Blood on the Street

I don't know if Strovska's recent dreams influenced mine, or if it was the five (!) squad cards my neighbor and I passed as we drove home from school yesterday, but either way my dreams also appear to be extremely suggestible.

I was on my lunch break from some training session, and I decided to go to the bookstore or library on my time off. As I approached an intersection that I now realize was probably a version of the one where my favorite coffee shop is located, the GPS device I was holding, and which was apparently giving me directions, narrated, in an increasingly wavering and eerily prophetic voice, that there was "blood on the street at [street name] and [street name]." It was rather disturbing, especially as it referenced a location close to me.

As I was waiting on the street corner, about to cross to my destination, an emergency vehicle with a bright white light flashing above its windshield came sailing through the intersection, I think with a siren going. As it passed, I saw there was a decal on its back window that looked like one of those "crossing" signs, except the animal in it was what at the time I think I identified as a marmoset. I now think it may have been a marmot.* Anyway, I figured it was the logo of the emergency rescue operation.

I entered the bookstore/library and started browsing the shelves. I noticed that most of the books had very worn spines. Then someone pointed out that someone (one of the professors/trainers from where I had just been) had set aside a book for me--there was a label with my name on it taped to the spine. Apparently it was a gift certificate, specifically so that I could get this book. It was on Vuillard, an artist I don't really know at all but in the dream seemed to like well enough. I took it up to the counter, and they rang it up for me. I had $1.60 left on the gift certificate.

Just before, I had remembered or been reminded (sirens?) of the violence ("blood on the street"), and had looked out the side window. In the alley, I could see a car and a person sort of bent over on the street, with his back sort of torn open and bloody. I told myself that I didn't really want that image in my head, so I looked away quickly.

As I looked out the huge picture windows at the front of the store, I could see that there had been a massive car accident. Five or six cars were strewn along the street, variously crumpled. There were big oily-looking patches of some fluid, from cars or bodies. Emergency personnel appeared to be draping sheets over bodies on the street. I could see that the building just down the block from the one I was in had been damaged, with its front window shattered.

Overall, one of the more disturbing dreams I've had in a while.

*The weird thing is that when I googled marmoset just now to find out what one is, a picture showed up that someone printed out and stuck on our office wall (the one with the two babies clinging to the fingers). I didn't know those were marmosets. I have seen marmots in person.