I was having dinner with family on Capital Hill. Since it was a dream, by "dinner" I mean a table at Harborview hospital cafeteria and by "family" I mean my mom, a random gay man I just met and his tall, blonde movie-star-looking "hag" (look it up in the urbandictionary if you aren't familiar), a group of unrelated-to-us grieving family members and a microphone built into the pale green plastic urinal on the wall beside the table through which my sister spoke, or rather sobbed, from a room deep inside the hospital where her boyfriend's aunt was dying.
I leaned into the wall as it was loud and echoey in the cafeteria, strained to hear and responded with an steady stream of "oh honey" and "I'm sorry", while roving nursing interns brought us trays of jello and weak coffee in plastic mugs.
Needless to say I was glad enough when dinner was over.
We exited the hospital and were immediately at the corner of Broadway and Denny, which if you live here in Seattle you already know is unlikely without some kind of futuristic physics-based intervention*.
The lack of sci fi accessories in my dream notwithstanding, we prepared to cross Broadway heading east but mom was somehow walking faster (*see earlier note about the low probabilities of events lacking medium-to-far-future technological assistance) and I missed the light.
Mom ended up on the far side and as I mimed her an apologetic wait-for-me, she refocused her gaze slightly southward and began running back across the street against the light. Someone a half block west on the opposite side of Denny was waving to her.
To reach her friend, mom had first to negotiate a phalanx of Matsumas (yes I know this is an easy-peel orange; in my dream they were a breed of irrationally aggressive guard dogs that would put a German Shepherd Pit Bull mix to shame) that occupied the entire crosswalk from north to south on the east side of the Broadway/Denny intersection.
The dogs were so aggressive that their owners typically blinded them, leaving them only their sense of smell to locate perpetrators (or mailmen, random passers-by, children, the elderly, squirrels, and any life forms, honestly, that consume oxygen as a means to survive).
Panic rose in my chest and time slowed to a thin molasses drip. Moment by agonizing moment my mom inched closer, apparently oblivious to the enormous raging dogs in her path while I vainly yelled for her attention. The owners were clearly in the same grip of fear; they frantically waved her off while struggling to maintain hands on leads at the ends of which strained and frothed their massive charges.
My mother, it needs be said, even in waking life, is not easily deterred. Certainly not by hoarsely screaming daughters. Nor, inches from the first lunging snarling monster, by the tacit panic on the face of its owner who was clearly foreseeing having to watch their pet rip a woman into small pieces right in front of them.
Mom was at the very south end of the line of dogs and I prayed she would go around. For a moment it looked like she had narrowly missed the dog, as she wove just south of the group. But then I saw her stumble and go down. Dogs that had been snapping and lunging in random directions, turned in terrifying unison toward the south sidewalk.
Though it sounds cliche, I am here to tell you that in that moment my heart was in my throat - and I do not mean that figuratively. Other organs made similar threats of relocation as I lost sight of my mom in the converging dog mob.
And then, miraculously, she popped up. Stumbled once more, to which I will always attribute the loss of my spleen and 25% of my personal fortitude, but a small price to pay, for a moment later an owner offered her a hand up and she resumed her jog, apparently unscathed.
If you are a regular reader of this blog (and by that I mean you have read even one other post) you will know that happy endings really aren't the speciality of my unconscious mind.
Despite the generally unrelenting science fiction horror show in my dreams, I strive to achieve gratitude on a daily basis on my non-dream life.
So today I am grateful that my mom was not eaten by a pack of semi-wild dogs. The end.
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