Since I've come home my sleeping schedule has been a bit off- I go to bed well past three in the morning and I wake up between noon and two. This is not preferable for me, but I've given myself until the new year to follow this schedule before I make any sort of change.
Because of this schedule, I think I've been harboring strange dreams. Mostly they've been harmless, mostly just things I wanted to see happen in life that play out when I'm unconscious. Friends make up and act civil, things clean themselves, family drama melts away, trivial things like that. But last night I had a nightmare that was more sinister than I've had in awhile. I'm leaving most of the elements that were "sinister" out of my re-telling of the dream. These are things that others don't need to experience, even in conjuction with my own re-telling.
I dreamt I was in a third-world country, it seemed like it was Africa... maybe Ethiopia or Northern Kenya. The dream began with me in a charter plane flying over a mostly desert region where deep ravines were being dug in an attempt to create a clean well for water reserves. The plane landed and I walked to the edge of these ravines, which were deep and clear with the exception of discoloration around the edges. There were people in clusters everywhere, using tools to carve the edges of the ravines. I began to help, and the tools did not feel strange in my hand and I squinted in the sunlight as I worked with strangers through the day.
At some point a woman with a baby, who must have been around my age but taller, darker, and much skinnier than myself came up to me and began to ask for a doctor. In this moment I suddenly became aware of an outcrop of buildings in the distance, very near to where the plane I had arrived in had landed. I led the girl over to the building, and fought with six very unwilling doctors to get her an appointment, even though the building was strangely deserted. Finally I marched her to the back rooms and found a doctor who was sitting beside a tiny hospital crib and a examination table. I brought the woman into the room and she sat on the table, holding her child. The doctor looked at us harshly and picked something up from the hospital crib, a very sick baby who, in the moment that I laid eyes on him, died. The doctor- a woman with sandy red hair and a rash complexion looked at me and said in a European accent of some kind, "Her mother left her here." I stood there in silence, not knowing what to say. The doctor placed the recently passed infant back in the crib and turned her attention to the woman I had brought in. I continued to stand there in this ramshackle doctors office, with holes in the walls so big that I could see the sun setting and dirt on the floor so thick that there barely seemed to be a floor at all. I even saw the dust motes in the air, caught in the sunlight as the doctor questioned this woman, whose illness and the illness of her child could not be figured out.
"Has anyone you know travelled recently?" The doctor pressed- a very strange question, when applied to reality, but I suppose it was just my mind connecting to what I know- and the woman struggled with the question. Suddenly, I turned to the girl and spoke to her in her native tongue, and re-asked the question.
"My father. Hell's Kitchen." She stuttered, but not in a frightened way. If anything, she spoke with stubborn defiance. She knew the doctor had little interest in diagnosis, and she knew I couldn't help her.
We walked away then. We left the building and the tiny village it was in. We walked together with her child along the edges of the ravines, which were filling with water.
"Look." I told her. "We can drink from these, can't we?" I was hopelessly naieve, and the woman sighed.
"That water is poisoned. See the pollution at the edges? We cannot drink this, we'll die." She told me, switching her child from one shoulder to the other before gesturing to the pieces of color I had seen earlier in the daylight. I could barely see them now, but she was aware of them just the same as if the sunlight had been strong and glaring. When I looked closely I saw the pollution, and we moved on to another ravine. When the sun set, we were standing together, overlooking rancid water with a silent baby between us. The people along the landscape were silent, and the woman turned to me. She began to speak about New York, the streets and the buildings and the traffic lights. She had been there once, she declared, when she was a child. She had been to a place that I called home but had returned to the place that she called hers. In that moment I felt like the United States was a undesireably reality, as if I had no need to be there any longer, because I had found a new home.
The dream ended with the woman and I and the infant seated at the end of a polluted puddle of water, in the darkness, waiting for the sunrise.
