Convalescing.

Because I have been ill, I have been sleeping a lot. The same dream keeps coming back to me. I am supposed to meet some friend-of-a-friend to take him trout fishing. I am waiting on a grassy bend of a river back in PA until he comes, but he actually shows up with about 10 other people (too many for where we are going) in a ridiculously high-walled boat that seems to be made of very expensive veneer. I trundle out to the boat and ask them to get out and follow on foot, but none of them will. They’re all big burly manly men who are already drunk, and suddenly they are joking about why they are (manly men that they are) being led around the wilderness by some girl in a pair of hip waders.

Since they’re so many and so obnoxious, I cheat and take them to a substandard spot where I don’t think they do any damage. They force me onto the boat, cracking my rod in the process. I get them there to this place where the river stretches out shallow and wide and is totally exposed to the high sun. It is large enough for all of them, and shouldn’t be a good place to catch trout.

They fish. I obviously can’t, I run around gathering their garbage, trying to fix my rod, and thinking of ways I can ditch them and get away. I am just about to send the boat ‘accidentally’ down the biggest gurgle and run up the shore when they start yelling. Four of the guys have caught fish, are reeling them in. I get my pliers when I see that all of the fish are just hooked through the lip (pliers are the quickest, least painful way to handle that) but the lead guy pushes me back into the water. I watch in horror as he ‘instructs’ his fellows to follow his example. He picks up the trout in one hand and breaks the line at the end of his rod with the other. Then, he tightly wraps the broken lead around and around the poor fish’s gills, the whole time spouting how ‘humane’ and ‘fair’ this is for the fish.

I can’t scream loud enough to make him stop, and every time I try to get up, another guy pushes me down. Eventually, they are so overjoyed in their cruelty that they forget me. I hop into the boat and make off, get the whole way down the bend before they notice. I start to feel safe. I flip them off, and yell back at them, but then I notice that the boat is full of HUGE brook and brown trout wrapped and bleeding, some still flopping around. I grab one and unwrap it as quickly as I can, but it’s too late. They’re all dead.

The dream is disturbing on so many levels for me that I don’t know where to start. There’s the whole simple Freudian nature of it, of course. But there’s more. According to the crazy mixed-up cosmology I carry around, this has extreme and awful connotations. Connotations I can’t deal with right now.

I want to ignore it like I’ve been ignoring my novel, but like my novel I fear that the dream will just leap into my mind as soon as I let down my guard. I blame being sick. I also blame the universe for feeling compelled to beat me over the head with things when it would be way more polite to just, you know, write down a suggestion and leave it on a sticky note or something.

~ by weltschmerz on January 25, 2008.