Hey guys,
It's 10:23am, and i'm feeling like crap after last night but hey, it's my own stupid fault. I wish I had some herb to help me out but alas, i'm dry.
The reason i'm posting this is because I just had an extremely strange experience and for some reason it's left me kind of shaken up. Actually, to say I had this experience would be a lie, in actual fact I dreamt this experience.
I dreamt I was sitting in some bar, which looked and felt more like a saloon from the days of the wild west. You know the kind, with swinging doors, wooden floor, wooden walls, wooden ceiling, spitoons all over the place, people playing cards, smoking cigars, drinking whiskey. The room i'm currently in is pretty small, with the bar dominating all of one side, but there is a exit to the left of the bar leading to what I imagine is another area. The only thing that makes me think this wasn't a saloon is that there was a huge flat screen television in one corner of the room. A bit of a giveaway, I think.
(Before I continue... somebody once told me that the most boring thing anybody can do is to recite their dreams back to you, probably because it's so hard to do. I agree, but give me the benifit of the doubt; I need to explain my dream to explain what i'm talking about.)
So i'm sitting in this bar, apparantly with my dad, but neither of us are drinking. There are a group of people sitting around the table behind us, two women and one man. They're chatting casually, occasionally erupting into bouts of laughter. Nothing strange at all. But then my dad gets up from his seat, walks over to the barman, and tells him to kick these people out. He doesn't give a reason, and the barman doesn't question him; he just gets up, escorts the three friends out who leave without a word, and then he proceeds to lock every door and window in the building, leavcing the rest of us locked in. When he returns he continues as normal, and so does everybody else.
For some reason at this point in my dream I start to panic. I can't seem to stand being in this building of locked windows and doors. I try and find another way out, but only manage to find a larger bar in a different area of the building. This bar is much the same as the last one, only larger, and three of the walls are almost entirely glass. I reckon the building outside one of the windows, and on further inspection I realise that the bar i'm in is sitting about three feet from my old secondary school building. Apparantly it's early morning on a weekday, because there are hundreds of kids all arriving to school. Among them I spot my nephew, James, and call his name but he doesn't see me.
Before I register this a group of people approach me and offer to buy me a drink. I decline, because I don't know them and I just want to leave this place, but then I look back up at them and all of a sudden they're no longer strangers, they're two of my friends and a girl I used to date years ago. I'm totally stunned, obviously, so I sit down at a table with Keiran and Cass, while Lee goes to the bar to get us all drinks. This is where it gets a bit weird.
Up until this point the dream has been like any other dream. Time, location and thread of the dream have been jumping around slightly, not making much sense and being inconsistent in the way only dreams can. But as i'm sitting around this table with two of my friends and Cass, my ex-girlfriend, it takes on an extremely life like quality. The conversation progresses in real-time, and at some points my conscious mind actually believes that i'm sitting here, talking to this people in a strange bar, and I can even control the conversation, experiencing different kinds of emotions and feelings in response to the subject. For all intents and purposes I was in that bar (let's just say I was extremely happy... I never really got over Cassie but haven't seen her since we split up....). After some period of time i'm convinced that this is real, and the idea that I might be dreaming doesn't even cross my mind, as it usually does when I dream. I believe I can actually touch my surroundings, actually hear my friends and the ambient sound of kids heading in to school. This was pretty crazy in itself, even though I didn't realise it at the time, because it's not often I have this type of almost lucid dream.
So the conversation continues, and me and Cass go off to talk to eachother alone. I don't know what she wants to talk to me about, but i've got a feeling that it's not just talking she's got in mind, and i'm ecstatic. But before we manage to leave the bar a guy approaches me, a short guy with long hair and a London accent. He looks extremely suspicious, the kind of guy that you know deals in some kind of dirty drug, and probably has a list of customers who are all quite a lot younger than he is. He's accompanied by a taller, much larger guy, who looks a hell of alot more sociable than his shorter companion.
They asked me to go outside, so I follow them to the door (which miraculously is now unlocked) and we go outside in to a a small corrider, made by the wall of the bar on one side and one wall of my former school on the other. I turned around to lean against the wall of my school to ask what this guy wants, but before the words come out he headbutts me. My nose gushes with blood, and I double over. I spit blood on to the floor and causiously prod nose, which I can immediately tell is broken, and not just in one places. Even though i'm dreaming I have convinced myself that this is real enough so that I can actually feel the pain, feel the blood running down the back of my throat, can hear the harsh whistling sound when I try and breathe through what used to be a perfectly normal looking nose. I look up at him, astounded, expecting him to say something, but instead he just punches me, this time in the left eye. For whatever reason I don't hit him back. As much as I don't like violence I still stick up for myself as much as the next guy, but this time I just let him hit me over and over.
Every punch felt as real and as solid as if this was real, the only inconsistency being my refusal to hit back, to hurt him enough that he'll stop hurting me. After fuck knows how many punches I start to black out. The world around me begins fading in that ever so cliche style, and I start to fall to the ground. As I hit the ground my broken nose crushes against the floor, making a repulsive smacking sound. I finally pass out and then, yup you guessed it, i'm awake, lying in my bed, facing the wall.
My eyes are open, I can see the white of my bedroom wall, but in my confusion I believe it's the white of the wall I was facing when I passed out in the alley between that imaginary bar and my school. I touch my face, expecting to see blood on my fingers, and am surprised when there is none. My face still hurts, I still truely believe I just took the beaing of my life. I lift my head up and once I see the familiar site of my bedroom I realise that it must have been a dream, though I can't except that, it was so unbelievably real. I get out of bed to walk over to the mirror on my wall, staggering on the way. It actually feels like i've taken a beating and that my face has become numb and swollen. The mirror tells me otherwise, and in some way reassures me that it was only in my head, but for the next half an hour or so I keep checking the mirror because i'm so convinced that I was beaten up by this guy whom i've never met or seen before, until now.
I woke up at 9:40am, and as I started writing this I was only just beginning to make myself snap out of it. I'm pretty shaken up by this, though I don't know why because it was only a dream, right?
