injured knight

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was probably in a library with two of my friends, one of whom may have been my old friend ML. We were getting ready to leave the library to hear an author's talk.

ML was a little disappointed with the author, and possibly also with having to go to the talk. I knew this was because he didn't like some themes or some plot devices in the most popular book the author had written.

But I knew, and I wanted to tell ML, that the author himself didn't like his most popular book. He had kind of been forced or swayed to write it the way he had. His other books were written how he wanted to write them, and I liked them a lot more. I thought ML would, too.

I could see an image from the popular book. The book was an old-style, cloth-bound, hardcover book. On the paper glued to the inside of the front cover was an illustration, monochrome, in blue and white, of a knight leading a group of men through the mountains.

I was now out in some wildland of rolling valleys of grass dotted with occasional groves of trees and shrubs. The day was grey, cool, and misty. There were three knights, one of whom may have been me.

The knights all rode big, powerful, fast horses. But the horses may also only have been half-horses, or they may have been like big puppets, or hobbyhorses with curtains of puppet-fabric over them. The knights were also wearing, instead of mail and armor, big, brown coats or vests made out of either animal hide or puppet fabric.

As the three knights sped along, the third knight, with whom I identified, somehow injured himself. One of his legs was broken. He fell off his horse, which then may have stopped running. The knight stood up and may even have gotten back up onto his horse, even though he knew he would no longer be useful at riding.

The other knights were only a short distance in front of the third knight. It was like they weren't moving forward at all, even though they may supposedly still have been charging forward.

I felt a keen sense of dismay and fear at the third knight/myself having broken his leg. I understood now that it may have happened because the knight had been shot off his horse, maybe by an enemy's crossbow. Or perhaps the knight had only fallen and injured himself. But his injury put him at the mercy of the enemy, who were lurking in the wildlands, unseen. I didn't want the knight to be doomed: his doom would be mine.

The knight called out to the other two knights that they should keep going and not worry about him. The knight tried to act like he could still ride, to keep the other knights from waiting for him.

I now understood that this was actually a scene from the popular book by the author my friends and I were going to see. I had felt bad about my friend not liking the book. So now I had gone into the book to make "the ultimate sacrifice" within the book, as a kind of penance. This might have seemed like a kind of silly thing for me to have done, since it might cost me my own as well as the knight's life.

The third knight was somehow keeping up with the other two knights, possibly even beating them. But it was now like he was speeding along on a pogo stick that was covered in shaggy hide or puppet fabric. The knight had chosen to ride on a pogo stick so he would only have to use one leg to move. But he was still afraid that something would happen, either to injure his broken leg even more, or to break his other leg. So he called back to the men that if something bad happened to his legs, he would make them feel really guilty about it.

I was now floating up in the air, maybe twenty meters high. I was looking down on something like a parking lot or a garage where a semi-truck was parked, possibly with two trailers attached to its back end, side by side.

Something had happened, I can't remember exactly what, to make the truck inaccessible to me. The truck had been guarded over by some man at some high vantage point and inside something like a control room. But I was either assigned to drive it, or I'd wanted to drive it, to some destination.

But now the man had been subdued, and the truck was no longer under the man's control. The two trailers were now attached (maybe they hadn't been before?) to the back of the truck, and the truck was now ready for me to drive. I could imagine the trucks being pulled back out of the concrete-walled, stall-like space they'd been in. My trip was ready to be started.

But now I realized I couldn't make the trip. I was scheduled to be somewhere, maybe at some place like my work, at a specific time. But the trip would take me 48 hours (or, at least, the end of one day and the beginning of the next). If I took on this task, I would miss the other thing I was scheduled to do. Plus, I now realized, I was only renting this truck. I had enough money to rent the truck for one day. But going on this trip for two days would be too expensive for me.

I also didn't know how to drive the truck. This hadn't seemed like such a big deal before. I'd thought I would have some time to be taught by my dad, who knew how to drive big trucks. But now the trip was about to start. I'd only have a short time, maybe 24 hours (even though the trip was to start immediately) for my dad to teach me.

Still, that didn't seem like such a big deal. I could learn what was essential, I thought, and pick up the rest by experience. But it was scary to think of needing to to that with such a big, dangerous vehicle.

And now I saw two other trailers standing alone, unhitched, near the stall-like parking space for the truck. I realized that the task was actually to take the trailers that were now hooked to the truck, then to come back, pick up the second pair of trailers, and haul them, too. This would definitely take me four days.

I was in despair. I definitely couldn't do this, and I may have said so, maybe even starting to cry. I didn't have the time, money, or experience for something like this.

I now saw something like the battle which had been fought to wrest the truck and trailers from the man's control. During that fight a father and his son, a young boy, were both shot in the head and killed. I thought to myself what an absurd waste it was that the father and son had been made to give their lives for these trucks.