MARCH 18, 2023 – I wouldn’t hurt a flea. Well, maybe a flea, and true confession: I’ve killed my share of mosquitoes. And swatted flies and flushed many a wood tick down the toilet. But murder a human being? I’d be incapable of that. . . . Or would I?
The other night in my dreams I actually hauled off and killed someone in an act of full-blown, pre-meditated murder. Worse: I accomplished the gruesome task in close quarters by plunging a letter opener into the victim’s heart. Worse yet: the victim was a person I know very well and against whom in real life I harbor no animus or ill-will.
Without hesitation I can attest that the dream produced the very worst feeling I’ve ever experienced. The crime was spawned by apparent necessity, though in the manner of many dreams, the underlying motivation was vague. All that was certain was that the deed needed to be done and that I’d been directed to carry it out. What confounded me was why I didn’t or couldn’t resist or protest the awful assignment. I simply carried it out as directed by a co-conspirator.
My searing reaction was along a continuum from the outset of the plot (“This is wrong”) to the moment when I raised the letter opener above my head (“This is really wrong”) to the next when I plunged the dagger-like tool into the victim’s chest (“How could I?!”) to the time thereafter, when I was overwhelmed by the irreversibility of the awful crime I’d committed (“How did I?!”).
Minutes after the stabbing, I retreated to the company of my wife and sons and expressed my extreme regret. My own words burned my soul to ash. The prospect of my arrest, charge, arraignment, trial, conviction and sentencing mattered none. I was in excruciating pain knowing that what I’d done couldn’t be undone.
The very unthinkable nature of the nightmare created the dream’s own resolution: my action was so awfully reprehensible it shook me into consciousness. And miraculously, I experienced the exact opposite emotion that had filled the dream. As I surfaced from the darkest realm of the subconscious, I felt the greatest relief ever: the realization that the nightmare was nothing more than a dream; that the irredeemable was fully, immediately and effortlessly redeemable.
When I was wide awake, I looked at the sunlight bending around a window frame. I remained still, blinked, and contemplated what had triggered such a dream. Before slipping down the bottomless pit of self-analysis, I remembered: on a whim, I’d recently used an old letter opener from the days when letters were “a thing”; moreover, the previous evening my wife and I had watched two episodes of Murders Only in the Building, an excellent dark comedy on Hulu starring Steve Martin and Martin Short. In the show, “Bunny,” the eccentric, pain-in-the-neck, stereo-typical lifelong New Yorker, co-op association president is murdered by a knitting needle-wielding assailant. That’s as far as I needled—I mean, needed—to go.
All’s well that ends well, or more aptly put, all’s well that never happened in the first place. But I’ll be curious to know what my therapist will have to say about my dream. Meanwhile, I’ll savor the ecstasy I experienced in that moment of realizing that after all, I truly wouldn’t hurt a flea—well, maybe a flea, a fly, a tick or mosquito, but not a lady bug or butterfly.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
