The White Trees and Superman Story

A strange dream, not entirely realistic but interesting to me because it had a story line:

Me and some friends road on top of a slow moving training that snaked peacefully through a beautiful parklike country side of low grass and tall willowy trees with white trunks.  At some point, I and a few others jumped off and lost track of the train.  We were walking along looking for the train when suddenly something grabbed us from behind and plucked us into the air.  Seconds later, we were dangling 3 stories high in the air near one of the trees, completely bewildered and confused.

We began to debate what had happened.  My friends had some ideas about maybe it was UFOs.  My argument was that it had to be that one of the trees that had grabbed us, but the others thought this was ridiculous.

"But how then are we still dangling now without falling unless the tree is grabbing us?" I asked.  They had no answer.

Eventually we were put down and scurried on our way, still not in agreement about what had happened but in a hurry to get away from whatever it was.  After a while of continued wandering, I began to inspect the trees and noticed many of them had a double trunk on the bottom, almost as if they had legs.  The more I looked at them, the more lifelike they seemed.  Then I spied a tree that looked like a humanoid, with two long trunk legs, two arm like large branched and an upright branch at the top where the head would have been.  It's bark was white and peeling and it had few leaves or side branches, just a few twigs.  It stood in a stooped crouched position and when it realized I was staring, it loped away from sight before I could point it out to the others.  Now I felt confident the trees were alive and animate but since they had not really hurt us previously, although I was wary of them, I did not feel great fear.  We continued on and found our way back home to civilization which is where the next part of the story begins.

In this part, I was working together with a super hero type person to defeat an evil villain.  I have no name for the super hero so I will for the sake of the story call him Superman.  The villain had been thus far kicking our butt.  Superman was not strong enough.  I and a few others who knew Superman had been working with him to defeat the villain using various strategies but none had worked and we were in dire straights.  Eventually, the villain had found my house when I wasn't home and had destroyed the inside, breaking apart much of my furniture.  We then quickly moved to rented place and continued on.

Soon after, I went off to work on the villain project and when I came home, the new place also was also broken up inside.  Now I was really scared.  How did the villain find my hideout so quickly when I had gone through such pains to keep it hidden?  If he could do that, there was no place for us to hide.  We knew the villain would be back any minute and so Superman and I and a few cohorts prepared a last stand against him.

When he came, he quickly defeated Superman and as Superman lay unconscious, we feared for our lives and all humanity.  He could easily kills us at any second, but then I began the last ditch backup plan.  As the villain stood outside the house in a location I had planned in advance, hidden machines around him zapped him from all directions and split him into 8 different individuals.

At this time, I recalled back to the creation of the villain.  It was time for the back story.  It had all started with the animate trees back in the park.  Scientists had studied them and were able to extract the spark of life from one of the trees.  The spark was then isolated and the end result was a terrible powerful creature that had become the villain.  Now I had no way of destroying the villain's spark of life but I could split him into parts, although with little idea of the outcome other than that his power would also be split into parts.

After the zapping, I watched as 8 young boys with dark hair now stood where the villain once had been.  They were all dressed similarly in dark clothes and looked to be about 8 or 10 years old.  Their personalities seemed much changed from the villain and 6 of them immediately moved away in different directions and soon were out of sight.  Two stayed for a short while, one slightly taller and appearing older than the other and the taller one, did all the talking.  Curious but nervous, I approached and spoke with him.  I asked him how he was and what his plans were.  I knew I was taking a great risk because even at only 1/8 of his original power, he could easily destroy me. Superman also still lay unconscious and vulnerable.  The taller boy acted as if I were a stranger and said, "We will need this lantern," and also indicated a need for a few other utilitarian items and so took them without asking.  I did not argue.  He seemed to speak more towards his younger cohort than me.  Then they also left the area and disappeared into the world.  I hoped that they would not cause trouble but if some of them did, once Superman recovered, he would at least be able to handle them one at a time now with their power thus split.

After the commotion, the police had arrived and were inspecting the damage to the inside of my home, trying to figure out what had happened.  During the fight, the house had been further devastated and everything was broken, scattered, and strewn.  Me and my cohorts needed to make an excuse to get inside and recover the body of Superman which was under a guise so that regular people could not see him.  The police let us in hoping to get some clues from us about what had happened but we gave only vague answers that were not useful.  Once in, some of us distracted the police while others of us got Superman's body.  Superman would recover.  It was a partial victory for us but we did not know what kinds of creatures the 8 children would become or what the future would hold.  We could only hope that the future would be brighter.                    

Dragon's Death

I peered around from behind the cement pillar, looking for the enemy. I sensed danger around me and became concerned that we had been found out. My clan leaders were inside the building I was guarding and there should have been no enemies here. They should not have known our location, yet we had already found one enemy scout and suspected several others were near. This was not good. I had a bad feeling, but to move without caution now could easily mean my death. As had happened many times in the past, I was in a life and death struggle to find the enemy and kill him before he found me.

My surroundings appeared to be ordinary every day modern day buildings, one several stories tall cement building inside of which my superiors were currently working, some flat parking areas around me, a tall cinder block wall in front, other buildings and a sparsely used roadway beyond, and several large rectangular well manicured grass areas along the road. It all seemed so normal but I knew danger lurked at every corner.

Eventually, I made my way back to one of my superiors near the building and we discussed the situation. We felt we were in considerable danger with our important people still inside the building, so few of us guardians present, and our location likely now known by the enemy. We could easily be overwelmed if we were not careful, but my superior offered me one solution.

He informed me that I could turn into a dragon! I immediately agreed and the next thing I knew, I was a dragon, not the lithe and sinuous creatures of Chinese legend, but instead a huge thick bodied brute of a creature with huge arms, slashing claws, and dark grey green scales. And somehow, despite the obvious problems of gravity and physics, I could even fly!

I sent out my dragon mind and sound found I knew the locations of nearby enemy agents. Now in my huge beast body, I easily descended down upon each one of them and slashed them down to death in seconds. No more did I need to sneak and scurry for my life. Now I could simply pound anyone to death in seconds using my huge scaly dragon arms and claws. I felt a great freedom from fear and a great pleasure in the new simplicity of executing my tasks quickly and efficiently and without fear. Thus, were the 3 or 4 nearby enemy agents dispatched and then I flew up and grasped onto the side of a nearby building to think and survey the area further.

Indeed, I could fly but it was not an easy task. I found I had to concentrate every second of the time in order to keep myself aloft and not crash into some nearby obstacle by mistake. My heavy dragon body was difficult to control in flight and it seemed that gravity and momentum were only just barely compensated for at any given time. Thus I found that I could not effectively think about anything other than flying during times of flight. And so I had to aloft on the side of the building in order to consider what next I should do.

At first as I sat there clutching some curly cue ornamental stone work on one corner of the building, I felt the job had thusfar been strangely too easy. It seemed almost a waste to have had so little to do and such an easy task for such a great and powerful body as the dragon. But then I let my mind stretch out further beyond my immediate surroundings and I realized my task was far from over.

There beyond the tall cinder block wall, arrayed out on top of a structure that looked like the top of a parking garage, were many many scores of the enemy. They lay in wait as part of a trap set for us. They only awaited the order for when to move on us, maybe 100 or 120 of them total, a large allotment of resources even coming from a larger clan like themselves. They meant to crush us and they were putting out a lot of effort to do so.

Quickly, I met again with my immediate supervisor and he advised me of that which I already knew, that it would be my task and my task alone to slaughter those atop the parking structure. With so many of their resources there, he did not know if they would have weapons that would be able to harm me, but that would be a risk I would have to take.

Trying not to worry about danger to myself, danger that most likely I could do nothing about, I flew to the parking garage roof and starting killing as many as I could as fast as I could. At first, I killed by slashing down with my powerful claws and arms, ripping open flesh and crushing bones. But then I realized that some might survive such an assault. Any victim that lived would be another person that would come against us as a powerful enemy in the future, probably an even more dangerous enemy than they had been to start with, but yet I did not have time now to be checking each body to insure death as I had done with the few scouts I had previously killed. So I reasoned that the only way to insure death would be to rip each body into two parts, the lower half from the upper, a procedure that surely no one would survive.

And so, as much as I loathed it, I began to tear many of my victims in two. Unlike the simple pounding slash that I had previously used, the tearing caused the majority of the skin to come away on one specific side, like a sock coming off a foot, while the majority of the meat would slide out into the other half. The feeling in my hands was akin to yanking apart a large slimey lumpy sausage with a very thick and stubborn casing. This horrible feeling weighed on my mind as I performed each killing and I did my best not to think about it too much and instead concentrated on killing as fast as possible.

I had not time to lose because as I killed, I could sense the warriors at the edge of the hoard were not thinking of attacking me but instead were scattering in all directions like ants into the forest, running in many directions at once, blending back into society, not easily to be found again. It would be impossible for me to get them all, but I knew I had to get as many as possible. The killing proceeded for some time until all were dead or ran away.

After the slaughter, I returned to my supervisor and was advised not to return to the killing area again for some time. And indeed, I already felt a strange urge to return there again later, when everything was cleaned up again and the bright sun shined on the green grass and the blood had been mostly washed away. I longed to see the place in its natural state again without the bodies and death, but I was advised that the investigators would be monitoring the area for some time to come, hoping themselves that the perpetrator of the killing would come back to see his handiwork. And so I could not return for that reason. I could not give them even the slightest clue that it had been me.

But overall, my superiors were pleased. Most importantly, we had all survived. The enemies, it turned out, had no weapon to use against me and many of them had been killed. All my superiors had finished their business and escaped and we now blended back into the society around us. No one would know we were involved in the killing. The mission had been a success.

I slept for a while with a strange feeling of peace and security and eventually found myself awake in the now waking world of here. For several hours, I retained a strange feeling of grim determination, and I could still remember the power that had been in my great dragon arms and of the strange stubby wing protuberances that had been at my back. And I remembered the sickening feeling of the skin ripping off the human victims as I pulled them apart. And I tried not to think of it too much until finally the regular concerns of the day, getting gas, arriving on time for my appointments, finding lunch, finally pushed aside some of those dream memories.

The Tips are Where It's At

I was telling the man that I didn't think he should be doing this kind of job, hanging around with these kinds of people. He was a tall lanky Polish looking caucasian, with short cropped hair and a slight but perpetual forward stoop, as if it his head was too heavy for his body and was continually overbalancing him. Even now as he stood talking to me, he looked down at the pavement.

"I have to do it because tips are where it's at," he said to me. "Tips are were all the money is. Without tips there's nothing really. You got nothing. So I have to do it this way," he said with a sort of dejected defiance.

I looked around at all the widely spaced cars spread out on the pavement. Here, space was plentiful and cheap. No need to be frugal with space. In the dark night, I couldn't see much beyond the pavement platter of cars, but I had the feeling that south western style desert surrounded us with sand, cactus, and the occasional outcrop of weathered sandstone. Above me towered a covered carport type of construction, similar to those you find at gas stations. Several flood lights were strung on its edges, attracting clouds of whining insects.

A cluster of men were assembled around one of the cars. Sniggering and drinking, they lounged against the car or the carport, some of them staggering at times to keep upright. They were a surly bunch. Disagreements flared up regularly intermixed with ringing raucous laughter.

Eventually, one of the men threw a shot glass at another's feet and exploding glass shards sparkled in the reflected light. Angry and confused, the victem threw his own glass at the car. Just then, the man I had been talking with earlier stalked into the middle of the group and demanded to know what was they were doing to his car. Behind him, one of the drunk men calmly picked up a long handled axe and expertly swung it over his head and struck down with a sick thunking noise directly onto the back of the car owner's neck.

The scene changed. It was daytime now as I gazed on a small house with a peaked tar gravel roof. Near the chimney, a man cowered on this roof, attempting to hide. The cops had already seen him be he pretended not to hear their shouts to come down. Eventually, they put ladders on the side of the red wood house and reached up to the man's leg and pulled him down.

He did not resist. In fact, he relaxed. The chase was over and there was something he wanted to say. "It was Wayne SoandSo (I forget the actual last name he used)," he said without any prompting. He had wanted to say it all along but he hadn't wanted to get himself implicated. But now that he was already caught, he could finally get it off his chest with confidence. He wanted the real murderer to be known. Everyone knew Wayne anyway and nobody was surprised. He would be easy to find. The only question was, would the charges stick?

Violence in the Playground

I was standing on the grass in the schoolyard staring at the long building in front of me. The excitement was intense, very much a sexual kind of excitement. No one else was out yet but any minute, people would begin to percolate out of those doors and I would get what I wanted. I would experience the joy and pleasure and release. I trembled with excitement at the prospect. I could hardly wait. Some weakling would come out and they would be alone or I would follow them until they were alone. The details didn't matter because I would find a way to get what I wanted. I was big and powerful and they were weak. I could feel the power and strength in my muscles and I was proud of it. I would go up the them and pound my fist into their brain. I would punch and kick them and feel their bones break and feel my fists sink into their flesh. I would pound their face and their big white grapeskin eyes until they popped. I would jam my fingers into their flabby skin until blood spurted out and bright red bruises bloomed and they would scream and writhe until they could no longer move. I could hardly wait.