Dream of Being Killed

Last night I had a dream... it was a spy dream, with lots of intrigue, romance, and flying. It wasn't the pleasantest of dreams, sort of a mix of being on the run from killers and being stuck at Arcosanti.

We join the dream in progress, near the end:

In the course of the dream a flying assassin, sent from my boss, managed to kill me (this is the second time last night someone in my dreams had murderous intent). I'm not sure how, I think I was shot from the air. In some ways it was a refreshing change from when I've been some Mongol Lord's Concubine killed by assassins because someone thinks I know too much (I hate it when that happens).

What was different about being dead this time was I wasn't simply lying there in a suspended, timeless blackness -- this time I had a vision and the assassin taunted me. The vision started out with blackness. Then a narrow orange track unrolled upwards at the middle bottom of my sight and cut the black in half. I recognized it as a Hotwheels track. I was looking at it from above; then there was a perspective change, and I was looking back along it as it disappeared to the vanishing point.

From the vanishing point I heard the accented voice of my assassin. He sounded vaguely Russian, like Arnold Schwarzenegger. "So, you're finally dead." he said. "Can you feel that?"

I had a vague sensation of pressure, more like my spine was expanding or compressing because bones in my feet were being crushed together and everything was connected.

"Eh, you're disconnected, then," he said. Somewhere along the way the Hotwheels tracks disappeared and I was floating in darkness.

Surprisingly, the dream went on. I'd crawled into an old half-abandoned hotel lobby. I managed to prop myself up in a hallway niche and look across the hall at a mirror in an opposite niche. I was in a kind of three-piece suit: dark jacket, white shirt, pocket hankie in a breast pocket. The suit was slashed with all sorts of horizontal two inch slashes. As I rose, (and as I inhaled, too) green iris swords grew out of the slashes. I couldn't see my legs, but I had a very strong impression that my torso was attached to my lower body by a very large thick iris sword. I hunched down a little and the plants -- which I'm pretty sure were growing out of me -- contracted.


I'm not sure what this dream is trying to tell me. Somewhere along the lines it's telling me not to weed iris beds and not playing Second Life just before bed. But I think that's not the main message.

I should add that while there are some elements in this that remind me of some dream elements that I've managed to turn into a short story, I'm not quite sure how any of this could be part of any fiction I write ... unless...