Blogathon 06/26: Dreams

My stepfather had a rifle I didn’t know about.

It was a proper, bullet shooting rifle, a bolt-action .303 which he kept at the back of his wardrobe and I didn’t know about that either.

One night, when I was about 8 or 9 years old, I had a dream. I dreamt I went rummaging about in the back of his wardrobe (and got hit in the face by something metallic as I did), I removed the rifle I didn’t know he had, and took it down to the kitchen where I gave it a rudimentary clean (I didn’t know how to strip it down or anything like that).

Then I wrapped it in newspaper, took it back upstairs and stowed it at the back of his wardrobe again (and avoided getting hit in the face this time). The next morning I had a black eye, no idea how that injury had occurred, and no memory of the dream or any nocturnal activity.

Fast forward about 2 months and we all got called to a Family Conference. The stepfather asked which of us had been messing with his rifle. I was (as my siblings were) stunned to learn there was a firearm in the house. We genuinely didn’t know.

He produced a newspaper-wrapped thing, placed it on the kitchen table, and peeled back the newspaper to reveal… a rifle!

To my eyes it was a bit like the air-rifle my younger half-brother had, but different. Anyway, we all denied any knowledge of touching it because none of us even knew it existed.

Later that day he opened one of the kitchen windows, leaned on the windowsill and shot at a rudimentary target he’d set up on the opposite side of the courtyard. I recall my mother was very unimpressed with this activity. I also recall he only had 5 rounds and he wasn’t much of a shot.

A matter of days afterwards the rifle disappeared for good (I strongly suspect my mother dictated what happened to it) and so the story ends. Except…

Fast forward more than 2 decades to me in my early 30s and I had a dream but, unusually, I was able to fully recall it the next day. In my dream I walked into their bedroom, burrowed about at the back of his wardrobe (got hit in the eye by a belt buckle), extracted a rifle, took it downstairs, gave it a wipe down, wrapped it in newspaper, and returned it to its place in his wardrobe. Here’s the interesting stuff:

• The child-me did not know of the existence of that rifle
• The child-me did not recall doing any of these things until I was in my 30s (over 20 years since they’d occurred in the not-dream world)
• He really was a shit shot
• Nobody ever explained how he came to have a bullet-firing rifle plus 5 rounds
• Nobody told us where it went after his shit shooting (but it did vanish somewhere)
• Dreams can mess with your head
• So can your memory
• Every single word of this story is true