Dream: The Old Man and Hiding the Children

Dream 20030930, 7:00 AM:

This dream seems to shift perspective. Some of the time I’m seeing the action through the eyes of one or the other of the characters, but for the most part it’s like a movie, with various perspectives on the action.

There’s an old man in a small but neat old house. He is hiding two young children, a boy and a girl. There are soldiers looking for them; I don’t understand what they want with them, but it has the feel of the Holocaust, as if they are part of a group that is being rounded up. The children hide under a special panel in the floorboards of the second floor; the little girl kicks the panel downward, and they both jump into the small space and they push the panel back up so that it is hidden. The soldiers come and look through the house, not finding the children, but finally one man pulls on a decorative panel on one of the first floor walls, and the children tumble out of their hiding place.

The soldier turns to the old man, and the old man begs him to show mercy and let the children go. The soldier says that he will, but the old man will have to cook for him; there’s some conversation about his famous chicken dish. The children run out of the house.

Then, the rest of the dream follows the old man. He goes into a place that seems to be a concrete brick factory; a huge machine takes big globs of wet concrete, and by hitting them with a heavy drop hammer, turns them into piles of smooth black bricks. He has a chicken, and is working on it on a counter there. He drops it, picks it up, brushes the dirt off, and continues. The whole atmosphere of the dream is very grungy and war-like; it seems like he would have been more concerned about the dirt and the chicken normally, but he is beat down and just can’t care about it now.