In the summer, a lot of discussion in the media turned to "Covid Dreams" and whether the population was having more traumatic or more vivid dreams because of the lockdowns and stress associated with the pandemic.
So I had this dream on the night of July 15th into July 16th. Was this my pandemic dream? (The following text is a cleaned up version of the original text file I banged out quicky before working that day.)
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I was on a field trip. It was for a group of high school students, but at times I felt like I was being brought along as a student, other times as a teacher.
Regardless, we traveled via interstate I10 westward over to Mobile. The class visit was to a maritime museum in that city. (Now that I've been awake for an hour, I can tell that my mind dredged up the museum and surroundings of the USS Alabama Battleship as the basis for the city having a maritime museum. I've travelled there several times on my own and with Boy Scout/ Cub Scout camping trips.)
Once there, we left the bus out front, reminding the driver to pick us up later at this spot. (The drop off location reminded me of the area where myself and the wife were dropped off for a casino trip to Biloxi in May 2019. The drop-off zone was wedged between large HVAC unites and lots of piping, a parking deck, and a small entrance into the museum.)
We entered the building and the first stop was to have lunch, so we all sat together in what looked like a ship's mess hall (again, thinking back to trips with the Boy Scouts to the USS Alabama) and ate. Once we had finished, we could go back through the line for dessert, but most offerings were trays of maybe a dozen cookies and I knew we had nearly a hundred students so I skipped taking treats from most trays, ending up with only a few cookies off of more plentiful plates. (Again, in real life I've been trying to avoid sweets and dessert, so dreaming this scenario doesn't seem unusual.)
After that, we were supposed to go swimming, but I hadn't brought either or swimsuit or flipflops. We were gathered in front of navy blue lockers like the ones at the UWF pool. A museum guard was there helping out, but he was suddenly hurt and on the floor. He was injured but I knew that he would be okay, until a sudden gunshot from nowhere fatally injured him. As he lay on the ground dying, at this point I felt like I was watching a TV show; I could see the injured guard and similar to a CSI show, there was even a brief overlay of illustrative computer-generated graphic explaining how the bullet entered the body and the damage it did, but I could not change my frame of reference to see anything else going on nearby, indicating that I was watching a static camera shot. Hands came in from the side like they were a medic or some other helper, but a distinctive voice came from offscreen, "JUSTIFY YOURSELF TO HER."
It was Terry Pratchett's Death. I knew instantly that I was watching a Discworld movie. (I like those.) But despite the limited dialog, I knew that Death was letting the dying guard know that he had time to send one text to his wife and in that text was the chance to tell her and vicariously the world how he wanted to be remembered, more importantly WHY he should even be remembered. (Yeah, I watched Hamilton on Disney+ last week for the first time.)
With the guard dead, every school group was being evacuated. We had to grab our bags and line up and get to the busses and we were walking outside to the busses up an incline along a curved wall/embankment. But I suddenly figured out that because of maritime law, I knew who killed the guard. (This insight stems from a long love of shows such as Murder, She Wrote or Columbo, so my mind had pieced together all the clues to solve the mystery.) The museum was abusing a law that required anything recovered from sunken ships be turned over to the closest (as the crow flies) maritime museaum for safe keeping, and someone of the staff of the muesum was going to steal from recovered items.
I didn't know who specifically was responsible for the murder, just that it was someone on staff at the museum. Additionally, I knew that letting everyone know that I had figured out the reason behind the guard's murder would get me killed, so I tried to pretend that I had made up a cool polt for a novel but nobody in my school group wanted to hear it. They wanted to leave, so I tried to find someone safe from the museum to tell quickly but I was separated from my group. We had so many stairs to go down and different groups were being led off different corridors or walkways (imagine a needlessly complicated parking deck stairwell) and soon I was in the backstage area of the museum where pipes and sheet metal lay stacked and the roads are dirt or gravel and a few rusted hulls lay forgotten.
I had given up telling people about the murder and just wanted to go home and I knew that I had to get out front to the bus before it left me stranded in this distant city but I did not know the way.
I talked to a guy and he was super reluctant to help me. I kept asking over and over how to get there until he finally described the path, and then I instantly knew I'd never make it in time wealking, so could he drive me instead?
This discussion also went on for some time, until he finally said he could get someone to take me, at which point other workers showed up under the building (I could tell we were deep down in the bowels of the museum) to get their shifts for the day. One worker made a comment about the guy making sure to give out the right job that the worker had paid for, and I realized that I had been talking to the foreman and he was taking bribes to assign tasks for the day and I should have bribed him right away to get a ride to the bus. (It's the Trump era. Everyone is corrupt.)
He asssigned a kid to take me to the bus (again, walking, not in a vehicle). We walked over the scrap metal that was stacked up on a hill to get to the front of the building. But the metal and pipes were stacked over large pits and holes so I knew that one misstep would cause me to fall, possibly to my death but as me and the kid kept walking toward the entrance, we met teenaged girls were sitting on the piles of pipes and metal, talking as we walked by them, but they shut up as the kid and I walked by. The girls were using a secret way to talk so as to not let us know that they had been raped but could warn other girls which men to look out for. I wanted them to tell me who were the rapists but they wouldn't and were upset that I kept trying to make them tell me.
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And then I woke up. I had time enough to write down this dream before starting my work from home.
Even editing the original text from months ago, I can still picture several of the scenes in my memory, despite the fact that none of this experience was real.
