Chattanooga Pulse

I dream in black-and-white film. I used to dream in cartoons…a two-dimensional format in primary colors in which the backdrop slid from left to right while the characters appeared to move in the foreground marching at an identical pace.  Mice and rats, horses and donkeys with plow collars hanging jauntily from their necks as they marched happily about their business, cartoon flames occasionally appearing in the background while round-headed cherubic devils with tiny wings and tiny forked tails danced with tiny smiles.

I don’t know why, and I don’t know when they stopped.  Then I dreamt of dining with corpses, me sitting at the head of a long table of poorly lit bodies, all sitting stale in front of rotting plates of food, the only life to them being the moist, black eyes in their skulls, wet with determination and frustration, looking at me with still mouths and dead expressions.  The occasional slit throat defied the common theme but even they, too, were boring asses mouthing silent breathless warnings after a few years of the same dream, over and over…even the moonlight being cast from the same direction over their shoulders.  We might as well have been roommates.

Recently however, the dreams had become a mix.  A series of black-and-white still shots, snapshots of the deceased with their heads leaned back over the old-fashioned bench seat headrests of cars that had steel-lined window frames and no air conditioning, sprawled across alleys, lying in recliners beside real telephones with push buttons (and dials). Women in pleated skirts, men in three-piece suits, both in hats, refugees from the ’50s and ’60’s…straight off the front pages of newspapers where the blood always appeared to be black, monochromatic from the limitations of print and emphasized by dramatic bold headlines.  There was no explanation for the change in my subconscious’s viewing pleasure.

In the end, I believe I have finally seen the changing dreams for what they are:  An abstract history lesson gleaned from hands-on experience, and the first-hand lessons from old paper files in restricted archival rooms, punctuated by musty smells instead of rumors and gossip from journalists and third-hand parties who heard things from people who heard things.  I still knew the answers (or in most cases just the questions) and what I was supposed to do and how I was supposed to do it…but I believe the dreams were my subconscious crying out because of my own police establishment that was forgetting things.

My own generation that took a lack of research and tradition as an absence of fact.  They simply didn’t care, and my mind was recoiling at the lack of direction we were now taking as a profession.  Police had historically been responders and preventers, but were now mostly reactors to popular opinions and panic, and the archival dreams were a reminder of a more simple and direct time.

For the new generation, it seemed old mysteries were pointless and new mysteries that weren’t easily solved were a waste of time.  Patrol cars had turned into chairs.  The people had turned into desks, something static, and something to work around.  Furniture.  Those that ran the place were now too far apart from these new investigators to know these things, and therefore didn’t know the pulse of the people they served…they were strangers.   And as bosses, they were allowed to continue insulating themselves even as they learned of this new apathy.  I wondered if all administrations had barricaded themselves thusly?

Whatever the case, I took comfort that I had stopped wondering that the images were distant signs of losing grip and slipping towards insanity over the months and years…but I couldn’t shake knowing the feeling of the fluid of the world slipping through my fingers and around my ankles in every one of my dreams, and therefore through my heart as well.

In the end though, they are cousins, aren’t they?  Losing your sanity, and losing heart in something you hold dear?

Ah well.  Probably nonsense.  Probably just random unrelated images and an internal conspiracy, one photo at a time.  But I lack proof that my mind is completely wrong.
Like the images, this is disturbing.  Perhaps apathy isn’t so bad after all?   I wish I could give it a try by just saying I didn’t care.

Or perhaps I just miss the cartoons.  In the end, it makes no difference.

I’m off to bed now.  Let’s see what happens.

When officer Alexander D. Teach is not patrolling our fair city on the heels of the criminal element, he is an occasional student at UTC, an up and coming carpenter, auto mechanic, prominent boating enthusiast, and spends his spare time volunteering for the Boehm Birth Defects Center.