9/10/00
UNSETTLING DREAM
3 PAGES

So last night I had the most vivid dream that I can remember in a long time. It really wierded me out and the really weird thing about it is that it lasted the whole night and told a full story. You know how sometimes you'll be having a dream and you'll wake up in the middle of it and then you fall asleep and it's a different dream. Well, I'd wake up and fall back asleep again and the dream would pick up where it left off. So here goes….

Donald is a guy who lived in my home town. His son Lewis was my age. Donald worked for my parents' company doing odd jobs like mowing the grass and general maintenance work. He's somebody who I really haven't heard or talked about in a long time and haven't seen in several years. So last night I dreamt that I was helping my grandfather and Donald fixing up this warehouse that my grandfather had bought about ten years ago. I was standing just outside this hallway where Donald and my grandfather were working on something. I was setting down a bunch of wood or something when I hear this crash and Donald screaming. I ran back into the hallway and saw a gaping hole in the floor, my grandfather standing over it. Then I hear Donald scream the most painful scream ever from inside the hole. Apparently (in the dream) Donald had fallen into a mine shaft. Now, I've come across mine shafts out in the desert and they are scary as hell especially given the horror stories I've heard about wandering too close to them. The ground is often unstable and if you venture too close or try to go in, the ground could give way and you'll fall to the bottom of the pit. So I'm sure this is the reason why in the dream Donald fell into a mine shaft and not just a weak spot in the concrete floor. And it also explains the reason for what happened in the duration of the dream.

Nobody dared to try and get Donald out of the hole. We knew he was alive down there because we could hear him screaming. I kept saying, pleading, we have to go down there and get him out. He's probably broken just about every bone in his body. Somehow we figured that he had fallen about 30 feet, although in retrospect it seemed a lot higher because in the end I was comparing the fall to the height of the warehouse which stood about 50 feet. Either way, he was crippled down there, hollering in pain. All we could hear was his calls for help. I knew that he was dying down there, and nobody dared get close enough to the hole in the floor lest the ground give way and they fall in themselves.

So the people who worked for my grandfather figured that in order to get Donald out safely, what they should do is enter the mine shaft from the side or from underneath by going through the sewage pipes. It was a process that was going to be tedious and time consuming because they had to blast the pipes out and still had to get a bunch of breathing gear in order to get through the pipes and into the mine shaft. And the thing that was horrifying me was the non-chalance of everybody. They were to easy to accept that Donald might die down there and they were willing to let that happen rather than risk any more lives trying to pull him directly out of the mine shaft.

Now as I said, I kept waking up and falling back asleep again in the middle of this dream and it would pick up more or less where it left off every time. So I'm not sure how many days were going by during the course of this dream. Probably around 2 days or so. The police, the fire department, any emergency measures were NEVER called into play. The people who worked for my grandfather were trying to inconvenience as few people as possible. Finally I was getting freaked out and realized that if the hole he had falled down was only 30 feet, we didn't need to use ropes or anything to pull him out. We could use a fucking LADDER. Because I knew that there was a ladder which we had used to get up on top of this warehouse which was about as tall as the shaft was deep. So I got a couple of my grandfather's employees, and we grabbed that ladder and lowered it into the hole and climbed down into the mine shaft.

There was a bunch of old machinery and equipment laying around in this large dark chamber which come to think of it, resembled the lower floor of the warehouse that I had been paid to clean out one summer. We called Donald's name and he didn't answer. We saw his legs sticking out from underneath a large piece of machinery. One of my grandfather's employess went over to Donald and looked under the machine and I just heard him say, "Oh god." Donald had committed suicide. I'm not quite sure how, but I think it had something to do with the machine he was under. He somehow managed to crawl under it and turn it on and that's what killed him. I seem to think that the machine was something that involved rotating blades like a lawn mower, so you can imagine what horrific things the employees saw underneath that machine. And now, here's the thing that just made me shudder both in the dream and as I think back on it. There was a way out. In the dream it was literally an old door in the wall of the mine that you could see daylight on the other side of. All we had to do was go in through that door and we could have gotten him out in time. But beyond that, even if we didn't know about that door, DONALD DID. It was in plain view. All he had to do was crawl over to that door and he'd be out. Instead, he crawled under this machine and committed suicide.

And the last thing that really makes me shudder is again, the non-chalance that everybody was demonstrating at this horrific event. I was asking why on earth Donald would just commit suicide when he coiuld have gotten out. My mom and grandfather said, "Well, it was probably because he knew he would have been written up again and fired once he got out." Because apparently, he had been written up 4 times already that week for unsafe behavior at work; for doing things that put he and his co-workers at risk. And this was going to be the fifth offense. Falling into the mine shaft, an UNEXPOSED mine shaft was apparently HIS FAULT according to my mom and grandfather. They didn't seem to care about his injuries or anything like that. In their mind, he had broken some kind of rule that was going to get him fired should he get out of there alive. So instead of coming back to face that, Donald commited suicide. And nobody seemed to care. And this is the point where my alarms went off and jarred me violently out of sleep.

I was shaken by the images and it wasn't like most dreams where the images go away seconds after you wake up. I can still remember every single thing that happened even if I don't quite understand all the details. It was such a strong feeling burned onto my brain, that when I got into work, I had to call up my mom in Maine just to make sure Donald was okay. I havne't seen or really even thought about the guy in a few years and all of a sudden, I was genuinely worried that something bad had happened to him. Nothing had. My mom said he came into the office yesterday and everything was fine, but she was so convinced by what I had just told her that she said she'd make sure and check on him today to make sure nothing had happened. It's weird, the feeling was so strong in my head, that I was actually surprised to hear that he was fine. I fully expected to call and find out that he had died. In fact, I'm still not completely sure that something isn't going to happen soon. It's like I was right there witnessing what was going to happen while it happened. And I can't shake that image.