Dreamed my family was on a trip, the four of us in an SUV. My father and I in the front seat, him driving. We were in Pennsylvania. We came off a road and I recognized where we were. So we had a point of reference. Our destination, my father said, was Unity, PA. Or maybe Unique. And we were kind of lost as to the route between point A and B. I looked through the road atlas to help but he'd torn out all the Pennsylvania pages. They were in the backseat. When I had them in hand, I concentrated on the maps--about seven or eight, different sectional and scaled views--and tried to figure out what road we needed to take. This took me a long while, using map keys and flipping back and forth. Eventually I gave up with a harsh howl of frustration, covering my face with the map.

We were driving and my father kept getting distracted by things off the road. He'd stare off at a sunset or something, through the side window, and I'd cry: "We're going to hit that rock/tree/thing in the road!" And he'd pull back to attention and swerve to avoid it, rather indifferent to our close pass with disaster. At one point, he swerved to avoid a big rock but went off the road instead, and swung up around a hill, pratically driving sideways so that I thought our car would tip over, before coming back down. I was really, vocally irritated with his carelessness.

We somehow ended up at a mental hospital. My father, or some other man, had brought me there, but was taken into a room for questioning. He held a gun to someone's throat as he sat in a chair, with the psychiatrist next to him in another chair. The psychiatrists--there were maybe three in all--seemed remarkably unperturbed, as if there was no real menace. I lurked in the next room, skulked around and peeped in to the big room where they sat. Wide doorways, not closed. A stage or podium at the head of the room, near me, on which another, smaller gun lay. I pointed out the second gun to the doctors, implying my father had staged this; someone, maybe me, would go for the gun and I'd end up shot, dead.

Since the doctors seemed unimpressed, I ran off, escaping through the hospital. Down a corridor, down a set of fire stairs, down down, as is always the way of things in dreams like this, to the basement. Once I arrived, I sought a way out. Immediately I saw men working and tensed as I tried to look like I belonged. No one really paid me any mind as I tried out different rooms, which had no exits. A black man, like a telephone engineer, was wandering around doing his job. I passed him and walked down the hall; as I reached the end I heard the voices of my pursuers, orderlies and security working together. They grabbed the black man and dragged him off. They'd been looking for me, a white woman, but their reflexes of predjudice were so strong that they'd mistakenly taken him instead for being there, noticeable and out of place.

Having escaped their attention, I reached the corridor's end, where women were piecing together shirts in manual factory style and socializing. I went to a table. The shirts were shiny and inside out. Blending in, I picked up a shirt and tried to turn it right side out, but there were long pins in the sleeve which hurt my fingers. I put the shirt back down. No one was noticing me. Odd. A man walked up though and said, "Anna?" I nodded. He handed me a check for ten cents, for previous work done. I thanked him and took my check and walked off, trying to look as if this were normal. Still, no one noticed--not my arrival as a stranger, my desultory attempts at work, my leaving.

Walked down the hall in the opposite direction, began to pass fire exits that would sound alarms if I used them. I tried to find the one furthest away so that at least I'd have a head start, but security returned. I could hear them behind me. I opened the next fire door; no audible alarm sounded. I dashed up the stairs--no, down--down flight after flight, with the guards on my heels, cursing, and eventually banged through to the outside. First run of action, I rounded the building and hid. Then the action reset itself and instead of going out, I tricked them by hiding inside under the stairs, letting the door bang to make them think I'd escaped.

Once they were gone, I went out. Someone--a beefy boyfriend--pulled up with a rescue van. He grabbed me, held his hand over my mouth, kissed me somehow, and I was struggling and anxious. But he was rescuing me. So we got in his van and drove off. We slowly drove along a crowded street, lined on one side with poor white trash and poor blacks. I hunched down in my seat, becasue I was the wanted one, but they could still see me, I felt. As we paused at a corner, a thin white girl called to someone else, also white, "You a nigger." And she and everyone else laughed, including thin girl's black boyfriend, with whom her arm was entwined. We in the van were also amused: concept being, there was white trash and poor blacks, but then there was a level of social status lower, which had nothing to do with color, and that was to be a nigger. (It's perhaps worth noting that this was my subconscious, and that I'm pretty much transcribing stuff with as much comprehension as a dictaphone. I don't know if that excuses me, but hope I don't give unintended offense.)

Then we drove on. Later, I dreamed...something. Me in my mom's sewing room. M. from work coming to work on my computer, as I reconnected to check my e-mail. A pile of folded underwear.

So, persistent themes of institutions, flight and pursuit, stairs, racial issues (god knows why, I can't think of anything in my life this points to), guns, driving, and folded underwear.

I feel like I had something more to say about Anya, something specific riffing off my own post. But I forget what. I was, however, watching a few minutes of "The Gift" to get a bead on the basement, and wound up watching, with the mute on, Xander and Anya's big scene. And she's just so darn pretty, and has a lovely expressive face. Good hair, too, at that point. Later of course the hair just got scarier and scarier until at some point, which ep I forget, I was staring at her head thinking: what the fuck is that? It was the hair of a seventy year old woman, stuck on askew.

I went back to Melymbrosia's thread and read the additional comments, and all I can say is, where do they get those wonderful brains? It got most interesting when the topic of demons souls kicked off. I more or less get and sometimes use phrases like "moral agency" but other people seem to use them with so much more intellectual authority. There are some scarily smart fangirls out there.

Strangely enough I am, I think, nearly done with episode two, in terms of how many scenes I have left to get through. Or I would be except that it's half the size of the other two eps right now. Hmmm. So we'll see what happens when I work the next few scenes--one should be fairly large. Plus maybe I'll go back and realize I need a few more scattered through to tie it together. So I very well might not be near finished. I like feeling that way, though. {g}

Small note: I just had to fix the links for yesterday's entry. I keep making stupid mistakes. My system needs to be automated, because relying on manual manipulation of numbers is lame.

posted 2.03.2002 @ 9:55am -- right-click here to grab a link