The Twisted Rantings of the Dantelope

I'm prepared to share with you some of the craziest, most vivid and memorable dreams I had as a child. I'm sure you won't laugh like hyenas.... much. Here's the first installment.

The Water Tower
A dream by Dantelope, circa age 7 or so.

I am crouching behind a dark, wooden cupboard in my friend Alexa's kitchen. It's a summer afternoon and the sun is angling through the living room window, producing funny slanted shadows along her shiny wood floors. I'm staring intently at the elegant, green cloth couch in the living room from my hiding place and thinking I must get out. I feel Alexa tugging at my shirt behind me. She, too, is scared.

Unknown bad people have stormed the house and are rounding up our friends, probably preparing them for some terrible torture. We can hear their horrified screams and shouts again and again. Alexa and I somehow managed to escape to the kitchen before they arrived and we are now nervously plotting a haphazard escape the best way two smart children know how.

They're coming, Alexa. We need to go now. We run for it, taking quick short steps and then dive behind the couch. Voices coming. Did they hear us? No... we're safe... for now. Voices talking in the living room... they're very close. Can't make out what they're saying. Don't really care, either. We've got to make a run for it... to the front door only a few short steps from the couch.

We bolt -- fast. They see us and give chase.

As we're running, the dream shifts to a birdseye view of a tree-laden hillside, rotating around like some kind of epic movie, hanging for only seconds but seeming like an eternity. The landscape is broad and Alexa's house is an island unto itself within the sea of dark evergreens surrounding it.

Now we're in the plains, running for our lives on a dusty dirt road, with farmland all around us. The bad people are driving an old, rusty red pickup truck and barreling down on us fast. We're not going to make it... they're gaining... run, Alexa, run!

When they catch us, they laugh out loud and congratulate themselves on a job well done. And as they prepare to put us in the back of the truck, I notice that the lining of the truck's bed is pegboard. With big holes. I'm perplexed at the obvious ridiculousness of such a prison. While I'm pondering this, I am thrown hard onto the back of the truck, butt first, with my legs dangling off the end of the place where a liftgate should have been. Alexa is placed in a similar fashion next to me. As we look nervously at each other, large wooden pegs, like giant chess pieces, are used to fasten our shirts to the pegholes in the truck. The bad people laugh again, jump into the truck, and begin driving us to what must be certain doom.

As the wheels begin to spin and the dust kicks up, I turn to Alexa and explain how plainly dumb this entire contraption is and show her how we can simply turn around and extract the pegs from their holes and escape. I feel almost superior to the bad guys and my confidence gives me the energy I need to take action. We wait for a moment when there is a lot of dust so they will have trouble seeing us.... and escape... again.

Despite our smokescreen plans, the bad guys immediately know we have bailed out. The truck stops quickly, kicking rocks and dust into the air. They turn it around hard, like you'd expect them to do in the movies, and they begin to chase us a second time. We are quickly caught... again. Apparently unfazed by our intelligent escape, we are once more pegged to the back. But as the truck drives off this time, we feel resigned that there is no escape because we are not fast enough to outrun them even though we are not technically bound by the simple pegs. The fact the bad guys may have known this all along sinks my confidence and makes me feel that perhaps, just maybe, I wasn't as smart as I thought I was.

The truck ambles along the dirt road until we come to a giant, abandoned water tower. The tower is the tallest structure for as far as the eye can see and its peak seems as if it touches the clouds. The bad guys bring the truck to a gentle stop. Car doors slam shut and we are being taken off the pegboard and placed into large potato sacks like the kind we used to race down the slide at Belle Isle with. I feel myself being hoisted onto the shoulders of a bad guy and he begins to climb the thin metal ladder to the top of the tower. And he climbs. And climbs. And climbs.

We're now inside the water tower, and the sack is opened. I step out. It's cold and damp and dark. The metallic interior echoes with the sounds of the second bad guy coming up the ladder and the sounds of the first bad guy disposing of the sack he has just removed me from. Alexa is extracted next. We look nervously at each other: we do not know what is going to happen to us and neither of us knows how to stop it.

The bad guys tell us we are to jump out of a small square opening cut into the bottom edge of the water tower -- sort of a strange twisted version of the pirates' walk-the-plank scheme. I cautiously creep to the edge of the opening and peer over to see what's below. To my dismay, I see a small, bright blue lake with enormous rocks protruding from the water's surface... and the bodies of people who have come before me laying there, apparently dead. I struggle to escape but cannot and, before I know it, I am thrown... and falling... falling... falling.. my eyes strain in the wind to see below me, to watch my impending death.

But as I near the end, I am shocked. The huge rocks are actually hippopotamusses. The bodies strewn about are actually my friends and family playing in the water! I bounce precariously but excitedly off the hippo beneath me and swan dive into the lake. Alexa does a double somersault and lands with a fantastic splash that covers me and several of my family members. We are laughing, splashing, having fun. The fear is gone, and I am safe.

And as I look up at the water tower I wonder... were they really bad people?

---- Dantelope @ i-dream-in-technicolor