The Opposite of a Valentine
"It was SO awkward. He heard it, too."
Our minds have been liberated from occupation. Now that the nightmares are happening in the streets and being litigated in Congress, our minds are processing the trauma. I’ve been having nightmares, strange ones, and I’m not the only one. Robin Whetstone checks in from Georgia where her subconscious is having a field day with her, including one nightmare that seems particularly appropriate this weekend, when Valentine’s Day comes with a body count.
by Robin Whetstone
For the past two nights I've had unusually vivid, detailed dreams. I'm going to write them down here. No one has to read them.
Last night, I dreamed that I was hanging out in Yemen by myself, and when I went to leave the country, the customs people found a powder on me that I had bought there legally, at a store. I *think* it was a drug, but I'm not sure. They told me that I was not allowed to take the powder out of the country and, because I had tried to do that, I'd have to come back to Yemen on Monday (that day was Friday) and spend three months in prison.
I spent the weekend fretting about this and then went to Miami to the airport to fly to Yemen. While at the busy airport, I saw a gang of guys I used to hang out with in high school: Mark Hilpert, John Peterson, Matt Roberts, and Tyler Godwin. We walked together toward the gate for me to catch my plane and I told them I was going to spend three months in a Yemeni prison. They were impressed. When we all got to the gate, I discovered, to my delight, that it was a gate not to a plane to Yemen but to the actual COUNTRY of Yemen. You just go through customs, and there you are IN YEMEN. I was super excited. All this time, a faraway, exotic country like Yemen has been bordering my home state of Florida, and I didn't even know it? As soon as I finished my 90-day Yemeni prison stint, the possibilities for travel would be endless!
I approached the gate and looked in my purse for my documentation. I was horrified to see that the powder that had gotten me into this situation was still in there. Would I get another three months in jail? Luckily, Tyler Godwin helped me disassemble a ball-point pen and hide the powder inside of it.
I approached the window to speak with a Yemeni representative and show her my documentation. The "people" behind the window were all female robots made out of this matte black stretchy, rubbery material that could easily morph to change shape. I was very intimidated by this never-before-seen technology, but the Yemeni people beside me at the window seemed to take it for granted. The robot in front of me stretched her arm out to me and the end of the stretchy part morphed into a hand for me to shake. I did, even though I was freaked out, and she told me to go through a set of velvet ropes strung up on polls to get to the other customs officials. I did, and while waiting in line I noticed a beautiful, ornate house on the Yemeni side that had many small doors all right next to each other. The house had been painted many different times, and was sort of old and uncared for, so in spots I could see the colors underneath. I was very, very excited, because I knew I was about to have an adventure.
I got through customs and began walking up a long, curved highway that, way up ahead, turned into a bridge over a big body of water. I was walking, and was fretting about the language. I had seen the language written down at the customs gate, and it was similar to Georgian, or Thai -- very loopy and inscrutable to me. I did not like being in a country where I couldn't speak some of the language. As I was walking, I came upon a beautiful woman who was dressed in a light blue sari with golden sparkles all over it. She was carrying something under her arm that was the size and shape of a boogie board. I asked her if she could read some of the language on my customs documents so I could hear what it sounded like. Instead, she took the boogie board out from under her arm and held it out flat so I could see it.
It was robin's-egg blue with a white pearlescent sheen over the top of it, like a motorcycle helmet or a fancy speedboat. It was very ornately embossed with the curvy words of the Yemeni language in sparkly, bright silver metal, plus strands and curlicues of this same silver metal spidering all over its surface. It was very beautiful, but also, tacky. The woman told me she was on her way to a wedding, and that this thing she was carrying was a wedding song. She began to sing it to me, pointing at the words as she sang each one. I was amazed, because in this language you started with the second- or third-to-last word in the sentence, then went to the second word in the next sentence. I watched her as she pointed and sang this beautiful song, and I knew would never learn this complex language, but I also understood that the people were so friendly that it wouldn't matter.
I said goodbye to the woman and started walking down the side of the two-lane highway, toward the bridge ahead. Every now and then, a car would pass by me, but I was mainly by myself. The landscape was like I-10 through the bayous of Louisiana, very flat, lots of water, and a big sky. I was really happy and excited, and felt free.
A car passed me, and when it got to the bridge that was still far up ahead, it got covered by the water. I realized that the water had come up over the road and flooded it. I turned around and walked back to the gate at the Miami airport and told a rubber lady that the road ahead was flooded. She did not believe me, but then eventually did, and thanked me for letting her know.
Then I woke up.
***
The dream I had the night before last was similar. It was very long, and very detailed, but was a stressful nightmare. I was living in a small town in North Korea, and for some reason was being sent to prison there, which I knew I would not survive, primarily because I did not speak the language. The man who ran the town sent me to look at the prison. It was all women, and was terrible and violent. One scene I remember was a baby who was lying on its stomach. It had a terrible wound on the back of its neck, right at where its back started, and a very old woman stuck her finger in this wound and laughed while the baby screamed in pain.
The man who ran the town told me that I would never get out of prison; the only way I'd ever leave was if I managed to escape. He told me that the prisoners were charged with building this bridge that was up ahead on this curved highway, just like the one from my dream last night (In fact, this bridge with the curved highway is in many, many of my dreams. It started showing up two years ago, and when I see it, I think to myself "oh, there's that highway and bridge again."). He said that my best chance of escape was to get to the bridge, but that I'd never live to get there because I'd die of sickness, starvation, or injury first. I was really terrified.
But then, inexplicably, I was in my mother's house in Oconee County. My mom was there, and so was my friend Erin Palmer (hi Erin!). I was very confused and tried to tell them that I had just been in a small town in North Korea. They said it must have been a dream, but then I had a bag of rice and some kind of maroon-colored grain that had Korean writing on it. Erin explained that I had a weekend to hang around with them, but then on Monday I had to go back to North Korea and go to prison. I was really scared. Then I woke up.
These dreams, coming one night after the other, were very similar in content and vividness, but the feelings they gave me were polar opposites. I think clearly my psyche is either trying to tell me something or process something -- maybe January 6.
***
A while ago I was writing a lot about strange things that have happened to me, like hearing a voice in my head that my grandmother was going to die, and then she did, or dreaming vividly about someone I never see and then hearing from them that morning, or having a psychic tell me when I was 19 that I'd have a career in radio and get shot to death in a square. I said I was going to save the weirdest thing that ever happened for later, and this is it:
I was 21. I had just started dating a guy I had known and sort of crushed on since I was 14. I should have been super excited about this, because it turned out that my crush liked me too! But instead, something was...off. I couldn't figure out what it was. There was nothing obvious at all, no red flags. He was perfectly nice. I'd known him for 7 years, and knew him well, but I just couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong.
I'd been dating him for about 2 weeks when I went to sleep and had a dream. In the dream, I was in a car-repair garage, very dreary and dirty. I had dropped my car off there and the guy I was dating, we'll call him Bud, was supposed to pick me up and drive me home.
Instead, the guy working at the garage handed me a sealed envelope with a letter in it. He said, "This is to you, from your boyfriend. He couldn't be here." I looked on the front of the envelope and there, written in big black marker, were the letters NME. I was very confused. In the dream, it was clear that those letters were somehow a stand-in for his name, like he had written who he was on the outside of the envelope. I woke up before I could open the envelope, and the big feeling I had when I woke up was confusion.
The dream stuck with me all day. Later that night, I met up with him. "Hey," I said, "I had the weirdest dream last night." I told him about the dream, and when I got to what was written on the envelope, I said it out loud for the first time. "It said it was from N M E." As soon as I said it out loud, I knew exactly what it was. N M E. Say it. Enemy.
It was SO awkward. He heard it, too. I had just let this guy know that my subconscious, at least, thought he was an enemy. But it was his response that really shook me. Instead of laughing it off or being sort of jokily offended, or saying "wow, I wonder what your brain is up to," he instead became immediately suspicious and guilty acting. Like, what have you heard? What do you know? His response to this dream, which I had not taken seriously, unnerved me so much that I broke up with him the next day.
***
About six months later, I was having a conversation with a high school friend I hadn't seen in a long time. "I hear you're dating Bud," she said. "How is that going?" I told her that we had only dated for 2 weeks and that it didn't work out, but didn't tell her anything else.
"Well..." she said, and then launched into this whole long story about how this guy was well known for being a date raper and sexual assaulter. She named the names of three separate people I knew who had had bad, illegal experiences with this guy. I was super creeped out, but also relieved. My subconscious actually sent me a letter in my dream to warn me about this guy. I'm glad I listened.
Robin Whetstone is a Georgia-based writer who previously serialized her memoir about living in Moscow in the early ‘90s. As we’ve seen from her earliercontributions to The Experiment, she has a remarkable comic voice, but what makes her memoir unique how it retains that voice while describing the peril she finds herself in. You can find the first chapter here.
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