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Dream Journal: Tragedy in Cambodia (March 12, 2008)

Our family was on one our epic, international vacations when we took a deviation from the rest of the group and visited an area near Cambodia, famous for its habitation by Quakers and talking animals.

Upon leaving the Cambodian airport, we noticed that there were no cars to be found; we were force to walk everywhere. None of the guide books said anything about that! We walked for miles and miles, crossing cross-walks that were the length of football fields. The trick was to make it across before the walking man disappeared. In Cambodia, the traffic [from trains] just plow through intersections as soon as the red hand begins flashing. This wasn't as distressing as it was for the small children with us as it was for the older vacationers, like BG.

Once we made it out of the city, we began to see endless fields of swampy farm areas. There was just a single road that passed along the edge of the fields. At a certain point on the road, the pavement turned to gravel and the gravel turned to tree-stumps protruding out of the swamp like stepping stones. Circus cages then started lining the near side of the road. Inside some of these cages we found malnutritioned-looking animals with droopy frowns on their faces. I can't remember which animals we saw but I do distinctly remember hearing outbursts from human voices coming from some cages not being displayed just off the road. The farther we traveled along the "road", the more desperate we got to get out of there. We turned around when we reached an animal that was straight-up insane. (I think it was a lion.) It ranted about it was about to pounce on each of us [it thought we were its prey] in the tall grasses of the African savanna and gnaw all day on our disemboweled corpses. Then it proceeded to make chomping and slurping sounds. Unappreciated and unloved, I suppose the lion had created a reality for itself in which it could be happy.

As we leaped from log to log, we couldn't help but notice the creepy-looking "Quakers" were seemed to be observing US from the fields. Unnerved be each additional glance, we moved faster and faster along the path. I started imagining that these Quakers weren't Quakers at all but undead guardians of some terrible secret that we had stumbled upon by mistake and now had to die for witnessing. Our demise had already been planned; they were just tiring us out so that when they did choose to strike we would already be tired...

(...I don't really remember what happened next. All I know is that we were almost run over by a few trains on our way to the airport we never reached. I think my dream went black and I paused the action for a commercial break.)

The next thing I remember was a deep voice against a dark backdrop, like I was watching a cliffhanger for the TV show Lost, "In the next episode, we do not lose ONE, TWO, or THREE main characters, BUT FOUR!"


When my eyes open, I am on the Cambodian beach at night. In front of me, I see four dead bodies of fellow travelers; one male and 3 females--all adults. It was up to me now to solve the mystery shrouding these senseless deaths. [This is were it gets a little gruesome.] The first thing I do is preform an autopsy on the male. I use my long knife to open his neck like a can of Campbell's soup. Once I separated his head from the rest of his body, the events from the previous 6 hours of the victims lives flashed before my mind's eye in unsequentially bursts like it would at the end of an Agatha Christie novel.

The victims were selected by a fellow traveler from Phoenix (who happened to be psychotic) at random. She chose the first four unsuspecting victims for death like any pick-pocket would. She contracted local Quakers to offer them a free sight-seeing tour of some local islands out in the Pacific Ocean. The only condition was that they couldn't tell anyone about it because they said the rest of us would be jealous and they didn't have room for all of us. (The travelers were hustled. Their commonsense was blinded by their greed.)

She was prosecuted in Cambodia with no extradition. As she was tortured to death by a cane, it was reported that she explained with a tear in her eye that she was not a murderer--she wouldn't hurt anyone! She was a social benefactor. She justified her psychotic murders because she had heard somewhere while researching the trip that an airline reimbursed a planeful of similar tourists because they actually witnessed a death of one of their fellow passangers.

In the end, all the travelers in our group were compensated for our traveling expenses by the due to the emotional trauma we endured.

Comments

  1. Dream! Nightmare more like. Glad you're awake. When will you post about your Seuss party? I'm dying to know what you did and who you dressed as . and you who took along!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Seriously! That was gruesome. Have you been reading a little "Heart of Darkness" lately or something? I wonder if my post about Cambodia influenced you at all.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Too many dark movies for you! Time to start watching the musicals again and fill your mind with non-violent happy thoughts!
    What I wonder about is how the Quakers come in? Did you recently watch Witness or a similar movie with Amish or Quaker-like people?

    ReplyDelete

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