Nightmare

Carrer d’en Robadors, El Ravel----September 26th, 2009
This morning at six, I heared someone screaming in my dream. In my dream, a black women, with a deep voice, was beating her child and roaring " DONT F'ING TALK BACK TO ME!" I kept hearing her hit the child and it felt so real. I was peaking over a fence where she was doing her violent damage and I wanted to break it down to force her to stop, but fear held me back. It was extremely upsetting. I woke up sweating, the entire back of my shirt was soaked through. In spite of being awake, I heared the same irrate voice I had heared in my dream.

After a few seconds, I realized it was real and someone was SCREAMING outside my apartment window as they walked up and down my street. I layed there frightened because I could recognize that he wasn’t screaming the familiar sound of Spanish words, but another language. In my semi-conscious state, I automatically pictured one of the Muslim’s with their terbins who stands outside their stores on my block, with an irate expression on his face. I know it wasn’t a logic assumption, but I thought that he wanted to kill me. I guess that kind of thinking develops from being woken abruptly from your sleep mixed with the paranoid propoganda supported by many older Americans.

I didnt move for what seemed like an hour, but was probably more like five minutes. Then, I woke up Josh (who knows how he slept through it?). With Josh by my side, as a safety blanket, I had enough courage to look out the window. Josh’s vision is much healthier than mine, so he was able to recognize that it was not the frightening character I had constructed in my mind, instead it was a drunk Eastern European man. At least, I hope he was drunk, otherwise, there is no excuse for his violent disruptive behavior. I squinted, without my contacts, to see that the vociforous man making all of the noise was chasing another man whose voice was much more quiet and seemed almost frightened. His friends tried to separate the two men. We watched as they ripped of their shirts to engage in a fight. I wonder where all the Spanish police were at a time like this. This had been going on for a very lengthy period of time to give the police anadequate amount of time to come and break up the scene. There were several other people who felt safe enough to look out their windows and a crowed had formed on the street. So clearly, I was not the only one who had been disturbed by this hateful man. I remembered my camera which I consistently forgot about at other bizarre moments in this apartment. That thought tore me away from the window. I blindly shuffled through my stuff to find the camera. As I turned on the camera back at our bed room window, I hoped that it would come in clearly so that I would actually be able to see the facial features of the men involved in the fight. To my misfortune the whole stinking thing came in super blurry. I fiddled with some of the features and I fixed it simultaneously as the fight moved out of veiw from my window. A man related to the violent group banged on a metal door several times for no apparent reason. And we layed back down, the sound gradually got quieter as they moved further down the street.

Trying to fall back asleep, I struggled with a logical explaination about what would spurr on such a man to be filled with such an intense rage and hatred at such an early time in the morning, while it was so dark outside. Maybe the other man had taken his prostitute girlfriend on the street? (Many of the Eastern European males seem to linger around the prostitutes on our block.) Or maybe the Eastern European man was the prostitutes’ pimp and he was getting revenge for a misconduct in the business? Who knows… In person, it was very disturbing. I should post the blurry shot. It probably won't seem frightening, but it is when you are woken up in your sleep by it.