lucyoncolorado

In which I leave misplaced hospital patients out in the sun and dream of movie scenes...

I'm walking up the path to my grandmother's old house. Everything looks just as it used to. My key still works, and I open the door to her main hallway where I'm surprised to see two people, in hospital beds with IV poles sticking up, covered by white sheets so that only their faces are exposed. I'm annoyed that they are blocking my grandma's hallway and realize immediately that the hospital has made some mistake. I wheel the beds out into the front lawn and go inside, leaving the sick people in the heat.

A news woman then approaches me with a microphone and television camera. She tells me that she understands that the hospital mixed up the addresses and that I have no legal responsibility to care for the patients. She agrees that it is a bizarre thing to happen. She turns to the camera, and in the news anchor's overly serious and dramatic tone, she asks her viewers, "What would YOU do, if you came home to find in YOUR living room, two sick people lying in hospital beds?" Then the camera crew pans my grandma's front lawn and shows the now dehydrated patients before turning back to me. The anchor continued, "This woman just rolled them out into the sun. They are someone else's problem to her, and she has broken no law since the patients shouldn't be on her property in the first place."

After setting me up this way, the anchor then addressed me directly. "Most of us would've taken care of these people until the mix-up was sorted out. Why don't you feel a moral responsibility to help?"

I push her off the patio which no longer looks like my grandmother's old front porch. It now looks like the raised wrap-around patio surrounding the Tara house in Gone with the Wind. The anchor woman lands in the mud and drops her microphone. Her skirt flies up above her head and I laugh at how undignified she looks. I tell her it doesn't matter if the patients wither up and die out in the sun. They are just a nuisance. They are an obstacle in my dream. Just like she is. She argues that I'm not dreaming. She lectures me that if I continue on in these reckless delusions, I will have the blood of the patients on my hands.

I point to two men sitting on the patio eating gruel with big wooden spoons. They are unshaved and have long scraggly hair. They are dressed in the faded and dusty tatters of Civil War uniforms. "If this isn't a dream, where did those guys come from?" I ask the muddy newswoman. "You just wait. Any minute now, Ashley is going to come walking up that drive, and Melanie will run out to greet him."

As soon as I say it, a woman wearing a beautiful, layered 19th century dress comes running up the drive with her skits and petticoats gathered in her hands. But it's not Melanie. It's Claude Chabrol's Madame Bovary. I'm completely lucid now, and I feel some embarrassment that my dream has just become a patchwork of scenes from movies. I wonder what would've happened if I'd just continued into the house. I realize then that I can do whatever I want for the remainder of the dream, but this idea is so exciting that I wake up instantly.