The Cop Dream

As long as we're talking about my dreams on this blog, I pulled another one out of my archive. I am very happy to report that this is no longer a recurring dream. I'm pretty sure I've had this dream about 3 or 4 times before, always ending with me dying via gunshot wound, and I never got away. I rarely even managed to hide. The events of this particular one ended the chain, possibly because, out of all of them, it was the most lucid.

This is copied and pasted from my archive. The only edits I did was to fix a few typos and misspellings, and a couple of sentences were very hard to read.

So here it is:

Notes From The Cop Dream, January 31st, 2013:

A dream I swear I've had before. Repeated in the same fashion. But I don't remember pulling the same kinds of stunts to get away last time.

I don't quite remember how it starts. It's some kind of thing where me and a group of people are walking through some kind of exhibit. We're looking at these weird things that remain from someone crazy who murdered some people. The mention of Alfred Hitchcock's name came up. We watched someone take a running dive off a high ledge and land right on their head. It looked incredibly real, but apparently it was a re-enactment of the movie that all of this was based off of.

By the end of this, our apparent 'tour' came to a halt and we all gathered into another area on the boat we're on to eat snacks. During the snacks, a cop shows up and recognizes me as some kind of murderer. The cop is Frasier's dad [from the TV show]. He shoots me dead.

The dream then restarts where that man runs off the ledge committing suicide. Each time it restarts I remember how I died last time and I try to prevent it. However, I remembered the last time I had this chain of dreams. I remembered all kinds of stunts I pulled on the boat to kill the cop and get away. I remember all kinds of attempts to hide. All previous attempts of that nature ended in failure.

So I tried something drastically new this time. I can't swim, so I thought what if I tried something that the dream knew I couldn't do. I found an area close to land that we passed by every time the dream restarted, before the cop was even part of the scenario yet, and I jumped off the boat and swam for the shore. Somehow, to my surprise, I was able to swim. I made it quite far away from the boat before I noticed the boat stopping, and some gunshots were being fired at me. I was shot and killed soon after I got to shore. I remember seeing that familiar laughter as the cop approached and his comerades congratulated him.

The dream restarted again.

I tried the swimming approach again, as it seemed promising. I got to the other end of the "dream wall" this time (natural barrier preventing me from going directly away from the ship) before I was no longer able to get further away and I had to make my way to a fence along the islands to the north. As I made my way to the fence, I hid behind trees, curving my slender body against them to prevent shots from hitting me. I made breaks for it when I felt like they had to reload. I finally made it to the fence and realized I didn't know how to get over it. I improvised, thinking that no matter how I hurt myself on the fence now, I'll be killed if I don't get over it. I managed to climb and jump over it, only to find there was a large cliff. The fence dropped off to a deep ravine, and there was another fence on the other side of the ravine, just like the one I was hanging onto.

I jumped from the cliff face over to the other side, and suddenly something very strange happened.

The entire scene in my dream turned to a third person view and looked exactly like some kind of Indiana Jones style movie opening sequence. I didn't make the jump, and as I was hanging off the cliff, an Indiana Jones silhouette was being cast over the cliff face somehow. Somewhere in here I also saw the face of my video production teacher, Rob Nyland, kind of transparently pasted over the whole third-person scene. That was very confusing. As the sequence progressed, part of the cliff face started to move and began to crush my finger. As I got my crushed finger free of the rock face I fell. Next thing I knew I was shaking my head in a daze. I had apparently never gone to the other side of that fence at all. I was laying just outside of it with the cop standing over me, doing that familiar laugh, just like every time he gets me with his comrades.

The dream restarted again. Frustrated with how the swimming approach didn't work and the fence seemed to be a fake, this time I ran to the head of the ship to jump off of it the instant it gets to land. I hid as best I could, and managed to get off the ship in time. I pulled some climbing stunts and got to a hiding place in an indentation on the rocky cliff face near the fence. This time I got to the fence from the opposite side - the side the cop got to me from last time [I'm confused by this phrasing too]. I hid with my back against the rocks. This was the best hiding place I had found from the cop yet, and the farthest away I have managed, but that didn't last too long. As his comrades searched for me, some of them came dangerously close to seeing my feet.

While I stood there, I had time to think. They're going to find me eventually. There's no way out. I'm clearly trapped. The only actual way out, the fence, turned out to be a trap that gave me nothing but false hope. The trap actually transformed my dream, bending the dream to keep me there. Can he transform my dreams? Bend them to his will? I don't think there's an actual way to fight him, or to run away from him.

So I made my location known to the cop's comrades (who turned out to be all of the other people in that group from the tour), raised my hands, and yelled for them to take me to the cop (I used his name, but I forget what it was). One of them shot me in the hand before I jumped down from my hiding place. After the shot to the hand I yelled "No! Take me to [the cop]! He's going to kill me, not you!" I walked toward the cop as I saw him approaching my hiding place from near the ship. I congratulated his genius, and told him he's unbeatable. Right after he acknowledged that I was a tough person to catch, he shot me directly in the heart.

As I was dying, this time it was totally different. I was still alive, still talking with the cop as I was dying somehow, as though we had known each other for a very long time. I don't remember all that he was saying, but it was like a series of flashbacks. I saw him in the future, after he gets shot in the hip, teaching classes. I saw him on his deathbed. I saw him as he is now. He gave me a hug and I died. But one thing - one question was repeated during the flashbacks: "What comes after the after?" I think it was. The cop was asking me this question repeatedly, and I couldn't answer.

The dream went totally black and ended shortly after I died. I woke up with a gasping breath in a cold sweat, still feeling the pain in my hand, and in my heart and chest. The pain in my hand didn't completely go away until I started typing this for about 5 minutes. The pain in my chest turned into a pressure feeling soon after I got out of bed, then the pressure feeling went away after about 4 minutes of typing.

I hope this different ending that I got after giving up ends this chain. Because I never want to have that dream again.