SEPTEMBER 8, 2024 – I dream a lot—every night. Back when I maintained a daily journal I’d often recount the more unusual dreams, but it’s been years since I kept a diurnal record of things, dreams included. Last night, however, I experienced one of the strangest dreams of my life; so strange I feel a need to document it.
The dream ensued from rather dark and troubling origins. The setting was the Kremlin, and along with several compatriots, I was being pursued by armed guards. We who were being chased knew the danger we faced—and the inevitability of being cornered and caught. Whatever punishment was in store for us was a frightening prospect, and I simply hoped that our sentence would be carried out swiftly, with a minimum of torture beforehand. We were, after all, likely to be charged with spying inside the inner chambers of the seat of Russian power, which I knew was crudely unbending. Our only appeal would be to an unhearing, unseeing, unrelenting god.
After the inevitable capture, we were escorted down a wide carpeted hallway to an open space near a large bank of elevators. In the middle of this area stood a steamer trunk with its lid closed. One of the Kremlin operatives opened the cover, whereupon my fellow “spies” disappeared from the scene, sequestered, I assumed, elsewhere in the Kremlin. I peered into the trunk and saw two partitions equally spaced, creating three compartments.
What I saw stuffed into the sections was something very bizarre: a dress uniform belonging to Peter the Great. In the far left section was Peter’s tri-cornered hat. In the center portion was the Tsar’s shirt and green waistcoat. In the third compartment were the breeches, knee-socks and shoes of the indefatigable Peter. I tried on the shoes, with their front buckles and square heels, and to my surprise, they fit—more or less—despite Peter having been a much bigger man than I. The socks and breeches, meanwhile, turned into a set of faintly striped leggings with feet that were somehow supposed to fit over the shoes.
Next came something terribly forbidding. I was ordered by my handler to contort myself so that I could fit myself into the compartment that housed the shoes, socks and breeches. My two compadres, who by this time had been retrieved and were standing close by, were to fit themselves into the other two compartments. The lid would then be closed, we were informed, and the trunk shipped off to a “disposition facility,” which I understood to be the situs of our impending doom.
The thing of it all was that no matter how hard I tried, I could not compress myself enough to fit inside my allotted space or even within the entire capacious trunk. Surely the other two prisoners would encounter similar or greater difficulty. I worried that the impossibility of our folding ourselves into the trunk would anger our captors, prompting them to finish us off right there in the waiting area next to the elevators. As I contemplated this expedited execution, I figured it might be the most desirable of several really bad options. What if our intended fate were the bottom of the Moscow River just beyond the Kremlin walls? How awful would it be for three human pretzels locked inside a trunk to be dropped into the water and sink straight to the bottom without any chance whatsoever of survival?
My fellow spies saw no point in attempting to play the sadistic game that the Kremlin guards had prepared for us. Simultaneously, we decided to opt out of the scene and make a run for it, even if that meant reaching no farther than three or four strides before being summarily dispatched to our Maker. Just then I realized there was another, better option: waking up.
Which I did. Periodically through the day I’ve ruminated about the dream, thus ensuring that I’ll remember it for a good long while. What had inspired it? What did it symbolize? Why did it rattle me so? Did the exposé of Tenet Media funneling Kremlin cash into the accounts of right-wing dupes play a role? News that the current would-be Tsar Peter has endorsed Kamala Harris for president of the United States (hardy har-har)? I fear that Russia is not only interfering with our upcoming elections but is disturbing my brainwaves, as well. What to do?
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
