Sunday, November 28, 2004

I'm Sure this Means Something...

Last night I had a dream that was a brilliant amalgamation of all the things I'd expect from a dream – bits and pieces of the previous day, and elements of everyday life, all blended seamlessly with the completely surreal.

I was working at the local Hannaford as a drive-up teller. I had a little teller station in the entry way and people would pull up to the outside window and I'd cash checks and make change, that type of thing.
At one point a man pulls up in a dune buggy and hands me a bent piece of paper. There's a check printed on it, but even in my dream, I'm analyzing all the things wrong with it - the routing number has too many digits, the account number is entirely missing, the check number is different in two places, and the ink is bleeding in the top right corner. So I take the check to find a manager.
I turn and enter the store, and even though in my dream I know all the managers are by the service desk, I make a right towards the bakery. Anyway I run into Ryan Cowan, Sarah Jenness, and Ashley Perry, three friends of mine from high school, all suddenly working at Hannaford. They're walking in the opposite direction so I turn and walk with them, back toward the service desk. They all work as regular cashiers and I feel as if they look down on me because I work out front.
When I finally find the manager she's in a back room which is apparently on a cruise ship because she's wearing a bathing suit and reading a novel, while lounging in a deck chair. I show the check to her and she tells me not to cash it under any circumstances, it's definitely bad.
So I trek back to my teller station and tell the guy that we called the issuing financial institution and we couldn't cash the check for him. He says, 'Well shit, I better tell my mother!' and pulls off in his dune buggy which has suddenly become one of those tiny cars the Shriners ride in the parades. I turn to one of my coworkers and say something like, 'That was the worst counterfeit check I've ever seen, that guy's fucking retarded.' Someone behind me, apparently a friend of BadCheckMan, starts screaming and yelling at me. When I turn around, he's swinging a heavy piece of metal at me. There ensues a pretty detailed fist fight, which eventually ends with me sitting astride the man and repeatedly slamming his head into the floor. I can really feel it happening, it's so intense.
At this point BadCheckMan returns with his mother. When he sees what I've done to his buddy he pulls out a little revolver. My first impulse is to try to get the gun away from him, but someone's suddenly in my face, telling me I can't treat customers this way. BadCheckMan points the gun at me but then sticks it in his mother's mouth, pulls a second gun from another pocket, and puts it in his own mouth. There's a moment when I can only see his eyes and hear him breathing around the barrel of the gun and then he pulls both triggers, hers slightly before his.
Then I'm running through the Hannaford, looking for a place to hide. I run into the back 'Employees Only' place and it's all under construction and every room is half done and I can't find a place to hide. I just keep going from room to room looking for a place to hide, but I can't find one. Eventually I come into a room with a really dark corner and as I crawl into it I realize that it's open to the outside and that it's very cold. I crawl in further, but find several very tiny wire cages full of very tiny moles, mice, and hedgehogs, all frozen to death. There are probably 35-40 tiny little rodents all frozen on top of each other. There is one little white mouse outside the cage, also frozen and dead, but somehow looking at me. An overwhelming surge of sadness sweeps over me and I wake up crying.