The dream again.
It has the elements of a thriller ground in the heaviness of real life. I'm haunted by the dream in the same way that I'm haunted by the murders within the dream.
It boils down to this: I want to be looked after, I admit that I cannot look after nor have any control over myself.
The murders committed like a sudden rash of rising blood, effortlessly, blindly, but irrevocably. With the bodies covered up, in the ground, under the stairs, I lead my banal everyday life with this rising feeling of panic - that soon I'm going to be handed over to a very public, very uncertain but ultimately painful and cruel future, one that I cannot avoid. One that is inevitably ME.
I feel desperate to put everything to right and confess to my crimes, all the while knowing it would mean handing myself over to a system I do not trust nor believe in. I am terrified of being raped, flayed and beaten in prison - my definition of a living hell, with all the nastiness of life concentrated into one small space and repeated constantly. If prison meant leading a quiet, anonymous life in near-solitude, I'd be afraid still but much more willing to turn myself in.
I feel desperate to put everything to right and confess to my crimes, all the while knowing it would mean handing myself over to a system I do not trust nor believe in. I am terrified of being raped, flayed and beaten in prison - my definition of a living hell, with all the nastiness of life concentrated into one small space and repeated constantly. If prison meant leading a quiet, anonymous life in near-solitude, I'd be afraid still but much more willing to turn myself in.
So I am living in between life and the prospect of so many different deaths. I notice that as I go about my business - to the mall, out to restaurants, around the house - I keep hurting myself badly but don't know exactly when it happens or how. Like the murders , these self-inflicted wounds just appear without precedent nor warning (for example, I glance arbitrarily at my hand to see - strange - my thumb badly flattened, crushed and the top part of it practically falling off - though I feel no pain). I am left to helplessly figure out how it happened and what it means, to provide an explanation to bewildered onlookers, or at the very least to feel in control of myself. I have no clue about any of it of course - and the sensation of guilt mingled with confusion simply grows and grows. I feel so alone and hunted - vulnerable prey for the future, judging public who, when they hear my crimes, will only want my blood. I have the timidity of a mouse and the crimes of an ogre. I don't want to think myself capable of atrocities; I want to think myself meek and small and harmless, but I know somehow I have committed evil and there is no sublimating, or diverting, that can "take my mind off it" and give me relief. Guilt stares bolt-eyed at me.
I long to be understood, restricted, taken care of. The craving for a mother to treat me like a baby is immense. I want to devolve all responsibility to her, feel the warmth of her embrace, that protection, acceptance. The thought of it is the only thing that gives my guilty self some temporary relief in the dream, but then I recall just how many murders there have been now, how many worried families, how much time I will lose in prison - probably my whole life - in debt for these purposeless crimes that I don't even remember committing and about which I have no particular emotion.
With these atrocities, it's almost like I have inherited them from someone or somewhere else, but really taken them on as my own.
With these atrocities, it's almost like I have inherited them from someone or somewhere else, but really taken them on as my own.
The worst is the knowledge of something that in itself cannot be sublimated or erased: covering up murders, trying to be foolproof about it and hating myself for such detached, unfeeling cruelty. And even though I do not know the names of the dead, nor remember their faces, the weight of the fact of their death by my hands is upon me, each and every one.
In the dream, I try to chide away the shame by writing song lyrics. Haunted by the prospect of having my voice taken from me by the media and my freedom of expression denied by constant torture in prison, I propose that I will exert myself through art in the last few remaining hours of freedom I have left - to have something strong, true and self-made. And to also have something by which to remember myself by when I am subjugate to a world that doesn't protect nor care to rehabilitate somebody like me.
But even as I wrote the first lyrics in ugly pencil handwriting on a maddeningly blank page, I could feel no force in them - I scorned my empty, unfeeling efforts and felt again, but more vaguely this time, a feeling of helplessness.
