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Middle East Dream

I was standing by the side of the road outside the old stone walls of a town in the Middle East as a slow stream of traffic drove past. In my hands was a large basket, which I held as if I were a roadside bread seller. However, I was wearing an army uniform and inside the basket were about a dozen human heads.

Notes for Freudian Interpretation

Two soldier dreams in a row -- an undeniable sign of the militaristic times in which we live! Of course, there’s a gap of about two weeks between the two dreams, which rather undercuts the cumulative effect. However, they are the only dreams I’ve remembered in that time, save for a brief one in which I was having a chat with Adolf Hitler.

Before going to bed, I’d seen a documentary called “Diameter of the Bomb”, which was about a 2002 suicide bomb attack on a bus in Jerusalem. I didn’t like it much as it was edited in an annoyingly distracting style, with almost constant music playing throughout. However, it had lots of pictures of IDF soldiers hanging about by the side of the road and various views of Jerusalem’s city walls, so that explains that element of the dream. Also, quite late on, after we’d become familiar with the features of the suicide bomber (through home videos of him larking around with his nephews and one of those Kalashnikov-brandishing pre-suicide video statements), we were shown television news footage of his actual head, which lay like a deflated football, with the face slightly folded in on itself, in the gutter by the wreckage.

Not often you see that on TV.

Soldier dream

I was with a troop of soldiers -- indeed, I myself was a soldier -- who were sitting in the back of an army truck which was passing through a British town on its way to Basra in Iraq. Everyone was depressed and we were all reading different copies of the Daily Mirror. I came across a brilliant anti-war article and thought it might cheer everyone up if I read it out. While I was doing so, our sergeant major stopped the truck and told us to hand over all of the newspapers. I told him that he just didn’t want the soldiers to find out that the war was wrong but he explained that he was just collecting reading material that would be sent out to the troops in Iraq, which struck me as a sensible thing to do.

Notes for Freudian Interpretation

Why the troops in Iraq would want some tatty old tabloids, I don’t know. The sergeant major was obviously lying --what a dupe I am!

The day I had this dream, I’d read reports of a speech that Tony Blair had made on a navy warship, George Bush-style (although Blair lacked the bulge-enhancing codpiece straps of Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” pilot uniform). Blair was doing his Churchill impression, saying that Britain must use its military “not only as peacemakers but as war-fighters” and that we’ll have to “fight terrorism and pay the cost of that fight wherever it may be”. I experienced the familiar feeling of biliousness that I often get when reading Blair’s bizarre pronouncements -- something similar to the feeling that might be experienced by one who has been told that the man sitting next to them has a contagious disease that he caught from molesting piglets.

I haven’t read the Daily Mirror recently, because I’m not a moron, but, during the invasion of Iraq, it had some memorably fierce anti-war front pages, usually incorporating a shouty John Pilger article.

Incidentally, I’ve noticed that this blog gets an awful lot of hits from people googling “I hate Blair”, so I thought I’d throw it in again, just to keep the traffic up.