Dream: I am between 12 and 15. I'm on the Island and there's a general store, but it's really quite large but on main street. The back half of it is a exibit that is changed seasonally or twice a year. This time there are elephants (!) three or four adults and a similar number of babies. I take the bus and see them everyday. There is a rail around them, you can't touch them, but it looks like maybe the adult trunks could reach if the wanted to but they don't they try to pretend people aren't there and play with their babies. Other people that come to see them yell at them and children run and scream about. I am very quite and always go alone. One day the babies are gone and the adults are paceing around their small space very quickly. The workers tell the people the babies must all be napping in the cave space.
One of the adult elephants puts its trunk out at they never have before. I'm gasping it is so close and so beautiful. It's trunk is coming toward me! And I put my hand in the air to reach towards it back. I think it's going to be an E.T. type moment and the tip of it's trunk will touch the palm of my hand, but the tip of the trunk dips past my hand and the trunk wraps around my arm and lifts me into the air!
I'm on their side now and I can see that the babies are gone! The workers hustle me out, hitting the elephants with sticks to get by. They tell the crowd the babies must have been stolen by people from the city. If feels like they're lying.I run out into the street.
Then it's later and I'm running farther down the same street with my best guy friend and my lover (even though we didn't know him them he looks like he looked in pictures from then). In an alley way we run up some stair that just keep going, three or four stories of stairs. At the top there is a door with light around the edges. I open it and there is another. There are maybe seven door, all right togeter with light always coming through to make you feel like you're almost there. Then there is a gauze curtain instead of a door it is red, like burgundy, but a slightly bloodier shade of red. All the doors have been this color too, but not identical.
Through the curtain we can see a whole bunch of nuns on a platform and on stair that go down outside mirroring the ones behind us. Between in the nuns and curtin there is a woman in a broad rimmed hat standing with a little girl they look like they're dressed in 1940's clothes for church. I motion to E & J that we should just go. But as I turn my movement makes the curtain move. they're all coming after us. I feel like no one was supposed to see this. We try to close the doors behind us put they're all turned into door-sized pieces of red parchment with paste on the side toward the curtain like we had peeled them off. I'm trying to press them over, but there are always fingers tearing through from the other side.
We're running down the stairs, but when there are only ten or fifteen left I fall because I'm clumbsy. The fall is like being inside a wave except the sharp corner of each step. pain. pain. pain.
It's years later. There were never anymore live animal in the exibit area. SO I don't feel all heartbroken about their cramped captivity, but the taxidermy animals make my stomach roll. I'm buying something and the guy behind me is tapping my shoulder and saying, 'hey, you're that girl...' His voice is laughing meaness and as I'm turning I can see the wallet in his hand made of elephant-hide leather. I punch him right in the nose and walk out the door. No one is chasing me.
I don't know what this dream means, I had it in the morning between 5:23AM and 7:00AM on 6/24. The previous day I'd put an elephant photo on the wallpaper of a computer at work and answered a coworker that I love them when she asked. I do not have fear of nuns, but I am clumbsy, and taxidermy does make me uncomfortable. I have never punched anyone in the face.
