We've all had them, those weird, unsettling dreams that wake you from deep sleep, putting you in a state of confusion and dismay. Those dreams that when you first waken you think your real world is the dream and nothing seems right, that you need to go back to sleep - quick! - so your life will be okay again? I call them whiskey-tango-foxtrot dreams.
I woke at 0315 today from such a dream about attending a veterans' reunion supposedly in the desert somewhere in the Middle East. I was a corpsman assigned to a prison camp for American and European civilian "traitors", a good many of whom were Quakers doing field service work with refugees in the area. Mixed in with the Quakers were, though, an equal number of people who had switched teams, so to speak; they'd joined the enemy. (I'm tapdancing around what to call these political prisoners because it is difficult to see them as enemies.)
The reunion was for those of us who had served, gone home and presumably reclaimed our civilian, pre-war lives. We were meeting in a huge mess tent that looked like a seafood restaurant I once went to somewhere along the South Carolina coast. Above the entrance was a sign like the one above. The civilians I was with, including my long deceased mother, couldn't understand the sign. I told Mom it said "Welcome home."
"Why is it backwards?" my mother asked.
"So you can read it in the rearview mirrors as you are leaving camp," I said, "except the ones when we left to go home read Farewell."
"That makes no sense," she said. "No sense at all. Why would anyone look back when leaving such hell?"
Maybe to make sure it wasn't gaining on us, my brother, Mac (Viet Nam vet), told her.
None of this makes any sense.
When I was awake enough to understand that my stumbling around in the dark of my house to find the latrine was not real, old feelings of sadness and grief and anger swept in and took my down. Will this stuff never end, I whimpered to myself, then felt really chicken---t for feeling sorry for myself. I mean, for crying out loud, I wasn't there! I didn't go through any of the stuff in the dream, ever. What is wrong with me?!
Maybe I'm going november-uniform-tango-sierra.
0 Yorumlar