Dream: The Kidnapping

I’m at a bus terminal with someone of significant importance to me when they are kidnapped.  As I run after the kidnapper (a tall man in a dark trench coat), I’m intercepted by a pale, bald, hunched, sharp-toothed man wielding a knife.  He pounces on the kidnapper and slices open his forehead, then proceeds to suck his mind out through the cut.

I wake up.

When I fall back asleep, I’m again in the bus terminal.  I have the same sense of loss as when the person who was kidnapped was first gone.  There’s a phone with an attached keyring, each key corresponds to a particular RTD bus or department; to make a call, you put the key in the phone and turn it.  There’s a man fumbling with the phone, trying to make a call to the information department.  I decide to simply walk to the end of the building, since it’s right there.

I walk in, and head toward a desk in the middle of the room.  I tell the secretary that someone was kidnapped here at the station, and I was hoping they could help me.  A woman comes up from a cubical beyond and says that she has something to show me.  The video shows that there was no one with me.

She asks me to step on a scale, and suddenly there’s an x-ray machine in the room.  She starts taking dental x-rays while I wait for more footage.  Where before the room was somewhat sparsely filled, it’s now full of various equipment.

When the new footage arrives, it shows the man in the dark trench coat going outside the station, and being attacked by the bald guy.  Except, instead of sucking the brains out of the tall man, the tall man fends him off and runs away.  The bald guy looks right at the camera and I notice he’s wearing a green flannel, with a bit of white showing on the right cuff – just like the winter flannel I own.

I panic as my rational mind starts to break into the dream.  Could the bald man be me?  Have I become a hunched crazy guy that attacks random passers-by?  My dream starts to shift as the woman hands me a mirror and my face is old and my hair gone.  No, I took that flannel to the Goodwill a couple of weeks ago.  But this happened before I did that, so I was clearly trying to get rid of evidence that I attacked this man, because he kidnapped someone close to me.  But where was that person in the footage, did the kidnapping ever actually happen?  No, I’m alone.

I wake up.