Nightmares

Nightmares
by Oliver Butterick

(Editor's Note: The following account was written in the middle of the night.)

It just happened again. My recurring nightmare is different. Instead of me being chased, now I’m the one doing the chasing.

It started out...I’m a SWAT officer in training. We’re on a Training Op, about to raid this hotel. For some reason, it’s like I’m in charge, and I ask for volunteers to lead the team into the building. One guy steps up, but he’s the same guy that has already been volunteering for everything (I remember this from an earlier part of my dream, but I can’t remember any of the details). So I tell him to step back and I ask for someone else to lead, someone who hasn’t done it before. This other guy steps up--he’s the umbrella holder guy from all of P-Diddy’s video’s. (I watched the movie Honey the other day and he was in it. Jesus is Jessica Alba completely hot.)

Anyway, that guy steps up and I thank him for taking the risk and pushing himself to develop as a leader (all that good leadership stuff that I learned once upon a time). We bust down the hall of the hotel, and I’m not wearing any Kevlar or even a gun. And (key point here) I have forgotton that it’s a training op, and I think that it's the real thing. Funny how your perception of the situation is all that matters in dreams.

So we bust in, and we’re going down the hall, and I look in all the rooms as we walk by, and there are dangerous looking people in all of them, with the doors wide open. I realize that we’re about to be ambushed, and I start running back up the hall, and bullets start flying from behind me. There are a couple of kids at the end of the hall and I grab this little girl. She had to be like 3 or 4 years old. We’re behind a corner, safe from the bullets, and I tell her to stay low toward the ground and to make her way out toward the side of the room. She stands straight up and takes a step toward the middle of the hallway and takes a bullet straight to the chest. Dammit!

Suddenly, the bullets are still flying from some sort of Gatling gun (like in The Jackal, which I also saw for the first time the other day), but now I’m in some sort of garage, and I’m with another officer. He’s just returned and he throws me a Kevlar vest and a gun. It’s a frickin' old Western style six-shooter, and I open it to find that there are only five bullets in it. Sheesh. I peek around the corner to shoot at the guy that’s shooting at us. I think about the fact that I really wish that I had one of those little dentist mirrors that cops and spies use in the movies to look around corners without getting shot.

Now we’re still in the garage, but the guy with the big gun is much closer (it’s as if we’ve moved closer to him, because his huge gun is stationary), and we no longer have corners to protect us from the gunfire. However, the gunfire is somewhat predictable, like a sprinkler. And it’s almost slow motion, like The Matrix, so I can actually avoid some of the bullets (which are shotgun shell-looking things, now that I can see them in slower motion). I’m dodging and dodging, and I take one straight to the middle of my Kevlar vest. There’s no explosion or piercing of skin or even a lot of pain from the impact. It just hits me and falls off. I now think that this is happening because I’m special or something. Not superhero special, but some sort of special that allows me to have bullets bounce off my Kevlar vest.

Now we're back in the hall. At the end of it is actually a grand ballroom, and the shooter is perched at the top of a double staircase. We get down there and we find the rest of our team, who has been taken hostage. I stand to the side of the room, and I have two letters in my hand. For some reason they need to get mailed. I don’t know if it’s information regarding this case or something else, but they really need to get mailed. The bad guys are going around to the members of my team and escorting them out of the room a few at a time. I try to hide. I see that my college roommate Leo is one of the bad guys. That seemed a little random.

So I’m trying to hide, but I get caught. Quickly, I start acting like I’m drunk, hoping somehow that will convince my captors to let me go, and it works! (Funny how logic works a little differently in dreams.) They escort me off, and they don’t see the letters that I deposited in the ballroom. They bring me up to the kitchen, where the shooter was perched and there are a few other SWAT guys there, and I look up to see a glass dome ceiling, and I’m thinking, “Why didn’t we just have backup come rappelling down through that ceiling?” Suddenly, I’m rappelling onto the grand patio in the back of the house. Now I’m swinging to some tree that I used to play on as a child, or at least that’s what it seems like...

I don't understand this. For years and years I’ve had the same recurring nightmare--I’m being chased, usually by two sets of people: 1) The cops (kind of scary), and 2) the people who framed me for something and got the cops to chase me (really scary). I actually think this is an extension of a recurring nightmare that I had as a kid, but it’s just evolved. As a young child, I would dream that I was riding a tricycle down a dark street at night. It was very dark, except the sidewalk, which was lit by some yellow streetlights. The building was black and completely nondescript. It was very scary looking--it’s like looking at a faceless man. I can’t remember if I was being chased per se, but I just remember that I had to get to the corner. I would struggle and struggle and I would get more and more scared the closer to the corner I got, but finally I would get to the corner, and turn...only to learn that I’ve started going down another identical nondescript street, and that I’m going to get more and more frightened as I near the next corner. This would continue until I would get so scared that I would wake up, sometimes screaming or crying. Yeah, that nightmare sucked. I’ve actually had it a few times as an adult, and it’s still really scary. But mostly, my nightmares consist of me being chased.

But not tonight. This is the second time in a row that I’ve had a scary dream and I’m not being chased. In fact, both times I was the one doing the chasing, and I think I was a member of law enforcement both times as well. So what I’m really wondering is WHY I’m now the chaser instead of being chased. I’m guessing that the whole chase theme in my nightmares stems from an old habit of running away from my problems. I guess I still tend to run away from other things (like relationships) even today. But I used to be running away (in my dreams), and now I’m running toward someone. I’m chasing someone. I haven’t really changed anything significant in my life that would merit such a dramatic change in my dreams. It’s very strange. Well, back to bed.

Oliver can be reached at oliver@babblog.com.