The Dream Where The Guys Has His Forearms Eaten Off

I don't have photo that relates to this post, about the dream last night. So I'll just put up this shot I took at the bus stop awhile back. I just found the color of the bike and how it lay against the metal bar looked unique. So there you go. Now, on to the dream.

Several things figured into my waking from yet another of the always the same dystopian dream around 4:45 this morning. There seems to be an abundance of unmarked helicopters flying overhead, up from two a day to, well, last night I took photos of them every 20 minutes, one shot directly overhead. They come from Midway Airport, go to some area south of here, but close enough that a return trip is within those 20 minutes. Suddenly, there are copters flying outside my window even when I'm typing at midnight. OK, so there's that. I knew I was having lunch with Greg today, so that set a certain location. Rich Chwedyk has mentioned to me his own recurring Chicago, one with looming skyscrapers both east and west. I wonder if such simple things change the locations for him, as well. But the real instigator was this, I caught an ad for SURROGATES, a new Bruce Willis paranoia flick. Which made me think of 12 MONKEYS, which made me think that I would dream badly,yet its a film I will watch every single time I catch it on cable, even if I turn it off after a certain amount of time. So, yea, it was that. Mostly. I'm sure the helicopters ate at my thalamus, too.

Again I am in the Loop. Burnt out buildings, some reduced to rubble, closer to dawn than to midnight. As I've described here before, the streets are rain slicked, there's a whole resistance vibe going on, and further north, its lit up at ground level and there's orders being given in garbles of static. This time it was different, there were even faces I knew in the dream. I'm with Sean & Jessica from Omaha, my friend Greg, and the rest are the same unknowns yet familiar because they are in EVERY dream, and we are in a huge room that is completely gray. Obviously, its an office building, but in every other dream I have been on the street, always between State and Wabash, don't ask me why. The el runs above Wabash. In the dream, the tracks dangle, they've been doing that since maybe 2005, prior to that the tracks were there, simply rusted and broken.

We are all armed and wearing bulletproof vests. I leave the building through a stairwell that leads to an alley, but most of the wall is gone, you can see the alley through strands of rebar. I'm on Monroe Street, not State, which fits with that being the street I meet Greg at. In the dream I know the signs on the abandoned buildings even if I wasn't hanging out with Greg. FourEyes, Subway. Instead of the Jamba Juice, it was the old W. Bell Co., a place where you'd ask for something (usually wedding or anniversary gift worthy), they'd write the order up and stick in a pneumatic tube, then your boxed order would arrive on a conveyor belt. Each storefront empty. But in front of W. Bell, there is a black man, young and seemingly healthy, lying on a cart that was the blendy color of quartz. His eyes were open, he was staring right at me. And his arms were chewed off at the forearms, the rest of the limbs dangling from the plastic cart. He says to me "Who would have thought rubbing an arthritic elbow was some kind of gang sign to these--" I stop hearing him then, and I'm guessing this is to keep me from knowing the real villains in this recurring mess, but it's also because I look up in time to see a dart hiss into my cheek, high up, near the sinus wall. Then I'm awake in the real world, the clock reading 4:45. The clock almost always reads 4:45. Doesn't matter if I go to bed at midnight or at 3 AM. The only good thing is that I seem to be getting more clues to just what the hell is going on, I might wait a few weeks and kind of will myself to a different intersection, see what happens. I can still see the sweat on the face of the guy missing his hands and forearms.

Dammit. I decided to go to Google and find a capture of Bruce Willis in 12 MONKEYS and check out the logo. Only one way to go from there, so see all the images above.