missed dream

woke up throughout the night thinking, i should write down this dream. this is a strange one, or a twitchy one, i thought.

i do not believe that dreams contain mystical or magical messages, but I do think they occasionally say something about yourself and about your anxieties and buried introspections. this dream had something of that about it, and i woke up half way thinking this would make an interesting note-to-self for later.

i had a longer dream last night, and i remember that one well. i have had this other dream in some form or other many times over. i often dream of being sentenced to death. the verdict can not be appealed, and the sentence is always in response to some indiscretion never clarified in the dream, but which all seem to agree was pretty inconsequential. in these dreams i get death on a technicality.

the only time i remember a reprieve of sorts was when someone told me, on my way into a gas chamber, that "no one actually dies in there."

last night, though, the dream had me going to the electric chair, and i was given a final day in the city to eat all i want and go wherever i wanted. my final meal was supposed to be a can of sardines, but when i opened the can it contained some kind of large beans.

i was accompanied this day by a man and his son. they worked for the state, and their job was to make me feel like this was any other day and that nothing bad was about to happen. i woke up asking the man if there was any way out of this, thinking about the pain of the electric chair.

details change but the focus of the dream is always the death penalty.

since childhood i have regarded institutionalized life-or-death decisions with some sense of foreboding. growing up in Florida, the death penalty was a frequent point of contemplation at my high school. the topic came up so often and so conspicuously that over time i came to regard it as inevitable.