palace of winds

I dreamt last night that I killed a man.

He (and a small group he lead) sifted gold out of this stretch of bog, and didn’t want anyone else to know about their source so they could keep it all for themselves. The dream had a long, dark beginning; the man’s presence was ominous, threatening. I don’t recall now how I wound up out in the bog. It was a huge stretch of black composting mud, deep and sludgy, something you could sink into for miles if you weren’t careful.

I was flickering back and forth between being myself and being a middle-aged man much like him (save I/he was the white hat in the story). As the man I made the mistake of going out into the bog to do the big there’s-gold-here! reveal. I realized this mistake as I turned back toward the other man and he lifted his rifle, and I knew if he got the shot off I would sink into the mud and no one would be the wiser. I somehow caught hold of the barrel of his rifle and pushed it up, and we struggled.

Midway through the struggle we were back in his house, and I’d somehow gotten him beneath me on the floor, and was pressing the handle of a wooden spoon (which had previously been the barrel of the rifle) across his throat. It seemed to take forever, staring down in his face, watching him watching me, his eyes cold, hating. There was no panic, just his face slowly turning red and his neck sinking flat. When he should have been dead — when in a movie I would have tossed the spoon aside and staggered to my feet and he would have made his comeback to spring upon me in another minute — I saw that his eyes were still sly, shifting, and so I took the paring knife I abruptly had and cut neatly through his paper-thin neck. There was, thankfully, no blood. His head had gotten very small, and I tossed it onto his body as I finally stood.

I don’t know what it all means, really. Perhaps it’s my frustration at the situation the world is in with regards to oil. Injustices of wealth. A female triumph, maybe, with domestic implements instead of firearms — fraught, bitter, the way that struggle often seems. And maybe it’s just a story my subconscious made up because I’m over-tired, slowly starving for sleep.