Wiggle space

This dream might have had something to do with the man in the news recently who’d been using little kids to steal unattended purses in a local Chuck E. Cheeses….

I dreamed that I was 6 or 7 again, small for my age, and lured in with a kitten by a middle-aged man who then kidnapped me by pulling me into his black van.  You know that thing your mother always told you about not accepting candy from strangers?  Well she forgot to mention kittens!  My downfall apparently.

He let me hold and pet the kitten but told me he’d take it back and hurt it if I didn’t do everything he said.

He took me to a lot of places where being small, lightweight, and agile was a particular advantage.  He had me climb trees and trellises into windows to raid jewelry boxes, into air ducts to steal high tech gadgets from laboratories or unset gems from jewellers as a for instances.

Always afterwards, my purring little fluff ball kitten was waiting for me in the van, my one treat.

The man meanwhile was very stern and threatening to me.  He’d yell profanities at me and slap me hard whenever I didn’t do exactly what he said at once or did it in any way clumsily.  He was a ticking time bomb to be around.  I never knew for sure what would set him off.

I’m not good with living with a threat; not in physical life and not in dreams either.  I began cramping up, stomach roiling, whenever he so much as glanced at me.  I wanted to attack and hurt him then but was sensible enough to realize he was too big strong for me to take on directly so instead I plotted quietly in my head as to how I’d get away and the kitten not get hurt.

Side note here:  there were 50 girls out of the nearly 300 school girls that were taken by those Boka Haram terrorists that escaped early on, all led by one very brave 16-year-old.  When the convoy came to a stop on a jungle road due to one of the trucks breaking down, she told her friends that now was the time to escape if there ever was one.  “But they’d shoot you!” cried out several of the others.

To this, she wisely answered, “Well I’d rather they shoot me than face whatever else they have in mind for us.”

The doubting Thamasinas couldn’t counter that so the whole truckload of them (all 50) jumped down from the truck and fled away into the jungle.  They kept running and hiding until finally they came across a village that took them protectively in.

In my dream, despite being a 6 or 7 year-old version of myself, I thought of that brave girl and decided that staying under the umbrella of this man’s constant threats was worse than possibility of getting hurt in an attempted escape… but I wasn’t going to risk the kitten.

The next time we parked in an alley and I sat petting the kitten while the man told me what he wanted to do, I nodded when he’d finished and said “Yes Sir!” per his demand; the picture of terrified obedience.  Then I just pretended to put the kitten back in her box while instead tucking her into the pocket of my hoodie.  Luckily, she liked the spot and went to sleep there so the man failed to notice the little bulge there.  She was such a tiny thing.

He pointed me to crawl into some sort of pipe that slanted up toward the roof of the building.  He was going to climb a ladder to the roof to get something and then down a wider pipe that intersected the one I was in, which he’d pass to me there.

The pipe was a steep dark climb and I quickly became aware that a trickle of oil was running down the bottom of it, so I had to avoid that in order not to slide back out.  I was actually pretty pleased about that however.  After all, I’d decided to go along with this scheme only for as long as it took for my captor to get too far into his own pipe to easily give chase when I fled from him.

The circumstances got even better for me as I slowly realized my eyes were adjusting to the dark despite the odds against this and I could actually see not only the intersection of the pipes and the man waiting for me there, but also so sort of fixture hanging down like a tonsil just before that juncture.  The fixture was what dripped the oil.  The man might have just barely fit into my pipe, but there was no way he’d get past that fixture.

He had a bag of something in his hand he was about to pass to me when I met his eyes, waved goodbye, then slid away backwards down the pipe and out the other end.

He swore and the pipe banged loudly in my wake as though he were coming down after me.  I couldn’t understand it.  How had he gotten past the metal fixture?  Maybe it was just the stuff he was trying to hand me.  Either way, I wasn’t going to find out.  I ran for our lives, clutching the kitten to me, and screamed out load when I felt someone grab me from behind.

Yeah.  That was Jeb I screamed at, jolting the poor man out of a dead sleep as well as myself.  But that was okay.  He gave a brief pat and a there, there, and went promptly back to sleep, as did I, but not to that dream.  He didn’t even remember my waking him last night this morning.