3/17/07

nightmare

The other morning I woke up feeling like mierda because of the worst nightmare I have ever had. It carried into my waking life like no other nightmare has.

I was sitting in a big old house, like the one I grew up in, watching TV sitting in a brown leather Lazy Boy. All around me sitting on chairs, sofas, the floor, drinking beers, playing cards & craps, smoking joints, were the hardest looking vatos I have ever seen. Muscles filling muscle shirts, Tattoos, slicked back hair, a few pelones -all of them were hard vato locos. I saw a few that I actually know, but that is because I know so few real vato locos of this variety. I was calm. I was not scared. I knew people. I had a good chair and the remote in my hand.

All of a sudden this 6ft 3inches tall, brown buffalo of a man, wearing brown Dickies and a muscle shirt, was walking at me from my left side with no sense of slowing down. I just looked up at him and popped three bullets into his chest and one in the forehead. He hit the ground hard. I sat there blankly staring at the TV that was now off. I could hear everyone in the room pull out their guns, feet shuffling, 'oh shits,' 'what the fucks,' and then I just turned the TV back on. The noise settled. I got up and moved to another room, that is when I began to feel like mierda.

A heaviness on my soul. A profound sadness. A darkness came all around me and I could barely breathe. I am trying to put this feeling into words and I can't. Guilt. Pesado. Sadness.

One vato came up to me and whispered in my ear, "Its going to be okay, we'll take care of it. No one will blame you."

My life was meaningless. My existence on hold. I knew I would never be able to shake off this darkness, this bleak feeling of 'death' being a re-viewable, re-livable noun attached to my being that I would carry forever.

I stared out a window and saw white light. I looked back into the house and some vatos were carrying the body, now in a bag, into another room. Another group was walking in a young kid around 14 or 16 yrs old into the room where I had just shot a man dead. I heard whispers and talking, then a "Asi va ser."

The same vato came out of the room and whispered into my ear, "It is done. He will go in for you. It's cool. He'll do very little time."

DANM. SHIT. FUCK. Not only did I just kill a man, a brother, a friend to someone, a lover to another, a possible father, and I was going to get away with it because that kid was going to take the blame and do the time for me! I wanted to go to prison to be killed, to pay for the life I took!

That is when I jumped out of sleep and felt like mierda.

The feeling from my dream was more than when you wake up with your heart pounding from running or being chased in a dream. This was purely emotional. No physical sensation that would subside. This was burned into me. It came with me to the bathroom, kitchen and living room. So sad. So much regret. The thought of it is weirding me out. This was truly a
nightmare.

When I drive I think the worst thing I could do is hit a pedestrian. I had a friend who while driving his van a kid that was running into the street, bumped into the side of the van, fell back and busted his head open on the street. DEAD. My friend was not at fault, just at the wrong place at the wrong time. He was still scarred. Here this dream of me shooting someone for no reason freaked me out.

I can't make sense of it yet... I feel I went through something.
I just hope I don't ever have to feel that way again.

4 comments:

Wendy Carrillo said...

Many moons ago, I was sitting in class popping my sugar free gum, pom-poms on the floor, when my history teacher looked at me and asked if I ever felt that my dreams were real. lifelike.
I said yeah sure, off course.
I was an active student.
Then he said something that changed my thinking forever.
He said, “what if, your dreams, are your actual reality, and what you think is your reality, is only really your dream, or someone else’s dream, manifested in your unconsciousness”
and I was like, WOW.

Edgar Allen Poe wrote ““Is all what we see or seem but a dream within a dream?”

so my question to you is, could it be that on a deeper level, there is a twisted sort of association with the romanticized ideas of cholo lifestyle? the mythical war like existence of your vida loca? the highly over extended and singular road not taken?
Could it be you had a vision of a path that stood before you and said no thanks too?
Instead, your weapon is a book and your bullets are nothing but vinyl records that spin at 2am infecting the minds of the children of lost men.

Maybe your dream is your un-faced reality in another world where you never spun a record and you never stepped foot in a cold room surrounded by green walls eager for words.
Maybe that’s where the sorrow comes from.
A guilt of something you know.

Pachuco 3000 said...

dang, thanks for the psychoanalysis.
my cholo time was when I was 10 or 11 - 12 yrs old. right after "Boulevard Nights" glamorized them. Then of course DJing kicked in at 13 -14 yrs and the rest is so- called history. I highly doubt I have any aspirations left over or hidden about cholo culture.
and yes this is all a dream.

Diana Marie Delgado said...

gery, it sounds or possibly might be that the person that you killed might have been your shadow, what jung said to be our other half. that would explain your profound sadness, sense of loss, and utter despair over the situation. You were wiping a piece of yourself out. But in all honesty, YOU are the only person who can interpret the dream correctly. Dream are made up of symbols, and those symbols mean different things to different people. It may also have been the death or you animus. Meaning your mind is entering another phase of itself.

Diana Marie Delgado said...

lots of typos in my last post. it's 7 am. What I meant was the figure you killed could have been your animus.