Dead Dream

I am pretending to be dead. I am lying on my back on the floor of a courtroom, my feet toward the judge who is looking down on me from his podium.

Someone, who is sort of my brother, is trying to prove to the judge that I was married before I died.

The brotherish person lifts my hand and shows the judge that I have rings on my finger. I know that the rings are fake and I am worried that the judge wont beleive that I am really married... (There are large pieces of plot missing from the dream, as though i began watching the movie halfway through: whether or not i am married, I dont remember.)

The judge inspects the rings on my hand and I'm not sure if I should make my hand tense or let it be limp. I don't know how dead hands are sposed to be and I am sure that the judge is going to notice that I'm not really dead; I also really want him to notice so that I can stop pretending. So I open my eyes... but no one notices.

The judge pronounces me married and dead and then they put me in a car where my Zaydie (my dad's dad) looks down on my face and says that he's sad that I am dead but in a 'everyone dies' kind of way.

Then my grandma (my mom's mom) is there and she sits with my 'body' and watches over me while we drive somewhere and I lie very still with my eyes closed. I somehow know what is happening as though I can see. The imagery of the dream is vague as though I am imagining it based on what I can hear.

Grandma talks to me, but sort of like praying, not directly to me, but to herself, talking about me... remembering me. And I wish she would stop because I assume that if she's talking to me then she is also looking at me and I am uncomfortable and I want to be able to move around.

I move. I want her to notice and then I will be able to get up!
But she must thnk that its normal for dead bodies to shift a little bit, because she doesnt say anything.

Next I am lying on a low rock wall near a field where the rest of my family is having a picnic. My grandma is still sitting near me and I am still moving.

...In my bed, in real life, as I near the end of the dream, I keep flipping around and moving my arms trying to get comfortable, and that is slipping through into the dream where I begin flipping and moving my arms on the wall beside my grandma who says, in this really bewildered, sad, mourning and not understanding way, "Katie, why do you keep moving?"

And then I wake up. I look at the clock, hoping that it is morning so I can get out of bed and not have to sleep anymore. It is exactly 3:00.

Looking at a clock exactly on the hour always makes me think of the scene where the clock tower chimes and someone looks up from something bad that they are doing and says to an empty room 'I'm afraid its the witching hour" and suddenly the room is full of ghosts and the tower continues to chime or the red digital numbers to blink and...

I can't go back to sleep for an hour.

Every time I start to drift back to sleep, I wake myself up, as the feeling that I'm not allowed to move creeps back over me. I have to keep telling myself 'you're not pretending to be dead anymore, because you never were dead, because that was all a dream" but my body feels heavy, as though my arms and legs will be stuck where i place them and my blankets are heavy and I'm too hot but the open ocean of black space outside the blanket is not safe.

And the feeling I am left with when I finally calm down is: "I really really don't want to be dead right now."


And it was all sort of inspired by this card, where dead people stand in their coffins and look up at the angel and wait eagerly for judgement... or maybe the dead people stand in their coffins and look up and eagerly judge the angel.