Nightmare

[Meanon]

I was sitting with some friends outside a cafe or something watching the kids play in a sort of cliff top garden that we had discovered the day before, they were with the woman who owned it who had gone to a lot of trouble to make it child friendly and they had loved it so much we went back. I was below them while they were quite a long way up, playing on a cliff, a situation I would never allow in real life!! I had a feeling like one I sometimes have where I am worried/feeling guilty about whether I have got the protectiveness/freedom balance right.

They fell off the cliff onto rocks and had awful head injuries and the hospital we took them to was like a war zone with awful sights I kept unsuccessfully trying to shield them from which I knew would scar them for life (some were memories of med school dissection rooms, weirdly).

At some point I had that strange thing where I know it's too awful to be happening and that it must be a dream but instead of waking as usual (I think I was just too tired to do so) I stayed asleep and it all turned out to be some sort of macabre plot as in that fictional town in the book, Cocaine Nights where people are so bored, affluent and nihilistic that they get their kicks by playing in an underworld of vilolence. The person on the cliff was in on it and it hadn't been an accident after all.

I think the murders of those Amish children was on my mind, but still I'm rather appalled that i managed to dream this up!