The setup [dream, morning of 20071105]

There was this sense of doom or death, like something was happening in the background somewhere, and I only knew about it instinctively. Some mystery or crime. I felt apprehensive.

It was the middle of the night, and I was being chased through this old, bombed-out-looking downtown area, like I was back in the slums in a 1950s city. An old car was cruising around, following me. This car was a golden-yellow; it also looked like it was from the 1950s. I couldn't escape its headlights. Each corner I turned, it was there. Finally I found a strange half-height passage on a corner, and I crawled through it, through a burnt-out shell of a building, to a different side of the street. The car didn't follow. It continued on. I expected to hear the startled screams of a different man at any moment. They were looking for a good time, I figured.

[note: This car episode was an enigma in the dream. It actually happened twice. In the first, the car followed me and then some prohibition-era, gangster-looking men came out of it and beat me ruthlessly. But then it was as if I rewound time, and I was able to replay the scene, to do it right the second time through or something. That's what is recorded above.]

I ran up a dark, sloping hill that was covered in dead leaves and mud and had some thick-trunked trees growing on it. There was an old plantation house-style mansion on the grounds ahead of me. I walked up to the house and two girls were there waiting for me--average-looking, but seemingly seductive and sly. They were in nightshirts and pajama bottoms. "Do you want to come in?" I was nervous and wanted to leave, but followed them inside regardless. They took me upstairs to the kitchen area, and proceeded to turn on an outdoors light, where you could see what looked like sycamore trees through the kitchen windows, right up there against the house. Then they took out large butcher knives. "It's a game," they said.

I was scared and needed a way out. They wore innocent smiles, but I felt that there was some deeper motivation--plus I had that feeling, that something was going on around this town.

"You just throw the knife against the tree and see if you can make it stick," one of the girls said. So that was the game. Then I noticed the faint-red footprints in the white carpet, tracing footsteps through the living room and beyond. I ran into the next room where it was dark, and I tripped, entangled in a mass of stickiness and hanging wiring and a soft substance. The light came on and with it, the looming secret made clear. A skewered, bloodied body was hanging in wires from the rafters, a young boy--Don Shugan, I thought, though he was hardly recognizable.

It was all a setup.

There had been a party at the mansion that night. I didn't attend. Things obviously took a turn for the worse. Turned into murder. They needed someone to blame, someone to take the fall--hence the car and the girls.

I had been away from the mansion all night and now they had drawn me there, covered me in the victim's blood. They had done it perfectly. I ran out the porch door, went sprinting past the sycamores in the pitchblack. I stopped and put my hands on my knees, panting, waiting for the sirens I knew would be coming, just out there among the trees, waiting.