2/09/2006

I just remembered bits of my dream from last night.

And boy was it creepy. No wonder I kept waking up...I think this euthanasia story I'm writing is really getting to me.

Basically, there were a number of cases in this town I was in where kids went missing and no one knew what had happened to them. Boy was it realistic. Finally, we found in this one house that there was a sort of basement house...an old house underneath the original house, kind of like an archeological find that was built over and no one knew it existed. Except, of course, the family's kid, apparently. And she would go down there to play games or something with dolls (you know, the creepy dolls they always have in horror movies)...Anyway, one day there was an earthquake or something, and she got stuck down there, the way she normally climbed back up was completely blocked off and since the ceiling was pretty high (it looked like a barn), she had no way to get up. It was kind of like being stuck in a well. Eventually she constructed a sort of ribbon string (kind of like how people tie bedsheets together to climb out a window, except this was done with gift wrapping ribbons, very thin...), and she edged her bony self out of the wreckage, just barely, back to her house and family... days after she'd disappeared.

Another girl had not been so lucky in that town. She had somehow had a similar experience, but she was found drowned and bloated in the ocean (bay?) near the town...fished out of the water days after she had gone missing.

Of course, all the families as well as myself (and I was somehow intimately related to all this)...were devastated. I was over at the house with the dungeon-ish basement...hanging out with friends. In this instance I was much younger than I am now, at least mentally very young, but physically still the same. My friends all decide to get going somewhere else, but I hold back for a second. I believe I see a cat or something disappear, and I decide to follow it...Sure enough, it leads me into the opening to that basement...and, as I peer through, I fall in. About 20 feet below. Into a pile of dirt, hay, or something. When I stand up, it's like I'm transported into the murky pages of some old, smelly book. I also realize I am completely trapped and no one knows where I am. I look around the room imagining how the girl felt. For some reason, though she seemed to have gotten out (that's how we knew her story), I have the retrospective premonition (if that's even possible), that she died on her way out...

I have this horrible pit in my stomach, the kind where you know, you just know, you're completely screwed, that you screwed up and you're going to pay.

Then I spot the strings she had tied together...The girl was at least three times lighter than I...

I ease myself onto the edge of the string and start climbing...sliding myself as gracefully and lightly across...before I feel like it seems to be breaking...I don't know if I make it or not.

I do know that I disappear for days from everyone's site. At least a week goes by...people notice that I'm gone...Meanwhile, I am trying to minimize dehydration by swallowing as few times as possible throughout the day, sleeping a lot...and, I'm considering my own blood as a possible source of nutrition...

In one version in my head I believe a family dog or maybe that same cat finally gets someone to see the opening...and finally save me. In another version...I may just wake up, forever trapped in that oddly sunny basement. The wholesome sunshine seemed to just further emphasize the hopelessness of the situation. It was such a tease. The outside world was going on, life was bright and animated, while inside that basement there was nothing--sterility, emptiness, a wasting away...

No wonder I woke up so unsettled today.

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