I think I'm dreaming someone else's dreams.
I had a very vivid and detailed dream this morning. In this dream, while I looked through her eyes and I knew what she was thinking and feeling, I was also able at the same time to analyze her actions with my own power of thought. The dream was also entirely in a foreign language, I'm assuming Arabic, of which she only knew a few phrases and of which I, of course, knew nothing.
She was in her bedroom, a grand room, with floor to ceiling silk curtains, cream coloured. She was standing in front of her dressing table, putting the final touches to her outfit: red alligator ballerina flats, long red silk skirt, cream silk blouse (same as the curtains), and an eye-catching wine red pashmina of some indeterminate flowy material. She picked up her silver handled brush to smooth her thick blonde curtain of hair. I couldn't see her face because she had brushed her hair over her eyes, but I knew she was unhappy.
She was planning her escape.
Her husband, a foreign dictator of olive complexion and sporting a huge moustache whom she had married against her will, had arranged for her a public birthday celebration. She knew it was nothing more than a publicity stunt, as there had been rumblings amongst the populace that she was unhappy with her cruel spouse. This event was to be an overt display of mutual affection between her and her husband.
A knock at her door from one of the servants or guards or publicists (I'm not sure who) signaled to her that it was time. She put down the brush, smoothed down her skirt, and followed the vague shape of a person down a long hallway to the outside.
Once outside, she was to cross before the crowd and join her husband at a podium on the other side of a war memorial (which I think probably commemorated the dictator's own victories). She managed to smile at the cheering crowd through her veil of hair, lifted a gloved red hand to wave as she turned to walk in front of the memorial. As she did, hundreds of tamed pigeons took flight around her, the air from their wings playing havoc with her hair.
Instead of joining her husband on the podium, she kept walking, smiling and waving, past the dignitaries, past the crowd, past the gate at the end of the park. Once she was beyond the sight of the crowd and her publicly embarrassed husband who was likely too afraid of looking a fool to raise the alarm, she began to run. She headed downhill, toward the river.
I'll stay on the side streets, she thought, but I won't go far. I'll tire quickly and they'll catch me if I try to go far. I'll just hide somewhere close by until they've gone past me, then I'll find a way out of this city.
At a bend in the road, she climbed over a guardrail by the river's edge. She slithered down the short gravel embankment and crouched down by the water. Hearing someone coming her way, she rose quickly and ducked behind a concrete pillar that supported a large bridge above her head. There wasn't too much room behind the pillar, so she knew that some of her was visible. *I* thought perhaps she should have picked a less obvious outfit. She pressed her face into the concrete and closed her eyes, praying. Then there was a tugging on the edge of her pashmina. She ignored it at first, then it became more insistent, pulling her away from her hiding place.
She slowly peered out at her pursuers with wide frightened eyes. I knew this was partly a sham to encourage sympathy, because she was, for the most part, dead inside. She saw two round brown faces looking back at her, big men who silently pulled her away and along the embankment to a spot further under the bridge. She wasn't sure if these were friends or enemies. She didn't understand what they were saying.
They hustled her, inexorably but with a certain amount of gentleness, to a flat level of concrete at the water's edge. The roaring of motor traffic echoed under the bridge. On this concrete pad were two squat white aluminum sheds. The two men were rummaging around in one of them, their attention, for the moment, distracted.
She looked despondently out at the wide, cold river. And saw a vision of herself swimming, no, drowning, with a smile on her face, somewhere out in the middle. Crying hysterically, she stumbled towards the river's edge, slithering on the gravel leading to the water. She struggled out of her pashmina, which was tangled about her arms, and leaned over to take off her shoes. She was crying so hard she had trouble with her balance, and so this took longer than was really necessary.
I found myself thinking that, with the amount of noise she was taking and the time she was taking to make this suicidal plunge, she would be caught again by the two men before she was five feet away from the bank. I hoped that they would catch her before she dove in too far, so that she and I wouldn't have to spend the rest of the day wandering around in cold wet silks.
She seemed to think this kamikaze mission would succeed, and she marched into the water, which actually wasn't as cold as I was expecting. When she was in up to her knees, she could hear her kidnappers behind her, yelling. She raised her arms to make a swan dive into the water, and they caught her before she broke the surface. They carried her back to the shore and sat her on the cold concrete, after handing her her shoes and pashmina. We were lucky - she had only gotten the hemline of the skirt wet, but she was shivering, and still crying.
While the two men were arguing over what to do next, they heard other voices shouting behind them. She knew that, regardless of the motives of her current companions, these next pursuers were bad news - they were definitely her husband's men. She followed the two men into the second one of the sheds, a cramped stuffy affair filled with broken bits of things. She struggled into the corner and tried to force herself behind a tiny obstacle, but I knew she was too big to be able to hide for long. The larger of the two men braced his body against the door.
She cowered in the corner, eyes on the floor, as her husband's men attacked the door. The big man was, so far, standing fast, but I could feel the shed wobbling under the men's assault. I assumed that they had weapons, knives and guns, and wondered how long before they started going after the walls of the shed, and how quickly they would manage to pierce through the thin metal walls.
I found myself hoping that she would think the same thing, and perhaps move away from the sides of the shed, but she simply sat, staring blindly before her, cowering in fear.
Then she turned her head slightly to the left, and we saw a rectangle of slivered light. A vent, large enough for her (or someone else) to come through. The men outside began banging on the walls of the shed. The din increased, shouting and banging and swearing. Everywhere there was dust and garbage being jumbled around. Just at that moment the big man stumbled back into her - the door had been breached.
And then I woke up.
Posted by Ally at January 25, 2009 09:49 AM