Saturday, September 8, 2012

A dream - trolls and turtles

I'm at the house where I used to live on Sena St, on the back porch.  It's night, and very dark out, with low lying mist obscuring visibility to about 100 feet.  Chey is out there with me, and she's about to go back in when I see see a line of what I at first think are children marching through the back yard, past the fence.  They are hard to make out, but they seem too stocky to be children.  They cross over Gober street and head into the yard of the house next door.  They're dressed in raggedy robes, and a few are holding small flickering candles.  I realize that they aren't kids, but trolls.  I urge Cheyenne to go inside, and try to hurry in with her, when the trolls see us and come into the back yard and onto the porch.  Then they really become children, and they are armed with long, metal whips, like antennae wires.  A few of them start beating me with them, but it doesn't really hurt.  It's just an annoying attack from kids.  I take away one of the long rods and order the kids out of the yard, but then Chey says, "No, they can't go!  Look!" and the house is surrounded by churning water.  We're all stuck on the porch now, and dad is there.  He gets the idea to fish with one of the rods, and does so, and I take one of the rods from a kid and start to fish with it.  There is a dead gopher tied to the line as bait, and I pull it through the water to try to make it seem as if it is swimming.  I see another gopher go after it, then abandon it when it doesn't want it.  Then a really huge turtle swims by, and dad urges me to swing the gopher close to it and to catch it.  I do this, and the turtle bites onto the gopher.  I ask dad what to do, and he says, "Pull it up when it bites onto it, and I'll catch it!"  So I do this and the turtle bites it, and as I start to lift it out of the water, it falls back in.  "Give it another go," my dad tells me, so I do.  The second time, I life the turtle completely out of the water.  It is extremely heavy, and I can barely hold it, and then  my dad reaches down and takes the turtle by the shell and pulls it up onto the porch.  When he does this, the turtle emits this horrible groan of distress, just the awfullest sound.  Dad gets the turtle all the way up onto the porch, and I look around for something to kill it with.  I have a smaller turtle that I was going to use as bait for the next catch, and I hand it to my dad.  He takes it and beats the large turtle in the head with the shell of the smaller one, until the turtle's head cracks open and it dies.  I imagine how long we will be able to survive on that one big turtle, and if it will taste good.  I'm vaguely horrified at the prospect of eating it.