by Jeffrey Bell-Hanson

(Warning: This blog post contains violent images that may disturb some readers…they certainly disturb me.)
The dream that I recount here came in the wee hours of the morning, as the most disturbing dreams usually do. It woke me, but not in a cold sweat or ready to scream. The horror came over me slowly with the realization that emerged moments after.
As the dream began I found myself in a grassy place in the company of four or five students. The students were familiar to me, but I could not name them. We seemed to be on an old farm that was probably abandoned. There was a run-down wood-frame shed next to us, clearly neglected. The grass around us was long, but dry and yellow. In fact, the whole scene had a sepia-toned look.
The shed was on the edge of an open field filled with this long grass. It would have been difficult to see things moving in that grass, though there were bare spots here and there, particularly around where we stood. With the shed to our left there was a line of pea-sized gravel in front of us. It had been deposited neatly there in a ridge roughly eighteen inches high and seven or eight yards long. By whom exactly, I didn’t know, but this didn’t bother me. I felt we were there for a purpose, and I had a sense of what lay ahead. Somehow, I had become aware that we faced a battle for this piece of land, or the land behind us, or for some other reason that was not entirely defined.
I also thought that our opponents were to be the squirrels hiding in the grass somewhere beyond that gravel ridge. (At this point you may be thinking Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but I assure you, it didn’t seem cartoonish at all to me. It all made terrifying sense.) Our weapons were to be World War I-era bolt action rifles. They were piled nearby. The squirrels would be armed with rifles as well. Questions of scale did not occur to me. I just anticipated the horrific wounds that these weapons could, and likely would inflict on my students and me.
A small shovel appeared in my hands, so I used it to carve some channels through the gravel ridge. I varied the angles to create a more complete area of fire in front of us. (It was something I saw on television once.) My overriding concern was to protect my students as well as I could, but I knew that our small number didn’t bode well.
Suddenly I became aware that there were squirrels among and behind us, seemingly focused on what lay beyond our position. They were not attacking, but rather appeared to be on a reconnaissance mission. I assumed their peaceful presence to be the result of some code of honor that might have been observed in warfare at one time. I struggled with this for a moment. I knew that I should observe the apparent cease-fire if I were to maintain my honor. Yet I was convinced that these same animals would likely be shooting at us soon. So I struck one of them with my shovel. And then another. And another. They did not die easily, but each one looked up at me in astonishment as I beat it to death. I kept telling myself, “You are saving your students’ lives—and your own,” though I had no idea if this carnage would eliminate the threat. Even as I woke, I kept thinking that I was doing what I had to do by killing the little animals.
I lay awake for minutes before it began to dawn on me that the squirrels had shown no aggression toward us at all. I saw no evidence that they actually had rifles, and how absurd it was to imagine they could have lifted them, let alone fire them, if they had. I began to question the provenance of the whole scene. Who had put us there? Who had deposited the gravel berm and set the scene for a battle? Who told us that the squirrels were our enemies and were going to attack us? Had I just assumed them to be enemies when they appeared? Could they simply have been trying to escape whatever was in the grass beyond the gravel? Was there any enemy at all? Could the gravel have been there for another reason? Did I see danger where there was none and strike out at innocent creatures in unreasoned fear? … Could I be that monstrous?
Yes. It seemed that I could.
And then, no longer asleep, but fully awake and aware, I was truly terrified.