Dream

Fighting with Flails

This was a long one. I don't remember how it starts, so we pick up in the middle, where I do remember.

Thad and I are walking across a college campus. We stop at a 'Starbucks' where we sit in a small booth, talking, for a bit. It's a bit warm in there so I take off my sweatshirt. We leave there and continue on our way. At some point I realize I left my sweatshirt, so we head back to retrieve it. When we get there I realize we went to the wrong 'Starbucks'.  They only have two booths and they are both big enough for five or six people. Straightened out, we head to the correct 'Starbucks'. Our path takes through a big knot of parked cars. The space between the first two cars is kind of narrow so I gesture for Thad to go ahead. He darts ahead and disappears. I make my way through the knot of cars but when I come out the other side Thad is nowhere to be seen. Oh, here he comes, dragging a big heavy chain. It's much thicker than a log chain, more like an anchor chain with links that are four to six inches long. It's a long chain, too, must be at least 50 feet of it. And on the end of it is a girl. A young woman, really. She is very dirty, bedraggled and attached to the chain. She's not talking. Now here comes a man, maybe 30 years old, dirty, bedraggled much like the girl, wearing dirty, ragged, bulky, multicolored overcoat, but not attached to a chain, walking with purpose and talking to us, though I don't remember actually hearing him. Maybe he's talking to Thad, who has hold of the chain. They talk for a bit and then he wanders off. I'm wondering WTF, then I see Thad rummaging in a pile broken lumber and I wonder what he's doing. Then I turn around and look to see what the other man is doing and he is also rummaging in a pile of broken lumber. This doesn't look good, so I start rummaging myself. I'm looking for something I can use for a club. I find a piece of wood roughly two or three inches across and eight feet long. It looks like it was split from a tree, it has no smooth surfaces. It's also been broken in the middle. I pick it up and give it a couple of swings trying to break it in half, but it doesn't want to break. The two haves are still connected with a bunch of flexible strands. Well, this will just have to do. So I carry it over to where the other guy is still rummaging, wind up my flail and give him a good solid whack in the head. The second blow is a complete miss and next two or three hit him in the body. So ends the dream.

Now that I'm awake I realize while you might actually encounter a situation like this in some of the crazier parts of our country, attacking the 'slave owner' might not be the best solution. For all we know, the woman could be the guy's mentally ill sister and he keeps her chained up so she doesn't run amuck and start attacking people. Freeing the woman might be a good thing, but given the lack of community support for the mentally ill, turning her over to the police might just make her situation worse. In a case like that, you might very well be obligated to care for her. Fine and dandy if you have the resources, but who can withstand an endless drain? 

In real life, Thad was a very smart guy I knew back in Granville, Ohio. He had very definite ideas about right and wrong, so I can see him doing this. I put 'Starbucks' in quotes because the coffeeshops we stopped in had all the features of a Starbucks, but the name never appeared.