The occupation
Last night’s dream…
I was at a They Might Be Giants concert with Marla (my younger sister). Weird, because she’s never mentioned that she was a fan at all, but anyway… No one else from my family was there. We were in the front row & I kept spacing out, daydreaming. Once, when I came back to ‘reality’, John Linnell was sitting on the side of the stage, right in front of us. Might as well have been sitting with us. At that point, I realized he’d been doing that all along, throughout the whole concert. I said to Marla, “It’s too bad Allison’s not here, she would love this!”.
Concert ended & people were milling around. This was in some kind of huge auditorium. We had windows to see outside, but it seemed far removed from ‘outside’. We heard a kind of siren & everyone was talking about it. “Do you hear that?” “Wonder what that is?”. We looked out the windows & saw the sky reflected in the windows of other buildings. Some of us thought we saw smoke rising up & figured the sirens were for that.
Jim came up to me & I asked him if he heard it & what he thought it might be. He said “I don’t know, I’m sure it’s not some national security problem or anything”. Like it was no big deal.
Just then, a woman soldier came in, had a black/steel blue uniform, gun across shoulder, rounding everyone up & sending us upstairs.
I started up, but realized I didn’t have Annie (Jim had Shelby). I went back to the soldier & begged her, cried, please could I go back & get my daughter. She relented & I ran down the stairs to get her. Annie was playing by some other kids, talked to them a bit even after I called her to come to me. Took her time coming over to me (*aarrrgghh*)… I got her and started up the stairs again.
When I got to Jim, we talked about, worried about, Allison. Where was she? Would she find us? Would she be OK? We didn’t know what to do about her, because we didn’t know where she was. We just hoped we’d see her or find her.
Then, I realized that I’d left my purse down in the auditorium & that it had Shelby’s epi-pen in it. Jim & I talked about whether we’d need it. Figured that, wherever we were going, they would probably give us food & that we would have no idea what the ingredients were. I needed it. I went back to the female soldier & begged & cried again. She let me go back down, but my purse wasn’t where I’d left it. I figured we’d just have to be extra careful. Went back & joined the march.
Next thing, we were all on a bus (still not sure if Allison was with), driving over a bridge, looking over a neighborhood/subdivision. I was talking in a voice-over, over the scene. Something about “We were the lucky ones. No one died. They rounded us up and took us to an encampment, which grew into a kind of artist colony that thrived during the time of the occupation.”
Weird.
