On Safari

I have weird dreams sometimes.  Sometimes they happen just as I’m dropping off.  Sometimes they happen as I’m about to wake up.  Sometimes they’re influenced by my last thought or by the most significant event of the day.  This doesn’t make me different to anyone else I suppose.

I wonder what goes on in the human brain when it dreams.  One minute you’re driving down the M50 and the next you’re in your dressing gown and soaring over the mountains of some far away country.  Other times you’ll be watching TV before you find yourself in the middle of a gangster shoot out more at home in a game of Grand Theft Auto.

Just like this dream I had last night.

I ran into an old friend.  It was like we’d just picked up where we lost contact all those years ago.  We immediately forgot all the bad times and just remembered the good ones.  We went for drinks to catch up and even in my dream I took a quiet smug joy in the fact that I was doing ever so slightly than she was.  We went back to her place because she had to pick her daughter up from school.

We drank coffee and caught up some more.  She looked at me and asked if I had ever thought about that day that we nearly kissed.  I said I had, but thought about how much better it had worked out that I didn’t.  She wasn’t happy with her husband.  He was a slave to his job.  He was an ivory dealer.  Weird in Ireland, but not in a dream.

He’d be gone for months at a time and her daughter was getting to the stage where she didn’t even remember her father.  In the living room we heard the tinkle of a piano as her daughter went through her weekly lesson.  It brought a tear to my long lost friend’s eye.  Her husband had used some of his bounty to fashion the custom piano and it just reminded her of happier times.

Times when they’d have dinner parties that would finish with a sing song around the piano and he’d tell her that everything would be alright.

I stopped feeling smug and felt sad for her.  I kissed her cheek and left the house.

Instead of stepping into the street however, I found myself on an African plain.  Surrounded by nothing, but only for a minute.  Before I knew what was happening a stampede of elephants came storming past nearly killing me.  Their calls to each other deafened me and echoed around the trees for miles.  Then a fully loaded Land Rover followed the herd as gunshots rang through the air mixed with cackles of laughter from all on board.

I ran after them and caught up with my super fast dream running.  There in the drivers seat was the husband of my friend.  How did I know him?  I’d never seen him before, but I just knew who it was.  Among all the commotion of the hunt I asked him why he’d left his family behind for this life.

Without missing a beat he told me that the elephants understood him better than any woman ever could.  Their trunks felt so wrong but felt so right.  Their tusks could reach places a woman would never go.  He had to leave them behind, for they wouldn’t understand.

Even for a freaky dream, this all made sense.  Sort of.

I woke up shortly after that and wondered what it had all meant.

If I ever do run into that old friend, would she be unhappy?  Would she be a single mother looking for a friend, or something more?  Would I be teleported to a different continent to confront her husband with a fetish for large game?

I dunno what it means.

Maybe it’s all irrelephant.