mafia!

Last night's dream was the scariest in recent memory. Somehow my husband and I had gotten embroiled in the Mafia. I don't know how it happened, but we had been roped into helping them safeguard a huge amount of money. The money was stuffed in one of those bank envelopes* and put into a safe deposit box in a very fancy little bank, and we had the combination.

There were a lot of complicated details involved in the deal, but it was coming to a close and it was time for them to retrieve their money. I had been supposing that our involvement with them would end at the time they took the money away, but it was slowly dawning on me that we were in a very dangerous situation: we knew what they had done, and it wouldn't be wise of them to leave us around on blind trust that we wouldn't spill it to anyone.

The main three or so guys showed up at our house (a second-story apartment) with wives, children and aged relatives in tow. They were all milling around, the guys with gigantic firearms, and it seemed like the big crowd was a show of force. One of the Big Shots gestured to me and said that his wife was now going to give me instructions on how they were going to retrieve the money. She was a nondescript, skinny, washed-out blond with messy shoulder-length hair** and an air of resignation--like she might once have objected to all this mafia stuff but had become hardened over the years and was now not at all likely to help me get out of the almost-inevitable rubbing-out. She gave me a rundown of the procedures and asked me for the combination for the deposit box. I thought desperately, "Hey! I'll give them a made-up code and then we can go get the money for ourselves and run off with it." Then I realized that 1) the minute I had that thought, I simultaneously forgot the actual code; 2) she probably was asking me as a test--they couldn't possibly have been so stupid as to not take note themselves of the code; 3) my "forgetting" the code was going to look really suspicious. I recited a number that sounded familiar, but I said that I wasn't sure I was remembering it right. To try to look cooperative I said, "What happens if it's not right? You'll still be able to get it from the bank, right? Because I'm sorry, I'm really not sure if I'm remembering it right, and I can't find the paper I wrote it on." She just gave me an inscrutable look, which freaked me out even more.

The wife went off somewhere else, and the three or four Main Men lined up in a line in our dining room. They raised their huge machine guns toward the ceiling, and everyone reacted in a way that indicated that this was a traditional mafia way of celebrating the clenching of a deal. They fired several rounds into the ceiling, which I could see really made my husband mad (up until this, he had been somewhat excited about working with the mafia and impressed with their Coolness, which annoyed me because he was being juvenile and foolish; now I could see him mentally calculating the cost of replacing the drywall).

After that the extended family members started leaving. I saw the wife who had given me the instructions, and her hair had changed from messy, youngish and unintimidating to a frosted, stiff helmet. I thought that didn't bode well for our survival and that it was symbolic of a hardening of her attitude [for some reason I was still hoping that she might be the key, maybe convincing her husband to let us go].

The emptier the house got, the more freaked-out I was, because the main mafiosi were still hanging around in the dining room, glowering and posturing with their guns. There were still some scattered relatives around, and I realized that when they were gone the mafiosi were going to rub us out in a hail of gunfire. I briefly thought about trying to hide in the oven, in case the metal walls would be protective, but that was hardly the solution since they were practically in the kitchen [and for numerous other reasons that didn't occur to my dream incarnation; the only other objection I had to the oven idea was that the bullets would make shrapnel of the metal and the shrapnel would kill me if the bullets didn't].

My husband had disappeared into the bathroom just after the ceiling-strafing ceremony, and I went and knocked on the door. It seemed like he was either in the shower or getting ready to take a shower, and he didn't want to let me in. I persevered and opened the door a crack to see him dancing exuberantly and without a care in the world, in a pair of "eurotrash"-y jeans that he had gotten from the mafia guys, apparently having gotten over his anger about the bullet-riddled ceiling. I was really annoyed, and desperate to communicate the urgency of the situation. I said, "They're going to kill us!"***

He was pretty unimpressed. I tried to go very quickly through the whole scenario so he would see that the only logical outcome was that we were going to die if we didn't leave right now. I knew we didn't have much time, but saw that he was determined to keep dancing in the bathroom and then take a shower. I finally said I was going to try to get away, adding "I'm so scared I want to take a gun". I hoped that would finally alert him to the danger, since he knows I hate guns and wouldn't want to carry one unless it was really necessary. He seemed excited that I was taking an interest in weaponry and said, "Oh, in that case take the pistol. That's the best option for you." [Apparently we had a stash of guns in our freezer.]

I woke up around then, completely freaked out and also feeling guilty that I was going to bail out and leave him there to face an almost certain rubbing-out at the hands of the mafia guys.

*How can it have been that much if it fit in that small envelope? I'm disappointed in your reasoning process, subconscious!
**Interesting detail: all of the mafia women had the same shade of washed-out blond hair.
***Actually, I remember it was a mixture of French and English: "Ils vont nous SHOOT!" I think I was thinking they wouldn't understand French--so why did I say "shoot", the most tipping-off word of the sentence, in English?

[Once again, here I am using all the unsavory labels.]