Here, have mine

Last night I dreamt that I was some sort of super-secret spy. I was in a different country, someplace I didn’t recognize. Everything was very dirty and run-down looking; buildings were leaky and crumbled and houses were small and brown. Everywhere I went, though, people had state of the art technology. Laptop computers, hand-held mobile devices, blue-tooth this and that.

I was in a classroom, in a dirty, broken looking building, learning a different language from an Asian teacher. We were crammed into the classroom practically touching bodies with our class mates, but we all had laptops open in front of us, and the instructor was using an overhead projector to project images onto the crumbling wall.

A man came into the room then, whispered to the instructor and pointed at me. As I stepped around everyone to leave the room, I saw that the teacher had tears in her eyes and had her face cast down. She looked up at me as I passed her, and her eyes were gone. I was staring into gaping black holes with tears pouring out, and the man who came for me said, “Do you see the problem?” before leading me out of the room.

In the hallway, I met another man. In the dream he was familiar, but I can’t recall him now. He was someone I think I knew, though, someone with whom I had been intimate. He grabbed my hand and started leading me down the hall while the first man began giving us instructions.

We were a team, and we were after some hidden objects. We were given lists of items to collect and approximate coordinates where the items were believed to be held. We were to memorize the items and coordinates, then burn the papers. We were not to be seen or overheard. We were to be stealthy in collecting the items.

The man drove my partner and I to a remote part of town and dropped us off. We’d been given dark clothing and tactical gear. We were well-armed and had wireless devices to speak with each other should we get separated. We had been given a bag to carry the items in, and my partner expected me to carry the bag. I dropped the bag into a mud puddle first chance I got, and we got to skulking.

It was the middle of the day, the sun high and bright, as we made our way to our first objective. It was a house, and there were supposedly rare diamonds inside. We tumbled and sneaked and jumped cleverly over fences and dodged the eyes of small children and house dogs on our way to the diamonds.

We found them and were on our way out when I noticed a woman sitting in a room. Her back was to the doorway, and she was sitting in a straight-backed chair. She appeared to be naked from what I could see. I went to her, thinking she needed help; when I walked around the chair to face her, I saw it was the teacher I’d been in class with. Her eye sockets were still empty, and her mouth was wide open.

I tried to leave, but couldn’t move. I sank down onto my knees in front of her and quietly clawed my own eyes out, dropping them into her lap with a wet sound. I sat back on my heels and opened my mouth wide in a silent scream.