mellowtigger | that can't be a good sign

I said I wouldn't post except for "life-changing" events, and I guess this experience semi-qualifies because of its implications. I woke up this morning, remembering the dream I just had. Followers of this "dreams" tag know that remembering is quite unusual for me. Here was my dream:

I was standing in a parking lot when the shooting started. There was a car parked somewhere in front of where I was standing, with a building's wall marking the end of the parking lot to my right. I moved to try hiding behind that car. Ahead of me, I saw a woman hesitate on the sidewalk, deciding which direction she would run, eventually going towards the shooting noise. I think she was heading indoors to the building on my right.

I think one of the shooters fell down on the sidewalk in front of me, shot and killed. One of the shooters approached from the right. I hid down farther behind the car, looking at feet underneath the car. I saw that shooter walk in my direction.

The dream jumped forward here. Somehow, I was hiding in the back seat of that car I was behind earlier. The two surviving shooters (apparently on the same "side" of the battle) were both in the front seat while we were driving somewhere. I had the clear-headed thought, "Why am I in the back seat? This is like the bad decisions that characters make in a horror movie." But, there I was anyway, still trying to hide from them.

They were talking about vicious plans, including where they would take their next victim, somewhere far away so they could torture and kill them. I stayed silent in the back seat.

The car stopped. The rider got out of the car. He spoke through that window, "Y'all have a safe trip". I immediately worried that plural meant that he saw me in the back seat and was alerting the driver, although he started driving onward again silently.

The dream jumped forward again. The car is stopped near a big highway interchange. The driver is in the back seat next to me, holding large wire cutters, talking threats to me about which pieces I could live without. He listed some of my potential choices at that moment, all of them bad outcomes for me. Thinking to myself that 1) the car was stopped and 2) the driver had no ranged weapon in his hands in that moment, I stated "or just run" and then got out of the car and ran as fast as I could toward that highway to flag down help.

I had that terrible molasses slowness of running when being chased in a dream.

I woke up then, turned off the buzzing alarm clock, and started my work day about half an hour later.

So... I think I've reached my psychological tolerance limit for the constant shooting and other violence around here. Earlier this week, some kids (age 13, 15, and 16 (yes, this is a trend)) allegedly beat and carjacked a 72-year-old woman feeding a cat about 10 blocks north of me, later got chased by police, and then all 3 kids died when they crashed the old woman's car. In other news, Derek Chauvin has posted bail. Purely by coincidence, of course, the Minnesota National Guard is coming back to the Twin Cities. We can't find money to fund civics programs that might circumvent these tragedies by altering course before things escalate into desperation, but we sure can find the money to pay for so-called "public safety" afterwards. You already know that I strongly disapprove of this arrangement of priorities.

So... this is what life is like in the warzone (recorded 4 blocks north, 5 blocks east of me). That noise is what I hear daily. Sometimes just a few shots, sometimes a barrage of 60 shots. A guy who unofficially tracks these things says we are in consecutive day 800+ of shootings here in the warzone of north Minneapolis. This problem existed long before COVID-19 appeared, but the tanked economy is making it much worse. This year is bad.

And apparently I'm at my limit, because the threat is seeping into my rare dreams. Now, back to my hidey hole. Good luck out there.