my mouth.
The next morning as everyone’s being dragged out of bed way earlier than they’d like, dream-me wakes up to find I’ve got no bra on, I don’t know how to use a bayonet and the sergeant is chewing me out for both those things. As she’s shouting that I’m unprepared, machine-gun fodder and not going to last five seconds etc etc, I take the rifle from her in anger (even though this is one hell of a muscular woman) and slash open her stomach with it, well below the ribs, so she doubles/falls over looking like she committed seppuku. As I calmly lead my best friend and several of my fellow trainees out the back door (with a hostile force gathering on the other side of the building!), I’m thinking, “Damn, that was perfect technique.” *
It gets better. I kid you not, dream-me then wakes up again (the previous part of the dream having ended when we all get into the hallway of our barracks on our way out) in the morning to find my beloved but somewhat abrasive father has come to visit uninvited, is playing loud country music which woke me up, and I’m wearing pajama pants, the top from a set of (stolen?) scrubs, my best friend’s cherry-red sweater that I borrowed from her a month ago in real life- and no bra.** So I get up and rush into the living room, ask my dad what he’s doing here- he says I slept through a bus that was supposed to take me to some kind of summer camp for college kids at the crack of dawn.
He’s pissed, though relatively mildly compared to the drill sergeant lady, and being annoying about it so I storm off into a huge kitchen that my real apartment doesn’t have. My best friend, who quit smoking about six months ago IRL, is sitting there smoking. Her mother, who despises me in real life, is in the background having an all-out bitchfest at our expense. Best friend says I look like shit and drags me back to bed, concerned. And as I fall asleep in the dream, I finally, finally wake up in real life.
- CBC did a WWI documentary a while back where they took a handful of descendants of Canadian WWI vets, stripped them of all their 21st-century clothes and technology, put them through the same training their grandparents had and then had them re-enact battles on the actual fields they were fought on, with actual guns, in actual trenches etc etc. There’s footage of the guy playing a drill sergeant giving them detailed instructions on how to kill a guy with a bayonet without losing your blade in his ribs, and I followed those instructions to the letter in the dream.
** Being a vertically challenged woman who needs a D-cup, I sleep with a bra on so I can toss and turn comfortably.
