My dreams have a false but recognizable geography to them. The street I grew up on figures heavily in many of them and the surrounding neighborhood, skewed by dream logic repeats from dream to dream. Some three blocks down the street from my own block, my dreams consistently feature a dark wood paneled restaurant with hotel rooms above them. No such place existed near my house nor ever did but it is consistently there. So too is a house near the end of the cul-de-sac, always abandoned, always dusty and furnitureless with naked wooden beams, worn and pocked by termites. I mention this because my dream last night featured this stable but non existent neighborhood--a shadow of the Walnut Acres in which I grew up. And the feeling of the unheimlische, not just within the dream, but outside it, is important.
I'm in a minivan, driving north on Topanga Canyon blvd and I hit Ventura. I park behind a gas station and get out on foot. As I walk east, way from my little piece of dream childhood, there is a street faire going on. It is night and people are dining al fresco, strings of light illuminating their laughing faces. People are waiting in line to get into bars and there are little dyed silk tents set up from which people are hawking their wares. I can hear this man I'm about to meet for blocks before I see him. He's no one specific, a douchey frat boy who reminds me of no one so much as Topher Grace though his features are indistinct. He's talking about some girl he intends to seduce to his friend. I'm his friend sometimes. Sometimes it's a third person standing near us.
A woman approaches us. She's a short, brunette with a bob--pretty but features are full of anger. She's wearing a tube top and has a deep red scar across her clavicle. The douchebag points at her, "Hey! Look who it is!" He leans in conspiratorially and says "The last time I saw you, you were all tied up." He gives us a sidelong glance and winks. She leaves in a huff. His friend (not me at this point) gives him a fist bump. I go cold. In my head I have a clear vision of that last encounter. She is naked. Bound at her wrists, ankles, throat and waist by heavy iron manacles. They are in some sort of cave and she is seething. This whole experience walks the very edge of consent and I am seething, somehow enraged with an undercurrent of jealousy. Feeling at all desirous in this situation makes me deeply unhappy and fills me with self loathing. The douchebag pulls a butterfly knife from his white slacks and gives a sharp flick of his wrist. He opens up her flesh near the clavicle the source of the scar.
I come to and am back in my car. I'm filled with a blind rage at this man and his casual leer at the woman he disfigured. I'm driving, white knuckled, my face contorted by anger. I've called the police about this man, I know. He won't hurt anyone else but I have to do something myself. I'm fuming, hyperventilating as I drive around. I start running errands to distract myself. I go to a grocery store to buy a palate of soda. I drop the soda off at the McMansion of a girl I went to high school with. She's having a party and I listlessly shuffle by them. All this time a clinical, detached voice is narrating, as though on a handheld tape recorder "The condition is marked by paranoid delusions. It predicates itself on the desire to take revenge, even when confronted with overwhelming evidence of their folly. In this condition they are doomed to play out their fantasies, disconsolate and immune to all help."
I am looking down on all this. Hearing the psychologist describe my confusion, seeing myself seethe and plot action, despairing as the police tell me I have no evidence. I saw him cut her, I think to myself. I can't bring myself to admit it might all be imagined. I wake up.
