The Dream

Been a little while since the “The Dream” popped up.

I was at my parent’s house alone with the baby. I had just put her down for a nap and thankfully she dropped right off without a fuss. I started hearing somebody rattling the front door handle. Odd but I didn’t think much of it until I heard it again…and again.

Odd dream event #1: I wasn’t carrying. I was fully dressed, it was the middle of the day, I was watching the baby, and I was in Maine, by all means I would normally have a gun on me.

Odd Dream Event #2: What I did have was this interesting little travel safe that seemed to be a massive combination of lots of features of several safes I’ve seen. Since it was “dream Me’s” Safe I opened it without incident, tho it felt like ages (really ironic when you have time dilation in a dream which is time dilation in itself!) but inside looked like the pistol case at the gun shop. LOTS of different pistols, none of them mine (Well except they were in “MY Safe” which I don’t really own) and all of them were as far as I could tell new and unfired.

I grabbed an XDm 45 and a spare magazine…except the spare was empty (who packed this damn safe?) so I grabbed a funky Colt CCO-style 1911 that was stainless with OD Green grips and stuffed THAT in my pocket.

I then started toward the front door and found that it was open when it should have been closed and locked. Whoever was rattling the lock had gotten in. I couldn’t see or hear anything so I retreated back to where the baby was sleeping. My folks live in a small house so if this dude was still in the house I knew he didn’t get past me, and if he got closer to me and the baby the muzzle of this big plastic .45 would be between us.

Then I saw him, oddly he had gone right back out the side door and was mucking around on the porch. The sun was just right that there were lots of shadows in the house but the porch had full sun, so I crouched behind a table (not great cover or concealment, but it had a tablecloth so it would give me a slight advantage in case he came in). I got a few glimpses of him as he rummaged around. Was a white male, slight build with shoulder length hair. He was just about to open the door back in when he gave that universal look of “I forgot something” and disappeared again.

Then I woke up.

Now here’s where my mind made it so I couldn’t get back to sleep. Odd dream event #3: I never checked the status of either of those strange guns. The spare magazine for the XD was empty, and there was a mag in both of those guns but I never checked either of them to see if they were loaded or did a press check on the chamber. Stranger yet, I couldn’t even tell you the condition of the 1911’s hammer. Had I stuffed a loaded 1911 with the hammer back into an empty pocket????

Seriously these are things I do to a fault! If I’m pocket carrying and decide to change from shorts to long pants or vise-versa, I’ll pull the pocket holster and gun out of my pants and set it down someplace I can see. I’ll change my pants, and before I put the gun back on I’ll drop the mag and check the chamber. Are there magic Gnomes that might sneak into the room and steal all the cartridges out of my gun without me even noticing? NO! But it takes a half-second to check for a loaded mag and a loaded chamber. Moreover, to stuff a single-action gun into a pocket without a holster and without at least making sure the chamber was empty or the hammer was on half-cock (not that I’d ever use half-cock on a 1911, especially this one which had all the modern appointments including a high-rise beavertail) just seems to scream that I hate my right femoral artery!

Also given that I’m not terribly familiar with the XD platform, while in real life the guns have an LCI and a cocking indicator, I didn’t notice either of those (hey I don’t even know if the hammer was back on that little 1911!)

Yeah my adrenaline was up when I woke up, but it only got worse when I thought that I might have been confronting an intruder with two empty guns.

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One Response to The Dream

  1. anonymous says:

    I recently had a similarly detailed dream, and woke up in an unpleasant state.

    I dreamed I was going down the stairwell with the intent of exiting a parking garage downtown, and was confronted by a pair of scruffy types whose appearance, body language, and behavior put me immediately into Condition Orange. I smiled politely and ignored their demands for spare change, threats to whoop my honky ass, etc. and approached the building exit. They began yelling death threats, and one of them ran around to get between me and the exit, and I put my hand on my CCW (a Kahr single-stack 9mm, if it matters). He stepped very close to me and I lost track of his buddy (which in real life would probably have gotten me killed there and then).

    He pulled out some kind of cheap shiny little two-shot derringer, and I made the split-second decision to try to disarm him, as he was a noodle-armed manlet. I grabbed his thumb and pinky and bent them sharply in opposite directions, and the gun hit the pavement. But he wasn’t done. He began shouting again, and announced, among other things, that he had another. I put my hand on my CCW again, and he pulled out some kind of larger, shiny nickel-plated pistol, maybe a Jennings .380 or 9mm. I was focused on him, and aware that he had a buddy with him but not sure where his friend had gotten to. Again, in the real world this probably would not have ended well for me.

    What happened next happened very, very quickly. Because he was at this point just outside arms’ reach, and because I was already rattled, I forgot a lot of my training. I saw that muzzle swinging toward my face. I drew, still staring at the gun in his hand instead of the front sight, and just sort of shoved the gun in his general direction and mashed the trigger hard. I remember seeing clearly that the bullet struck him in the abdomen, well below the diaphragm, a bit to the right of center. He dropped the gun and went down like a puppet with its strings cut, just collapsed in a heap. His buddy, who had been some distance behind him, legged it.

    He was rolling from side to side groaning about how unfair it was that I’d shot him. In my mind I was terrified, trying not to panic: “oh crap, I’m gonna need a lawyer. Oh crap, I’m gonna be on TV like Zimmerman. I don’t want to be on TV, I don’t want to end up on trial, oh crap,” etc. I woke up shaking and sweating with my heart pounding, with sharp pains in my chest (for the curious, I’ve had sharp pains in my chest at times of emotional distress since puberty, and multiple physicians have been unable to find any physical cause; all the tests come back negative, the EKG is 100% normal, and they shrug and say “it’s all in your head, try to relax.” Easy for them to say), and could not get back to sleep for some time.

    What I take away from this is that I am worried that my tactical knowledge and skills may be suboptimum, and that under stress my marksmanship may deteriorate to a level that might, in the real world, result in my untimely demise. On the other hand, my subconscious appears to expect my carry ammo–Winchester 147gr Ranger-T–to do its job if I do mine.

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