Dream (III)

I lived beneath a forested glade on a hill. On this gladed hill, I strangled a man—a former convict—to death and buried him in a shallow grave covered by leaves; then I strangled to death a teenage schoolgirl and buried her in a similar shallow grave. I felt considerable remorse but more due to the panic that I would be caught than to any inherent moral repugnance—I was sure that I had not concealed the bodies well enough and that the relatives would soon raise the alarm and all would be discovered.

A few months passed: as I walked down a road by the forest, I saw a stream that ran through the trees—the rains had created it in full spate; it had been surrounded by police ticker tape and I could see bones below—just fragments. I felt immediate panic, the graves had been uncovered by the rainstorm and washed down into the river. I saw a white-haired boffin-type pathologist at work on the scene. I went to ground, but there was nowhere to run. Yet, soon enough, it emerged that the bones were ancient—the whole forest was a graveyard in ancient times. It struck me within the dream that it was mystical that I should create graves upon graves.

I went into the forest and found, newly excavated, a king’s grave. He was dressed as a Norseman, as with the famous Lewis chess set, complete with a broad shield and sword. His tomb, dug up from the earth, was a casket set in rough stone—and he seemed almost to glow a mossy green. He seemed to be a very ancient and powerful king.

They never caught me, I woke up long before—yet the dream was very vivid. I would partially wake up and think, “It’s okay, I’m not a murderer,” and then fall straight back into the dream and feel the fear and guilt—the certainty that I was guilty and would be discovered and there was nothing to avert it. Indeed, very early, a man knocked on the door outside—and although I had awakened from the dream and snoozed with my eyes close, I could not shake the sensation that “they” had come for me.

I have no interpretation, but we can summarise the facts: I killed a guilty man and an innocent girl, then I buried them in a sacred site I did not know was a sacred site—later, the rains washed a grave to the surface but it belonged to an ancient king. This is perhaps to do with the integral view: murder good and evil to uncover the king.