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fishdavidson · 5 years

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Dream Journal 2018-12-01: A Most Repugnant Plan

Trigger Warning! This dream deals with school shootings, militant incels, and attempted suicide. I’ll try to spare most of the details, but please sit this one out if you think you can’t handle this post.

Here’s a chance to look at some dream fragments to avoid having to see the bad stuff:

Dream Fragments

I was part of a tribe of people who gather around ceremonial paw-paw tree (paw-paw trees produce the largest indigenous fruit in North America!) once a month on the night of the full-moon. One of our tribal rituals involves a young man trying to escape from a cattle pen filled with invisible zombies. Our tribe is the only thing that keeps the zombies at bay, and each month is basically a military drill for us to keep our skills sharp.

The Main Dream: Your Last Chance To Turn Back

Although I try to record each dream the day it happens (unless I have busy weekends), this dream was so morally awful that I couldn’t bring myself to write about it until I had some emotional distance from it and some extra time to dull some of the details. This dream starts off in a cesspool of toxic masculinity and skewed thinking, because the Fish Davidson in this dream has joined the militant incel movement. “Incel” in case you missed the news coverage about it, is shorthand for “involuntarily celibate” and has been co-opted by angry youth (especially white males) who believe that they are entitled to sexual gratification through their very existence. The internet echo chamber twists and weaponizes these sentiments and some of these people are driven to violence to disrupt a perceived system that is designed to keep these unlovable individuals out of the gene pool.

So we’re off to a good start, because I’m one of those dudes (sarcasm!). Yay.

I am a student attending a large university, and I have become friends with a bunch of likeminded young men. There were probably 30 of us in all, and we were insufferable. We couldn’t understand why people didn’t want to love us, while conveniently turning a blind eye to how insufferable and awful we were. Everyone else has a problem, not us!

Somehow our little group of friends decide to disrupt the system in a grand and dramatic fashion. All the people at our university who are denying us the love we are entitled to will be murdered. If all of us work together, we can go down in history as the perpetrators of the largest school shooting in history. And this attention (regardless of whether we lived or died) would somehow correct the systemic injustices against us.

As you can probably imagine, this is an absolutely terrible plan. But dreamtime Fish Davidson is desperate and has nothing left to lose, so he’s on board with the whole thing. We begin plotting in earnest, though in the dream I do not think this plan will ever come to fruition.

We give our operation a codename: Plethcott. No one outside of our friend circle is ever to hear mention of this codename. The first phase of our plan is to commence the student government to allow some students to make a temporary outdoor art exhibit to protest gun violence in schools. Ha! The irony!

Our proposed exhibit would be located in a courtyard near the middle of campus. It would consist of several mannequins covered in brightly-colored knit bodysuits. The mannequins would be completely covered head-to-toe in yarn, so that no one could see who was underneath. Each mannequin would be sprawled out on the ground like it was dead, and beside each mannequin was a gun similarly covered in yarn.

After the exhibit had been up for a week or so, we would remove the mannequins, put on their bodysuits, and lay down on the ground until the time was ready to strike. We needed this exhibit to be located in this courtyard because it was in a central location so everyone could see the original exhibit and get used to the idea of yarn people with guns. The original exhibit used toy guns covered in yarn, but once we swapped out the mannequins, we would also swap out the toy guns for actual assault rifles.

Each of us would walk to a different building in our yarn suits with our yarn gun, and we would all open fire on a classroom at a predetermined time. If you have 30 people perpetrating such a thing, the number of potential victims gets really big really fast. We were hoping for an “improvement” in casualties at least an order of magnitude larger than the previous most deadly shooting.

Fast forward about a month or so. I’ve sort of forgotten about our plan since none of us know how to knit and I haven’t heard any updates on it. I though it was maybe just a plan that people thought up and had no intention of carrying out. But that changes when an administrator invites the student body to attend an announcement in the university’s auditorium. Several of my incel buddies are going to be in attendance, but I thought it was just because they wanted an excuse to skip class.

The administrator shows everyone a new sculpture that’s going to be commissioned for the courtyard on campus. It’s the mannequins idea our group had proposed. This administrator was apparently also an incel and was a friend of a friend, which was how he came to be involved in this project. Where everyone else just saw a weird piece of art, I saw an ugly face oozing of the sweater suit like meat coming out of a tube.

“OH GOD, THAT’S PLETHCOTT!” I exclaimed.

Any incels there heard my exclamation, and they knew I broke our vow of secrecy. Their spirits deflated because now people might start asking questions about Plethcott. I had ruined their plan, so naturally, they wanted to kill me for it.

It is at this time that I thankfully had a change of heart and thought that maybe not murdering a bunch of people was a good idea. I needed to let a bunch of people know about the shooting before it happened and also before I got assassinated.

Next door to the auditorium is a ball room with a bunch of rich alumni in it. I burst into the room and start a loud monologue about what’s happening. I tell everyone about Plethcott and my part in planning it. I also let everyone know that it’s a terrible idea and shouldn’t have been planned in the first place, and also that I will formally renounce my scholarships, in an attempt to not get expelled. Lastly, I make a plea to everyone there to help fix the situation in the long-term. Although I can’t remember the exact wording, it involved impeaching Betsy DeVos and voting for elected officials who were educated and not racist. Upon finishing my monologue, I leave through a side entrance and it is now nightfall.

A man steps out of some nearby bushes. He’s one of my incel buddies and he looks like Logan Paul wearing a black trenchcoat. “Hey, dude,” he says. “Can I kill you?”

My shame is palpable and I would very much like to die. This man’s offer resonates with me. May as well go ahead and get it over with. “Sure, how?”

The man pulls a large knife from his coat. “I’m gonna stab this knife into you a bunch of times.”

Stabbing is a lot more painful than I was planning on for my suicide, and also it has a much lower incidence of success than guns.

I start backing away. “No, thanks. I’m looking for something quicker than that.”

The man keeps walking toward me at a steady pace, and I spend the rest of the dream running away and not getting stabbed. That said, though, I probably should have been stabbed for being so awful in that dream.

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Header image by Phyllis Galembo, “Atal Masquerade, Emanghabe Village, Nigeria, 2004″

#dream journal #dreams #phyllis galembo #knitting #incel #shooting #school shooting #murder #college #fishdavidson #fiber #crochet #fragments #zombie #tree #hof

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