Date: 21-06-2022
I had another bizarre dream. Again the world I found myself in was post apocalyptic. I was with a group of men, about my age, some I knew from my time on college, some I didn’t know. There was one particular guy I know from college; X. I found him to be unpleasant, unkind, and untrustworthy in real life, as so too in this dream. All the men carried weapons, but it was mostly crossbows and PCP rifles. In short; weapons that would’ve been legal before the fall of civilisation.
I recall us walking around in a foreign land. We spoke English to people outside our group when we interacted with them on the street. I also recall I was itching to fire my PCP rifle at something, but didn’t find the right excuse. When it accidentally went off while pointing at the ground, I let go of that urge. We were walking around, seemingly aimlessly. It was like we were on vacation but also looking for something. Maybe something to eat or to do. I’m not sure. At one point we were inside a small building. A shed or hut of some sorts. In there an altercation started between X and another man in our group.
The man – who could have been a guy named Jac, also from college – was aiming a big crossbow at X. Jac didn’t raise his voice but was dead calm and demanded X “give it back”. Jac repeated this while X tried to calmly deny any wrong doing. “Give it back.” “I didn’t take it.” “Yes you did. Give it back.” “I didn’t take it.” Others of our group inquired what was going on. Jac explained that as he was cleaning out his room (apparently we stayed in that hut and we were about to move out) he couldn’t find his PCP gun, and he was absolutely convinced X had taken it.
The other men were apparently much inclined to believe Jac. X was much of an outsider in this group. Apparently a barely accepted one. But as calm and imposing as X’s demeanour was until now, that collapsed when the other men drew their weapons at him. Jac loaded another (second) arrow on his bow and set the snare on tension. X showed absolute desperation, cried, was visibly scared, but continued with his witty comments neither denying nor confirming the theft. Typically him. It fuelled the anger of Jac who set the snare on his bow even tighter and pointed it at X’s face, ready to pull the trigger.
I intervened. Came between X and Jac. I asked for calmness: “Either he took it or not. Let’s first establish whether he did before we do anything else.” It took me a considerable amount of effort to convince everyone to lower their weapons so that we could solve this logically. When they all did and everyone but X calmed down I turned to him: “Alright. Did you take the weapon, yes or no?” “Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t, who knows?” “Stop this game, you’re not helping yourself.” This went back and forth two more times, until I broke the cycle and said: “Alright, either you say you took it and we find it somewhere among your things, or you say you didn’t take it, and we won’t find it. So which one is it? Because these guys are going to look through your things.”
But then X’s head turned into a skull with big frightful looking eyes. Like all his flesh except his eyes had mummified. After this almost instant transformation, he responded: “You’re forgetting a third option…” I said: “I know. That you deny stealing it but we do find it. But if that’s the case, I cannot do anything for you.” I put my right hand on his left cheek, and he leaned his head onto my hand, resting it there while turning back to de-mummified normal X, but staring at the ground like he was staring into the distance overthinking his life: “So are we going to find it with your stuff?” He replied almost softly whispering: “Only one way to find out…”
He seemed completely guilty and unable to just take responsibility for it. So we set out to go to his place, which was apparently a long walk to another hut. While walking there the guys got distracted and suddenly we had lost sight of X. We rushed to the shed and X was in his room, sweating, doing things. It was clear he had rushed to his room in the hut. We looked for the rifle, didn’t find it, but we did find many other things of which we could be certain weren’t his. It looked like he had stolen many things and rushed to the shed to get rid of the stolen rifle, but we did not have hard evidence to support it.
The guys now searched the premise and asked the maids whether they had seen X with a rifle. They stated they had witnessed X rush in with haste, but didn’t recall see him carry a rifle. On the premise around the hut one of the guys found the rifle in the sand. The rifle number had been filed off so there was no way to confirm this was Jac’s original gun. It was the same brand and type though. X was back to be his arrogant self again now, and clearly felt he was now in the clear. No direct evidence linked him to the theft of the rifle, and he was all in our faces, pointing with his finger, telling us we were wrong. And all of us were bound by inaction, because we had made a pledge to follow the evidence and act on that. We couldn’t act, even though he was clearly guilty, but we all felt like killing this son of a bitch that was in our faces about not being able to tie him to this theft.
