It started with a dream inside a dream: I was standing on a hillock in what looked like a windswept moor out of An American Werewolf in London, in a surreal kind of pitch darkness that you can still make things out in like a scene I only vaguely remember seeing once in Our Gang (The Little Rascals). I could barely make out a fawn not too far away and when I moved it made a strange, menacing, rumbling sort of noise, and when I backed up slowly I noticed a large buck standing not too far to my right of the fawn, just looking at me with great brown liquid eyes I could somehow discern clearly in the gloom. It was rather frightening, not only because of the unnatural sense of menace I felt from the deer but due to the darkness of the environment and the eerie silence and loneliness of the place. A large barn-like house also loomed behind me and I recall there being a gravel driveway with what appeared to be a derelict old car in it, which in this aspect also reminds me of The Wizard of Oz, when the tornado was menacing Dorothy's house.
I awoke from that dream into the encapsulating real life dream feeling my fingers being nudged and something pressing down on one side of my bed. It was a fawn, nibbling on my fingertips and trying to climb onto my bed! My bed? I had one of those, apparently, and as such can only conclude I lived in an apartment or house, which I concluded later to be an apartment. I push the fawn off and find myself in a dark room with three or four deer rummaging through it, the fawns trying to almost eat my fingers, and displaying no fear for me whatsoever and acting so domestic as to even allow me to pet pat them like they were big dogs. But, they had to go, and so eventually I led them down the main hall and to do the front door, holding it open as they filed out. As it turns out, the apartment I lived in was laid out in almost the exact same way as a combination of a couple in Southeast Portland I'd lived in before.
I went back to sleep, wondering how in hell deer got into my apartment, when later in the early hours of the morning they came back! This time there certainly was four of them, a doe and a buck and their two fawns with their obnoxious desire to eat my fingertips. Really, I don't know what traumatized a couple healthy-looking fawns with both parents into wanting to eat my fingertips, but it kind of hurt and was getting rather annoying. Ergo, time for you bastards to go again, as cute and playfully dog-like as you are in your behavior, and so as I was leading back down the hallway to escort them out I hear the front door slam and in comes my uncle, who helps get rid of the deer though doesn't seem terribly surprised at their being there. Then again, my surprise was rather understated, too. My uncle was a little out of breath and was dressed as though he'd come back from a long trip. Day was breaking as he put his stuff away and I noticed that the apartment looked like it had been demolished, or like we were moving out. And it looked like my uncle and I were going to go to a store and he said that he was going to be gone for three days and asked me if going to Fry's would be okay and apologized for not being able to give me a ride back home, which I said was fine because I don't mind taking the bus.
I don't recall getting into a car with my uncle, being in the store and what I bought or what was bought for me, or even the bus trip back...but when I returned home it was a sunny early afternoon, my aunt and my little brother were there, and I had a computer on me that was a little larger than a Voyage 200 calculator. And I had a cat! Two of them? My aunt was pissed at Mitzie, a darling little girl kitty, for having been "bad", which since I knew that could mean anything to my aunt I stood up for her and told her that she's just freaked out and she needs to just pay some attention to it, comfort it, which she sneered at and left me to do. Which I did, soothing and petting her until she was purring on my shoulder as I reclined in a chair. I asked her if she was okay and would try to behave and she said "Yes", after which another cat came up and snuggled with me because it was jealous and so I had both cats to give the kitty-lovings to, for a while at least. Until things got interesting, and very muddled again.
Sometime after I attended to my felines' emotional needs I was bringing something out into the garage – meaning suddenly the apartment was a house? – where I stood and watched a homeless couple have a loud, drunken, and rather embarrassing domestic dispute. The woman involved in the dispute stormed off swearing, after having thrown something at the guy, who after swaying for a bit shuffled into my garage and practically collapsed into my aunt and asked her if he could lay down for a bit who by then had appeared in the doorway. he collapsed on a couch in the garage and I returned inside the house to find my little brother spanking Mitzie, my kitty! I broke down into tears as I grabbed her from him and petted her while my aunt went off into an incomprehensible rant about how "bad" the cat had been again.
After putting Mitzie into a room and locking it, to ensure further abuse on my beloved, I wandered into the kitchen, where I saw two homeless-looking men casually eyeballing the stacks of canned and boxed food we had in there, and still being distraught over Mitzie's "spanking" I screamed at them, asking them what the fuck they were doing there, who they were, and telling them they'd better get the fuck out before I started smashing things into them; I was infuriated. The apartment manager showed up in a confusing scene that followed, which involved the strangers leaving, my computer catching fire and me putting it out somehow, and another stranger showing up while I was screaming about who in hell set my computer on fire and trying to power it up to see if it still worked. He was helpful and calm at least, and seemed sympathetic to my plight, by offering me tools to use to dismantle the device in order for me to dry it out piecemeal. He spoke to me, too, and almost seemed familiar, but I don't know who he was or what he said. Or how my computer had caught fire, got soaking wet, or could power on after all that abuse.
