This dream started with the usual kind of bullshit. I was in the car, my husband behind the wheel bordering on a panic attack because he doesn’t know how to drive any better than I do, and we were trying to make decisions at highway speed. I wanted to help him but I couldn’t make myself stop trying to explain the song “God Wrote Cum Junkie” to my homeboy Jeremy, who talks very little and was giving no feedback.
This transitioned into yet more of usual kind of bullshit, in bathrooms because IRL I had to go to the bathroom. In this part I was a young doofus of the kind that must get his ass kicked and learn kung fu in certain movies. Except in this dream, my destiny was to become a murder victim. Martial arts gangster types (yakuza?) were going to murder me for an accidental transgression against Kung Fu Laws.
The dream switched perspectives to have me in the role of one of those gangsters. The plot was supposed to be that I feel sympathy for the bozo who is about to get offed by my homies, and turn on them to save his life. But I couldn’t get over my sense of honor to betray them, until it was too late. On seeing previous me’s brutal death (lightly strangled and sawed open from stomach to sternum), I snapped and attacked my homies to avenge him.
Still in a filthy restroom, I quickly killed the guy who did the deed, leaving just the lady among my criminal colleagues. I offered to just drown her as a mercy – less painful than what I did to the first guy. She agreed and I started trying to drown her in the sink.
People kept coming in to use the bathroom, including a mom and her children. It was taking forever to drown my homegirl, and the mom explained to the kids that there was nothing they could do – it would be like trying to save a baby bird that fell out of a nest. Yakuza ladies getting waterboarded to death = the circle of life.
This felt grody but I also felt committed to the path, that I couldn’t make myself stop trying to kill her.
Anyway, this is the second time within a short while that I’ve had a dream shift to a different perspective, and from that perspective, watched my previous self get murdered by criminals. That’s a heckuva recurring theme.
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Before movies, tv, videos, etc, did dreams play out with the shifts in perspective we now take for granted?
i know! i have to think movies and tv changed the fuck out of our dreams. literature could give a hint to this. many stories from before the advent of film have a play-like quality, like they were written with the proscenium arch in mind. however, some do almost feel cinematic. i think the original carmilla reads a lot like a hammer film. i don’t know what to think.