Adventures on Halloween

I had one of the most bizarre dreams of my life early Halloween morning. I dreamed I was the King of France and that I got beheaded. It was not by guillotine as you might expect, though. I was standing in a nearly empty banquet hall with a couple other people, whom we all knew were waiting to be executed. The other two went first. There was an executioner holding a long sword, and he just whirled it around and popped off their heads one by one like he was Braveheart in the midst of a bloody battle. I remembered hearing in discussions of the Reign of Terror that a person’s head is conscious for a short span of time after being severed, and so I asked the two heads (a man and a woman) if it hurt. In their severed state, they nodded vigorously, eyes bugging. I thought, “Oh, darn. I don’t like pain. Good thing it’ll only be for a bit.” Then the executioner swiped off my head. All of a sudden I was on the ground, looking up at the room above me while it rocked slightly. Yeah, my head was still conscious. It didn’t hurt unbearably, just a little sting, although it was an odd sensation knowing a sword had just sliced through my neck. Kind of like when your tooth rubs a furry peach the wrong way (that’s worse than nails on a chalkboard to me, and why I prefer nectarines). On the floor, I wondered why my body wouldn’t just die already. I was tired of studying my sensations.

Suddenly the scene shifted to the afterlife. I was with a group of people wandering aimlessly in what looked like a sandy campground with cabins on short stilts. There were administrators who were supposed to tell us where to bunk, but we were all very disoriented and confused. We knew it was only a temporary stop before we “got where we were going”, and weren’t sure what to do with ourselves in the meantime. Some of the people clustered together were wearing Halloween costumes.

I’m sure that part was influenced by my reading C.S. Lewis’ depiction of purgatory, hell, and heaven in The Great Divorce, but isn’t it odd how something can turn up in your subconscious 10 years after you’ve read or experienced it?

The dream was over before I made it to heaven or hell. How disappointing.

It’s also odd how often in my dreams I’m male. It doesn’t happen all the time by any means, but if it’s a dream with an actual story and “me” is someone other than the conscious “Janeheiress”, it’s not unheard of that I’m a man. Don’t worry, I’m far from suffering any gender identity confusion. I think it has more to do with the fact that I’m a bit of a control freak (not an extreme one, but it’s something I’m having to come to terms with in my “old age”), and women in my nightmarish-like dreams are always weak, scared, or running. Maybe it’s a reflection on how I perceive women in general--or my jumbled subconscious dissemination of how society depicts them. Or maybe it was just because I had dressed as Charlie Chaplin three days earlier for a Halloween party. One thing is for sure, I would much rather be a generic “King of France” than a Marie Antionette!

On another note, some coworkers and I celebrated Halloween Monday evening by eating pizza and pumpkin bread, drinking green “slime” smoothies, and laughing our way through Vincent Price’s The House on Haunted Hill. Our two hosts were dressed as a plague victim (=ghost) and a plague doctor. The plague doctor costume was so creepy that he scared some trick-or-treaters. We had a good laugh in the kitchen over their squeaks and gasps at the doorstep. If you don’t know what a plague doctor looks like, look it up. Seriously. And be grateful how far medicine has come, even if it is still far from perfect.