I’m walking down a sidewalk (don’t remember the surrounding environment, but it seems very open, pseudo-urban, industrial. More cement. Maybe some grass. Maybe I’m in downtown Lincoln. Or Salt Lake City, since I recently watched SLC Punk and it seems to have had an affect on me… maybe some of the landscape shots seeped into my long-term memory.) There is a group of “kids” sitting on the sidewalk. They are trying to watch me subtly, but I’m older than they are and I’m “like them” – so I’m a few steps ahead because I’ve been like them longer than they have. (I’ve often thought that I would still have a teenage mindset after I became an adult.) so I know they’re watching me. I can tell they’re going to ambush me as I walk by. They don’t want anything, they’re just angry and violent and they want to smear somebody. Maybe kill me in the process. Maybe it’s a premonition, maybe I can see their weapons. I don’t remember. I know there are rocks lying nearby. Some of the kids seem to either be reaching “subtly” for the rocks, or already holding them out of sight.
As I walk by they start up. One or two kids throw rocks at me. But I change my pace with more subtlety than they had – I actually pass through the other side of the group right at the moment they had meant to surround me (a miscalculation they wouldn’t have made if they’d thought I knew what they were up to).
On my far thigh, I’m drawing my Stiletto (the one I laid on my desk before I went to sleep. This is how I know it’s a dream – and realizing this, I also realize that “realizing it’s a dream” cuts my time-to-wake down to a few real-time seconds, so I’d better resolve the situation quickly.) It seems there must have been other people around who I didn’t want to see this, or maybe I was trying, with what little knowledge of weapons that I have, to hold the knife in a good position (kind of like you keep your hands in front of
your face when boxing.)
*snap* They don’t hear it (the blade coming out)… they keep moving toward me as a threatening mass. I feel threatened, don’t show it on my face. I’m [...] fearless [...] with a machine gun. This irks them a bit… I turn so they can see my knife. In my mind, I’m fighting them off like an action hero movie already, all at once. (Interesting to note that I use visualization in a dream. I’m not sure how this is possible but I distinctly remember generating imaginary images which I also remember distinctly, images that were distinct from the “images” representing the events of my dream). The willing suspension of disbelief gives me the ridiculous ardor I need to hide the fact that I’m genuinely intimidated. They stop short, intimidated themselves. Hesitation. I’ll play to it. Make them confuse this perfectly valid moment of pausing-to-reevaluate-their-strategy with fear.
“OK, WHO WANTS TO GET CUT FIRST??” It’s a psychological question – smarter than a threat, smarter than using the F-word (which would make them feel tougher for being “man enough” to listen to), smarter than something like, “I’ll take you all on!”… no one wants to be that one guy who gets it before the others take me down. (Also, “getting cut” sounds like it hurts more than “getting killed.”) Crowds are braver than individuals. These guys have beat people up before, but none of them have ever been stabbed. And, they may be street smart, but none of them have studied psychology. I’ve often marveled at my real-life ability to bring academic, intellectual reason to bear on a situation within a fraction of a second. Besides which, if it comes down to it, I have nothing to lose by fighting them all at once, to the death, … in fact, they’ve taken away my other options. And I think they can see that.
I lift my knife a little and they back down in a torrent of epithets. I’m a [...] chicken. I ought to pick on someone my own size. That type of thing. (The word poser has to be in there, although I don’t remember it specifically. It’s a general insult that keeps careening around, bouncing off the walls my subconscious.) They seem to sit down or fade away, give up and turn away and I jerk abruptly into wakefulness. Apparently I pushed that dream all the way to its limit.
Interestingly, I have meditated on the idea of carrying a knife into my dreams with me (although not this one), concentrated on the feel of it’s contours in my hand, the way it looks. Drawing it from a pouch on my belt seems to have been a freebie, especially considering that this part of the dream wasn’t fully developed into an event which I experienced as much so as it was a fact (where did this knife come from? Oh, I pulled it out of that pouch.).
This is one of the first recollections I have of diffusing a threatening situation in a dream without violence. I’ve shot gangsters, [... fought someone off] with a frying pan, [... defeated] intruders [...] or hit them over the head with the leg from an old table I used to have. I’ve also been [killed in various ways...] but I’ve never beaten a person or group of people who threatened my life or safety without harming anyone. I wonder if this has something to do with my recent thoughts on the pure stupidity of violence and the senseless mind-set people have in my hometown of always being ready for a fight. My recent thoughts about running first and fighting later. Maybe it’s the discovery I made within the last couple of weeks that I can still fight after all my physical resources have apparently been exhausted that causes me to feel a bit safer expending other energies before taking someone on in a fight. In any case the non-violent solution didn’t lead to my destruction any more than a violent solution led to safety (since it most likely would not have).
In addition, this seems to have been a successful experiment in rudimentary lucid dreaming. I say rudimentary because this off-the-cuff solution is obviously contrived and unrealistic – how convenient that this particular demographic chose to ambush me instead of a more commonly occurring class of violent mob that prides itself on a nearly self-sacrificial machismo. (Like most of the gangs I would have been likely to encounter in my old neighborhood.) How convenient that they were unarmed (particularly with the type of pipes and clubs they would have had in the movie, or even with guns).
It’s also possible that I was using this dream as a vehicle for clarifying the observation I’ve made about “Lincolnites”… specifically that they possess a capacity for committing acts of violence, but seem to lack the “hardened” anti-social mentality of a real, hard-core “gangster.”
Now that I think of it, my choice of demographic may also yield some insight. Watching SLC Punk I noticed that the “real” punks spent time whipping up on the “posers” – the “punks” would sweep in and clobber the other kids, who never had a chance in the face of someone who was genuinely “hard core” and experienced with the tough realities of life on the streets. I’ve been bothered by the idea that maybe I will never be anything but a poser since I’m neither given over to violence nor stepped in daily, stereotypical “anarchic” behavior such as robbing liquor stores or driving 25 miles per hour over the speed limit. However in the dream, it was these “real punks” that threatened me, and that eventually backed down in the face of something that was “genuinely” intimidating, which was ME. It was perhaps a Freudian “fulfillment-of-a-wish” type confirmation that I’m that much more genuinely “hard core” than the “posers” that go around trying to use violence to prove how tough they are precisely by virtue of the characteristics they would criticize me for, possibly coupled with my geographical background. (Remember how they called me a poser and yet, in the end, it was they who were the posers.)
The other dream, I can’t remember.
And, so much for Luther loathing to play the part of “rhetorician.”