Visions in the Dark

The dream starts off in the small gymnasium of my old public school. There are no children, just new recruits for the military. The small gym is the sleeping quarters, whereas the large gym is for training. There are no chairs and the new recruits are forced to sit on their duffle bags and use small fold out card tables, or in some cases, cardboard boxes to eat and write on. I do not know anyone there, but we are assigned to small groups of five or six people to a table/box. I do not remember any of the details about the others in my group, but there is a guy sitting on my left who looks like a stereotypical jarhead. I cannot remember his name but I think it started with an "L."

L is a real bully to everybody and no one really likes him. I try to be nice to him, but in return he starts harassing me with rude comments and constantly tries to grab by breasts and buttocks. I am able to fight him off but from then on I have to be on alert at all times because L takes every opportunity to harass me. I try to keep my distance, but that is almost impossible since we are in the same training group within our unit. The dream skips ahead a little and it is months later. Our commanding officer is giving us our orders and assigning every soldier with a "war buddy." I don't have to wait to find out who my partner is. Somehow in the dream, I just know. It is L of course and I couldn't be any less excited about it if I tried.

The dream skips ahead some more and L and I have been deployed in a thick tropical rain forest, hunting down the unseen enemy presence. I think that our settings look like scenes I have seen in Vietnam war films, though this though does not bring about lucidity. I tell L that if he tries anything towards me that I will not hesitate to defend myself, and will go so far as to kill him if I have to. L doesn't respond. We travel for quite a while without engaging in any battles, and L concentrates on his soldierly duties and does not harass me. We come across a wide river that is thick with brown silt and is flowing quite rapidly. Crossing it would expose us to possible enemy fire but we have no choice, as our destination is somewhere in the forest on the otherside. As we are crossing someone starts shooting at us. I become afraid and try to go back the way we came, but L grabs me by my munitions belt and forces me across the rest of the way. He is spraying the part of the forest where he thinks the enemies are hiding, but neither of us are actually sure where the bullets are coming from.

On the otherside of the river L and I dive under the tree cover and the enemy fire suddenly stops. L begins berating me verbally for trying to run away, and though I am angry and not in the mood for his verbal abuse, I say nothing. From then on L declares himself the leader of our team of two and starts bullying me around. I am indignant at first, but soon realize that he is pushing me hard because he is trying to keep me on my toes and alive in the dangerous situation we are in. At random intervals we are attacked by enemy units but L and I are able to fight them off. I cannot see the details of the enemy fighters as they appear as sillouettes of people dodging in and out of the thickette of trees and ferns. More then once L saves my butt and a few times I save his. We are unable to stop for sleep and rest only a few times to eat, as we are constantly attacked.

We reach our destination and it is some sort of military outpost in the edge of the rainforest. On the far side of the camp the flat field dips down into a deep lush valley, where several small villages of the local population exist. We are summoned by our commanding officer and are required to report our experience. It turns out that L and I are the only members of our unit that survived to complete our mission. All of the other soldiers in our unit were killed and the commander wants to know what we did to survive. We report our experience and when we are done I openly admit that it was likely because of L taking charge that we survived. The dream ends with me saying "I think L is an @$$hole, but he's also a damn fine soldier" or something close to that.