When I Lived in Vietnam

It's one of those situations where you are travelling but you are travelling fast, all over the world, in a matter of days, which is a possibility to enjoy if it weren’t for the actual travel.

We were somewhere in Europe.

We had to go to Hong Kong the next day but I was unsure of where this was. Realising that we were in fact in Canada I asked if it were possible to go to America for the next day before we travelled home.

We were flying, but we crashed, as always. And we crashed into a car, which we then drove in, with a driver, who was previously the air pilot. He was dodgy, rugged, in a bad way, edgy, like you could think he might have a good heart but then he just doesn’t, to surprise you, if you were a viewer.

We were driving and I asked to stop, wearing his patience I suppose. Things that I owned were strewn across the ground and the ground was mud, it was supposed to be a road and it was raining so much and as I looked out it appeared an odd landscape of green, green grass that went for ever, it might have looked like part of the outside of Bowen with an odd barn yard, if it weren’t for the green and the mud. One of the items was my head band but when I picked it up it was just a small square cloth, same pattern, but definitely not a hair band. Something of less importance ahead was a canvas which I brought back into the car and considered the difficulty of getting home.

We were in Vietnam. We discussed the significance of this, the signs of it. The reason my things were on the road was because we had been in Vietnam before.

(I consider now as an awake person that I have in fact been to this place before, this Vietnam, although this could be déjà vu, if that can occur in sleep. In this dream I may have thought that I had been there before when really I had just dreamt it up in that dream, double instancing perhaps, as I don’t remember any direct and true reflections that were spoken of in this conversation.)

In a street in this Vietnam. There are dogs chasing the car, mangy and dying. Caitlin is in the back, and this always scares me when she is around as she is always the cause of threat to us. She is holding a puppy or small dog. Somehow the driver/pilot gets up and walks through the car to her, taking the puppy from her.

He pulls out a hot iron and presses it to the puppy’s back until its skin is soft and broken. The puppy makes no sound. The man pulls out a knife and presses it into the neck of the puppy, such as butter. It is so hot, that this is possible. He says “Nobody should die without pain.” And then puts the dog on the roof of the car where the wind catches its broken neck and drags it to the street, disappearing as we drive away. I need to get out of the car as even though this man may not be a direct threat to us, I feel that he will be. I don’t know where he’s from and what his values are but anyone who can kill an animal that cruelly is not good. I tell him I am about to be sick and he turns on me, telling me that if I came to be sick he will slit my throat the same way. Caitlin is crying uncontrollably. Nigel does not a thing, and I wake up.