Dreams and Violence

I've started dreaming again.

I was biking across "the city", enjoying a vigorous ride under what I assume was a bright moon. I cut through some back alleys that reminded me of something out of GTA:Vice City. As I weaved through the turns, I suddenly came across a wall, a dead end across my path. I used my momentum to go up the wall and sort of flipped over and around, and as I landed to retrace my steps, two men were in my way and my bike was gone.

I somehow knew that they meant me ill, and that there were more on their way. I had nothing to appease them with, no money or other valuables -- and they knew that. I would be an easy mark, or so they thought.

I knew I had only one chance out of there, and it was to take the fight to them, and with the element of surprise, I'd have a chance of overcoming the odds before their reinforcements arrived. Otherwise I was well and truly boned.

I thought all of this with no emotion, only a cool calculating of possibilities, odds, and outcomes.

I palmed the folding knife I carried in my pocket, a Christmas gift from Kim, hiding the blade behind my wrist. As they approached, both taunting and silent, both armed and not, I launched myself at them, slashing out and down.

The next thing I remember was halting my blade an inch from a very wide eye, then slowly lowering it after trading wordless words, sharing the understanding that I could have just as easily kept going, that I did not want to harm them, but that I could, and would, if necessary.

At this point I woke up. It was a rather different outcome than most of my dreams.

Most of the dreams I remember are of a violent nature. Sometimes perpetrated by me, sometimes by others, but there's always a sense of necessity to it. Life is fundamentally violent, a continual struggle against death, and civilization is an all-too-thin veneer layered on top of it.

In these dreams I have died more times than I can count; there's never panic or fear, but instead a calm "well, shit" acceptance. I simply rolled the dice and lost.

I've been crushed, drowned, and fallen, but the most vivid ones involve conflict with and violence against fellow man. Blades, blunt instruments, and firearms -- I've shot and been shot countless times, limbs rendered useless, chest wounds, and even a searing shotgun blast to my face. That last one I walked into while I was a soldier or policeman, clearing a house with my comrades.

This violence is never random; there's always a purpose to it, almost a sense of duty or service. It's a necessary means to an end, be it protecting society as a whole, those I care about, or simply defending myself. I've never gain anything beyond my own survival.

Each time I wake from one of these dreams, I am reeling with either survivor's guilt or a "By the fact I'm thinking this I'm actually alive..." sense of disbelief. Either way my hands feel quite stained.

Nature isn't peaceful; it's an endless struggle of one life against another. That doesn't make it any less incredibly beautiful, and it certainly doesn't make any one life any less precious. Taking a life is not something to be done lightly -- only when truly necessary.

Thanks to our brains, we can resolve conflict through other means, yet beneath all of that, in the end, the words must be backed up by might. It's still a dangerous world out there.