Empath mode

Phil Gurnee ♦ May 10, 2017 ♦ 5 Comments

The dream was swirling around just before I needed to wake up. My friend Jerry was there, the old companion and I were in a somewhat modern world but different. People were around us and as we wandered a 50ish African American woman with a companion came up to us and we wandered around together. A tiny tot showed up and Jerry charged me to look after her. When I say tiny I mean tiny, not child tiny but insect tiny but human. Cartoonish. She had goggles on her head.  I don’t know why I was now in charge of her but she was following us so I didn’t have to put much effort into it.

At some point, our African American companion came up to me and put on some glasses to stare at me with.  This made me uncomfortable and I inquired what she looking for. She hadn’t been looking at me like into my eyes but at me, surveying me.  She took them off and offered them to me and said: “look at me”.  I hesitated but she was insistent “look at me”.

I put them on and the woman changed. The glasses allowed me to see her in a different way. She had scars everywhere, and she pruned for me to get a better look at them. They were everywhere, black hideous marks, sinewy muscle was destroyed, it went on and on.  She held up the back of her arm, and Jerry poked at the skin and pulled at it, he could put his finger between the skin and bone. He said,  “this is fake skin and muscle, her whole body was burned”.  I had seen enough, I took off the glasses. Jerry intimated that I should have remembered hearing about her accident. That she had been famous. I tried to remember who she was. A famous singer I think. I could not come up with a name.

I just stared at her and told her how sorry I was. I felt like throwing up and her companion remarked to the scarred woman “oh great, now he’s going full empath on us”.

What a strange comment I thought. but yeah, I was feeling boatloads of empathy towards the scarred woman. So much empathy that I’d forgotten that I’d been charged with taking care of the strange goggled tiny tot. Jerry tersely told me again to watch the child. I looked down and she was still with us.

But not for long, moments later a small burrow opened up right in front of us and something went in the burrow. Like a child, the tiny tot bounced right in afterward. I groaned and got down on my knees to peer into the burrow. Someone whispered in my ear that I needed a flashlight and pointed to one of those cheap harbor freight give away flashlights. It was old and I doubted it would work as I brushed off the sand. It didn’t but I gave it a good shake and hit it with my hand. It turned on and the burrow was illuminated.

It was at that point I realized that the person who had whispered in my ear about the flashlight was the tiny tot who I had seen jump into the hole. I turned and looked and she was looking into the burrow as anxiously as I had been.

I woke up and in such a state that the dream stayed with me long enough to review it and put the highlights into memory.  I went over it a few times but it was already fading so I got out of bed and hit the keyboard as quickly as I could.  I wanted to remember this dream. I hadn’t dreamt with Jerry in a long time. I miss him so much. That quirky midwestern humor would be greatly appreciated in this day and age.