Chats with Dad

Another email I sent my Dad about a dream I had:

Hi Dad,
I woke up from another whacko dream last night, most surely inspired by watching Platoon before bed. This time I was in a foreign country (that looked strangely similar to the layout of the farm) and in the middle of combat. It seemed like the Vietnam war, there were Asians all around me with yellow berets shrieking nonsense. At one point I was in the field to the side of the barn and they were tossing grenades but they took a while to explode so they’d fall and I’d see it and run to a different area. Hey, I create my own rules in my dreams, and successfully avoided all of the explosions. But it was pretty loud and lots of screaming and clinking of metal and shots being fired. Then I ran to the back field where I saw some of the enemies getting up a huge machine which basically looked like something that would be attached to the back of a tank or something. Imagine a motor about the size of two refrigerators. It was basically a rotating machine gun the fired in all directions. I had to crawl low enough so that the bullets wouldn’t hit me and get to where the old clothes line was. At some point, around the dead chestnut tree I used to climb and before the burn pile I found a little kid in the middle of the action that I had to save, so I crawled him back to where the lot ends (where the tree almost fell on me)and we hid hunched over. Eventually while crouching and avoiding bullets some guy, from my side, came over to me and the kid. He had this tool that looked like it was for gardening, kind of like a rake but hand-sized, and it had huge hooks or claws at the end of it. (I think I made this up, it was a tool the soldiers used to hook and quickly moved dead bodies kind of the way they used meat hooks) and he dug it into my arm. Maybe he thought I was dead, I had a leather jacket on so it only hurt a little. He dragged me to safety and I said I had to save the kid and he said, “Leave him!,” But I didn’t. Then at some point there was a neutral zone that we walked through and made it to a car that a woman was in, waiting for us to drive us to safety. My fellow soldier realised at soon as he shut the door that he had triggered a car bomb release and that we couldn’t open the doors or else it would explode. We got to the end of the driveway and made a plan to escape by opening the doors and hauling ass. Of course, this also was not an instant explosion because, I never die in my dreams. We run out of the car, and like every stupid girl in any movie she’s like, “wait, I forgot something,” and goes back to the car so we had to go after her and drag her to the ground before explosion. A lot of the rest is blurry but I distinctly remember one scene of the dream where we were hiding inside what seemed like maybe a locker room, somewhere with high ceilings, walls like stalls, to hide behind and showers on the ceilings. Then, suddenly, a voice over a loud speaker (with an asian accent) says “are you ready to get hhoottttt?” And all of a sudden a bright yellow powdery liquid starts shooting from the shower heads and a weird asian gongy music starts to play like they would have at a spa or sauna or something and this chemical was raining down on us. 


I must say I certainly entertain myself and seem to have invented some cool weapons in the meantime too. Sheesh.

Love,
Ham

I feel
like you and I are drifting
through water without waves
and the nights turn into days
and the days turn into ways
to avoid each other.
But I look for your attention
and I can't find it.
I seek your conversation
and it's reserved for others
and I beg you to notice
before I get tired of begging.
But I am getting tired
of waiting
to feel
like I am important to you.
Do you hear me screaming under water?
Do you feel me pulling you towards me?
Do you know how much I am suffering in silence?
Just begging for you to turn to me?