I had the oddest dream this morning. It was odd because I remember it completely, it was a coherent story from beginning to end, and it involved civic duty which is something ol’ Hermit Joel doesn’t normally give a lot of thought.
In the cold light of dawn it also seems kind of “duh,” but that’s only because it’s really simple.
I was living in a town, rather like the tiny part of Detroit I remember from when I was a little boy before everything in my life went to hell. There was a storm, and tornado sirens had gone off, and we trooped down to the storm shelter (which leaves Detroit out: The only community tornado shelter I ever saw the inside of was in Texas.) I was by myself and didn’t have a family to watch, so when they called for volunteers I queued up. I and this other guy were sent to go door to door on this one block and make sure everybody knew what was up.
It was windy and cold and rainy but not really threatening at first, rather like both days of this past weekend which might be what got my mind on this track. And we two went from door to door, mostly finding nobody home. The guy I was with asked me what I was doing there, and I said I’d been contemplating the difference between good behavior and noble behavior.
“A man who behaves well goes into the shelter, doesn’t steal raisins from babies, takes only his allotted space, stays calm and quiet, and causes no trouble,” I said. “A man who behaves nobly makes sure his neighbors have a chance to do the same.”
The other guy didn’t say anything, but bumped my arm and pointed up the street in the direction we were going and right on cue there was a big-ass tornado just in the wrong place. (Texas again. Bad memory.) We kept walking to the next door, maybe hurrying up just a bit.
A man came to the door and said he didn’t believe there’d really be a tornado, so he and his family would shelter at home. We both pointed up the street. “And now I see a tornado,” he said, quite calmly, and hurried his family outside and down the street toward the shelter.
We went to the last house on the corner, nobody home, and turned the corner. The tornado was now very close. Maybe we could make it to the other side of the block, maybe not. The tornado paused, my companion made it easily. I started after him, and of course that’s when the tornado pounced. I ran, was dragged backward, dug my fingers into a convenient cyclone fence and tried to meld with it.
Have you ever seen what a tornado can do to chain-link fencing? I have. It did it now, with me attached. The storm pulled my boots off and dislocated my fingers, but it could not pull me off that fence if I didn’t allow it and I wouldn’t allow it.
The twister passed and left me lying on the sidewalk alive, still gripping the fence which hadn’t pulled loose from the last of its poles. In fact I couldn’t let go because my fingers didn’t work anymore. My companion came back with a woman who turned out to be some sort of EMT, and they pried my fingers off the fence and helped me away.
I woke up feeling rather good about the whole thing, and the dream didn’t fade the way they usually do. I’ve no idea what that was all about, or what if anything it was trying to tell me.
Congratulations on finishing the dream. I know I’m more satisfied when a dream completes itself.
Freedom-wise, it could mean, “Don’t give up the fight; you will come through the war intact.”
Or maybe you were merely re-enacting the chickens’ blood and gore over the weekend.
In any case, I don’t see Freud in any of that dream, thank God!
Interesting dream, for sure. I’ve had some like that myself. 🙂
A discussion about this was accidentally had at Tam’s the other day. It had to do with good behavior vs. noble behavior in an active shooter situation, when you’re carrying CCW.
The discussion was bounded on one side by the good actors, who said that they would retreat and allow the situation to unfold without intervening, and would only fire on the active shooter if he was actively threatening their person. The “get the hell out of there and let everyone else figure it out on their own” argument.
On the other side were the noble actors; people who would go in search of trouble, hoping to make contact with the shooter and put an end to his spree, in the hopes that they could save the lives of a few innocents in the process. Of course, those people recognized the dangers inherent in going out looking for a gunfight, mostly, and said that they would rather die trying than to live running away and letting innocents die. This was lampooned as “sheepdog” mentality, and that a smart person would look after him and his and nothing more, and let the other people deal with it on their own.
It was a very interesting discussion to read. both sides had good points. I fell on the “noble actor” side of the argument. Good, bad, right or wrong, I don’t know if I could look at myself in the mirror ever again if I had the ability to maybe stop a mass murder and instead acted to save myself and allow others to die.
Maybe that’s stupid. I can live with that.
I’m with you, Goober. I’ve been in a slightly similar situation and the trick is to learn as much as possible about it before you act. You can so easily make a bad situation worse. The “active shooter” scene is probably pretty easy to determine, but you can’t take anything for granted.
I came across a man beating a woman in a parking lot and yelled at him to stop. He turned on me and I put my hand on the gun, flipping off the thumb break… he ran around to the driver’s door of his car instead of coming toward me, thank God. But when I asked the woman if she needed help, she snarled at me and told me to mind my own business. She got in the car with him and they roared off…
OOPS. If I’d had to shoot that man, she would not have been a friendly witness.
Butwhat are you gonna do? Ignoring the situation and hoping it turns out OK didn’t work out well for Kitty genovese. The only thing necessary for evil to triumphis for good men to do nothing.
Of course, Goober… you just have to keep a cool head, assess the situation the best you can, know your target… that kind of stuff. Good thing is, at least here, it’s not going to happen very often. Heck, I rescue droopy plants at the hardware store… I can promise to be a hard ass all I want, but I’ll wind up the sucker most likely. 🙂
I have often wondered what I would do in a situation like that. The clear issue is I’d be more afraid of the aftermath than of the shooter. The temptation to deal with the shooter severely and then make haste elsewhere would definitely be present.
Dreams are relatively easy to interpret if you have enough information:
1. Dreams are messages about reality told in symbols. Eg. Detroit, the tornado, the people in the shelter all are symbols for other things.
2. Detroit represents the United States. It looks like your boyhood home – the old U.S. But Detroit is now a disintegrating wreck like the U.S. So Detroit which has fallen apart from your childhood to today is the dream equivalent of what has happened to the U.S.
3. The tornado is a symbol for the disaster that you see coming to destroy the U.S. The bad thing is you see it as inevitable. The good thing is that you see it as survivable.
4. The shelter is a symbol for those who are prepping for the disaster that is coming. It also says that you can hunker down and ride it out in relative safety if you choose.
5. The good vs. noble is your view that those who have prepared to survive without preying on others are good, but you feel that you must do something more (the noble) to get the word out to others to prepare to save themselves
6. Being caught in the tornado means that you do not expect to escape the disaster that is coming.
7. Losing your boots means that you expect to lose personal things in the disaster but not everything, you didn’t die.
8. The cyclone fence means that you have something to hold onto that will help you get through the disaster and that you will save yourself by holding on to it. Others won’t do it for you, you have to do save yourself I think that the fence represents your beliefs and or skills. Since you don’t own it, it is not your possessions and it is an object so it isn’t friends or other people.
9. Broken fingers which cannot let go after the disaster mean that you expect to pay a personal price to survive and that it will be impossible to let go of the suffering and loss on your own.
10. The other warner and the emt coming to help mean that you expect other good and noble people to survive and that they will help you to let go and recover when the disaster has passed.
The fact that you remembered it in detail means that your mind thinks that this is an important message for you to know.
As Lucy used to say in the old Peanuts cartoons, “That will be 5 cents.”