A sunny day in Miami

Part I

We'd just killed a man. I don't know who 'we' was, just that there were several of us in the room. The flat, I should say, or maybe the apartment. Perhaps we hadn't killed him, but the body was there, and he had definitely been the victim of foul play. The flat, or maybe the apartment, was small and dark. The only room I was ever in was the living room, with a kitchenette. I knew the kitchenette was there, even though I never saw it. All I knew was that we had to get rid of the body. At the far end of the living room, there was a balcony, you might even call it a small terrace. It was a bright day, the sort of sunny brightness that permeates crime shows set in Miami. The balcony overlooked a swimming pool, a gigantic swimming pool. Or maybe it wasn't even a swimming pool to start with, just the sea, or a huge lake, because the decision was made to get rid of the body by crucifying it and throwing it off the balcony into the water. The dead man was white, bald and large. I couldn't have told you his weight, I've always been shit at estimating that sort of thing, but he was definitely heavy: it took the three or four of us in the room to lift him. I don't know who suggested crucifixion, but the idea to throw him in the water was definitely mine.


Part II

Did we call the police? Did they just knock on the door? They were there, talking to us. Had the body been found? Maybe? They needed us for something, but it wasn't for the body. For some reason, I was to go diving with them. I can't remember not wanting to go, just wanting to help.

We were diving into the pool (it was definitely a pool now), and once we were underwater I noticed that the bottom of the pool was divided into sections. Someone on the surface was talking to us, through headsets that were set up in the diving equipment, and telling us to go to J7. And then they told us, in no uncertain terms, not to look at J8. We swam to J7, a small square at the bottom of the pool, and there, sitting in the square, just in the centre, as though they'd been carefully placed there, were my keys. My actual keys, the ones I use to unlock my house and my bike every day. I picked them up. And then, I couldn't resist looking at J8.

All I know is that there were three things in J8, and that one of them was a small toy penguin, the sort of tiny figure you might put on a keychain. Come to think of it, it wasn't actually a penguin, not if you looked closely, but it represented a penguin. I grabbed it (the police with me tried to stop me), realising with sudden horror that these were the keepsakes of a serial killer who'd been taking little girls. The police knew about them.

We made it back to the surface, but for some reason I wasn't questioned about my keys or made to hand in the penguin. In fact, the police seemed unaware that I'd taken the penguin, and did not seem to find it suspicious that my keys had been found in the pool. Had I been awake, I would have made the immediate connection between dropping the body in the pool and finding my keys there (they must have fallen out of my pocket when we were throwing the body off the balcony, my non-dream brain thinks), but in the dream this connection carried less weight than the fact that I'd found the keys next to the serial killer's keepsakes.

The last thing I remember is looking at the quasi-penguin in my hand, thinking about the little girl who had loved it (maybe I'd seen her in television, in a homevideo shared by her parents to gain public sympathy?).

Part III

I wake up in my bed, in Cambridge. It's not bright nor sunny, and the things stressing me out have nothing to do with serial killers. My heart's still going faster than it should though. Was it a nightmare?

I haven't had nightmares for a long time, probably since I woke up sweating with fear as a kid. As I got older the nightmares went away, or maybe I used them all up in stories I told or wrote down. Then came the stress dreams, but these were different. When I had an exam coming up, or an important event, I would dream about it and wake up with my heart pounding and my mouth dry. But I wasn't scared. They were stressful, but firmly tied to reality, and easily explained away. Now that I think about it, I haven't had a stress dream since my undergraduate days.

I analyse this dream. I wasn't scared during the dream. All I really felt was dread. Anxiety, a pressure in my chest, and an overwhelming sense of something bad about to happen that I couldn't completely control. A stress dream then. But all my stress dreams have been obvious, grounded in reality. This is different. If I believed that dreams can be decoded, that they are our subconscious trying to tell us something, I would likely pick up Freud's 'The interpretation of Dreams' and try to figure it out. But I'm not sure that I would find sunny Miami in the book, and I have little faith in Freud. So for now the dream will remain a mystery, just something to write about.