Red

Dreams can really mess with your head sometimes. 

I’m standing on a street in the community where I live (just outside the gates of a preschool I’ve walked past, in real life, more times than I could possibly count)…it’s bright, warm and blue, day and I’m talking and laughing with a friend (in the dream I couldn’t really see her face distinctly but we share an easy intimacy that lets me know we are, at very least, good friends…maybe more.)

Another guy comes up (in the sudden way people sometimes appear in dreams) and starts to talk to me.  The woman I was talking with says sometime about him interrupting our conversation.  The newcomer, someone I don’t recognize from my waking life but who I apparently knew in this dreamscape, tells her to shut up…tells her that men are talking.

I tell him to be cool and to apologize to her.

She calls him a rude asshole.

He hauls off and punches her in the face with all of his might and she sprawled to the sidewalk crying.

And I saw red.

I’ve always been a strong, imposing (some might say scary…large black men being constant objects of apprehension for some) guy and as a result I haven’t been drawn into many physical fights in my life…and I didn’t have a problem with that.  I never wanted to lose control.  I never wanted to really hurt anybody no matter how much I thought they might deserve it (my brother…the Universe bless and keep his troubled soul…was the only person who could, when he was of a mind, goad me into blind rage…and I never hit him even on those rare occasions.)

But, in this dream, I saw red.

And I hit the man.  The first punch seemed to startle him…he wasn’t expecting that I would hit him…but I grabbed his shirt with my left hand and held him up before he could fall and I punched him over and over with my right.  He put up no resistance but I didn’t stop until his face was a bloody pulp.  I let go and he slumped to the ground and curled up in a fetal position.

I was still seeing red.  I bent over him.  I screamed…”you don’t hit women!”…I grabbed his limp, cowering body and pulled him out of his fetal position…”you especially don’t hit THIS WOMAN!”

I seemed about to hit him again when my friend, her face bruised and streaked with tears, put her hand on my shoulder and told me to stop.

I didn’t seem to recognize her at first.  But the red went away.  I let the man drop from my grasp and I stood up.  The woman touched my face and told me it was okay. 

My hands were shaking…the woman wiped my face (apparently I was crying) and hugged me.  I didn’t hug her back…my hands were shaking…my hands were bloody…I looked off into the distance while she tried to calm me with words I couldn’t hear.

And then, quite suddenly, I was awake.  I apparently wrenched myself out of the dream world and back into the darkness…it was just before 5 AM…of my bedroom.  My hands were shaking and I had a pounding headache.  “What the hell was that?” I said out loud to the emptiness of my room.

I got up.  I emptied my bladder, put on some tea, fed the cats, took some aspirin.  And then I sat here and wrote the dream down.  I wrote it down while it was still vivid.  I wrote it down because there’s no one here to tell the story to.

Red.  I saw red.  I saw myself out of control and, to be honest, relishing the violence I was indulging in. 

Maybe it was a manifestation of seething, unrecognized anger in me…anger at others, anger over losses and perceived betrayals…maybe it was anger at myself expressing itself in violence I have always stayed away from…maybe it was a way of tapping into the rage inside…or maybe it was tapping into the need to  be somebody’s “hero”… 

Or maybe a dream is just a dream…

Maybe. 

But man dreams can really mess with your head sometimes…