Thursday, October 3

The Angel of Death

I had a pretty fractured dream last night. I was home for Passover dinner and I lived with an entirely different family, in a different house. I guess the dream started with us watching Newsroom because the beginning is a bunch of images of the characters from Newsroom dealing with Criminal Minds like situations. Don killed someone, Maggie is being chased up a spiral staircase, they both end up on a roof over the city with a pool and neither are safe. It's all dark and frightening.
Then my family (including a big brother, a little brother and a little sister who are small children) sits down to Passover and the kids at the table begin asking the questions from the Haggadah. When we get to the story of the ten plagues and the final plague, my mom (not my actual mother) motions for me to get up. Confused, I stand. She then nudges me out of the room and I walk out to discover that I am to play the part of the Angel of Death this year. The next part of the dream is me moving from house to house on a dark Egyptian street, placing my hands over the cradles of the first borns and watching them die. I guess I always imagined this plague taking out kids of all ages but in this dream I was only killing babies -only children and the first children of their parents. I moved from sleeping house to sleeping house and wept silently as I pulled something egg yolk like out of each child and killed them all. At one point I wanted to stop but then my dream older brother was behind my shoulder, urging me on, reminding me that this was the price of our freedom.
After what seems like an eternity, I am done and I am allowed to return to the table. My mother pats my hand, in a  "You've done well" gesture. We go back to the ceremony when a rock comes flying through our window. When my brother goes to the front door to see who threw it, a man comes rushing past him and barrels into our house. We all scream and I go to protect my younger siblings. My older brother chases this man down and discovers him in my room, going through my things. My brother somehow throws him out of the house. We call the police and when they arrive, they don't understand why we called them. The man is still prowling around our front yard, like an animal, looking at me. The police refuse to make him leave, saying he is not trespassing because he is on the sidewalk.
My dream essentially ends there. I say it was fragmented because what I remember mostly are snapshots that tell this story. An image of the TV show, an image of dinner, of the broken window, of the man pacing on the sidewalk. The most fluid and complete portion of the dream was when I was the Angel of Death.

It is incredibly rare for me to wake up in the middle of the night for any reason. Even when I sleepwalk, I never wake myself up. I am a heavy sleeper and I usually only wake up in the night when I'm sick. Last night I woke up at 6:00a, parched. I went to the bathroom for water and felt ill. When I went back to bed it took me almost an hour to fall back asleep - another rarity for me. I don't know what this dream means or why I had it, but it has shaken me up pretty badly.

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