Mob Dream

This is another dream post, so skip it if you aren’t in the mood. Also, my Puritan conscience impels me to tell you that this dream does not have social value, great wisdom, or an improving message.

I’m living in a ground floor apartment of some high end apartment complex somewhere, by myself. Why I’m living by myself is never explained in the dream, and I never wondered.

I have an unused bedroom. A friend shows up with a friend of his that I’ve met a few times and ask if I need a roommate. The friend of the friend pipes up and says, ‘nope, he doesn’t any more, now that I’m here!’ and basically just waltzes in. So this extrovert just foisted himself on me but I don’t mind because I like him and I needed a roommate. We hit it off.

Now, its odd that the dream starts this way because it has nothing to do with what comes next.

But first, a little background. A year or so ago I had a dream that I can only very vaguely recall where I was in a doctor’s office and another patient there, a young white man maybe named Sweeney, did something clumsy, swinging something around or something, I don’t remember, and accidentally ended up scraping my groin area. The scrape was painful and uncomfortable for a couple of days until it healed. The dream made no impression on me at the time and I haven’t thought of it from that day to this until I had this dream I’m now telling you about.

I and my new roommate friend have been buying groceries or something and we are the doorstep to the apartment when my wife calls. She says there’s a rumor going around that I suffered some kind of horrible genital mutilation maybe in this incident with this kid at the doctor’s office.

So then we go inside. Seated on our couch are several teenager men, several black guys and a couple of white guys, all of them fit and fairly tall. I have the impression that they are part of the local high school basketball team. When they see me they start making mocking comments. I am enraged, instantly go to the glass door in the back just to the rear and side of the couch, and order them out. I tell them they are criminals and to leave immediately. They do, although continuing to give me attitude. One of the white guys stands in the doorway for a bit until I repeat the order and the other white guy lunges back in screaming at me–he is genuinely upset–until the others pull him back out. Then they set up on the common patio back there and start chanting stuff at me. They appear to be having a good time. It’s hard to tell from what they were saying, but my impression from all this is that they are accusing me of having said or done something horribly racist, possibly to Sweeney, including maybe having mutilated his genitalia or something, and that these accusations are being discussed among other places on some kind of black american social media platform (black twitter?).

My poor roommate is completely shocked by all this. I tell him to call the apartment security and he does. They come zipping around in their golf cart to the back and the young men scatter.

Fast forward. I am coming back to my apartment (which is now oddly next to or including a tennis court with chainlink around it) and there’s a horde of people standing outside, standing inside, and standing in the fence. When they see me they start yelling about ‘Sweeney.” They are outraged by whatever it is they think they have done. In particular there is some blond girl in her early teens with a raw face who is screaming. I yell at her to tell me what she even thinks I’ve done. She is startled and says, ‘no.’

At this point my Scots-Irish conscience kicks in. I’m not going to take this. The next parts of the dream occur in vignettes.

There is this guy Sweeney shamefacedly and in a mealy mouthed way endorsing the rumors about whatever it was I am supposed to have done (the dream never did get to that part), and in response he receives a huge outpouring of public support.

There is me setting up a givesendgo platform for donations, “Justice to G.” that is worded to sound like it is planning to sue me, without ever saying so, to collect donations form the public. Just before I go live with it, in a rare outbreak of common sense I put a disclaimer at the end that donating means you are ok with the money being used to find the truth and do justice no matter what form it takes. After further thought, I add a second disclaimer making it clear that the money will be used by me to vindicate myself, but worded in a way that is not very quotable. I empty out my bank account and lawyer up.

I get fired but win a case against the entity that is my employer in the dream In the settlement I demand that the final decisionmaker who approved my firing personally apologize. This turns out to be the CEO and the phone call apology naturally turns out to very awkward–I hadn’t thought about how the apology would actually occur when I made the demand. The CEO says, “I apologize for rushing to judgment and for everything we put you through” and then there’s this dead air–what are we supposed to say to each other next?

There is me suing, mostly successfully, news orgs that repeated any of the allegations, police departments that failed to provide protection, and private individuals who participated in spreading the rumors. This last part is particularly ruthless in my dream. We basically have this huge mill running at this point that is financially self sustaining. What we do is we sue people but give them a settlement offer up front if they publicly and permanently retract and apologize plus paying court costs and legal fees to date which are pretty low at that point, a couple of thousand. If they don’t go along, we press forward with the full lawsuit.  There are tens of thousands of people who were involved and we are just going after anyone we can find of them. Less ruthlessly, we also put out that we will not sue anyone who proactively puts up a permanent retraction and apology along with donating at least $5 to the fund.

I work with a couple of sympathetic law enforcement agencies to track down and arrest some of the worst instigators and those who are making threats and doing attacks.

A lot of the dream suits and prosecutions involved RICO, maybe a mental association on my part between mobs and the Mob.

I do receive death threats and mild attacks–car being keyed, stuff like that–but it dies down over time.

I’m being interviewed by some kind of Sunday TV news talk program. I explain that the worst and most spiritually damaging kind of bullying is righteous bullying, where people have the glow on their side that they are bullying evil. I say that we are doing these people good by going after them. It’s a chance for them to reflect and internalize what they are capable of doing when caught up in the mob. The interviewer pushes back a little and says that I’m just suing ordinary people who are often panicked and desperate when they find that I am enmeshing them into the legal system. And I say its for their good. Aren’t I the righteous bully? Maybe awake I’d think that’s a point worth considering, but in the dream I don’t think that at all. What I say is that I am offering people a contained, limited way to deal with the problem they caused, and once they’ve met the terms, they are done. Bullying, I say, has no end.

That’s the dream. I can’t say its very realistic, either about events in the world or about my own personality.