Night. On a highschool football field a half-dozen young men drive cars in bumptious circles. At the other end of the field an old man sits at a makeshift desk. Papers and other humdrum objects are scattered on it, and hold his attention. Myself and a friend walk onto the field knowing that the old man was our chief tormentor in high school, a bully and a villain. We approach him and push over his desk and send him flying onto his back. The scene blurs here but somehow our attack kills him. Awareness now splits, so that I'm standing off the field while also digging a ditch with a backhoe to bury him in the field. My friend and I admire the fact that we/they are burying him in the football field, it seems a charged act.
All during this and what happens afterwards, I am aware of myself thinking that this is a Stephen King story, that I've read it before.
The scene shifts to later in the night or the next night. We're now in a large dining hall filled with the people of the town. They are rewarding us for having killed the villain, who apparently tortured them all in one way or another. They show us gratitude with gifts and food. One Oriental man offers me a painting from his art shop--can't quite remember the artist.
I half wake and realize that this isn't any King story I've read before, that I'm the one making it up. It's a disturbing dream but I drift back into it and try to re-write the ending so that it is more of a story. In this re-writing I realize that I am now being cast in the role of the new villain to replace the one we killed. As though there was a psychic ecology to the town that demanded this role exist. As an amendment, I realize that the friend and I will now have to fight it out for first place in this role.
I think I know where this partly came from. I've been watching Breaking Bad every evening for several weeks, and I'm reading a novel by Edward St. Aubyn--both bleak and thick with monsters. The power of the dream was not so much the horror elements as the sense that it was a significant story revealing itself and being revealed by my lucid rewriting.
