Don't read this if you have a weak stomach.
Bury your dead.
Stark hospital room. Filthy. Tarnished metal. Torn sheets. Soiled sheets. Soiled walls. Bodies lying in the filthy beds, covered with sores, blood and worse. None of them are moving. No one is attending to them.
Bury your dead.
I start running to get out of the hospital room, but the room just keeps getting longer. More beds. More bodies. More filth. I can smell the bodies rotting. An arm falls off one body and onto the floor. A head rolls off another and breaks open on the floor. Maggots come out in a flood.
BURY YOUR DEAD.
The voice is getting louder. A man's voice. As it gets louder he gets angrier, more frustrated. There is music now. The music is beautiful, contrasting with the scene of the hospital room, which I cannot seem to escape no matter what direction I run or walk in. More body parts fall to the floor. The smell gets worse. More blood. More rot. More bugs. And then the rats start teeming into the room and attacking the body parts hungrily.
BURY YOUR DEAD!
I have no idea what to do. Bury them where? And then an image. A beautiful young woman. She is smiling this impish grin. The image flashes on and off, and my vision switches back and forth between the horrors of this room and the vision of this beautiful woman.
Your connecting flight.
This time, a woman's voice. One I know.
I fall to my knees beside one of the bodies. It sits up for a moment, turns and looks at me. It is badly decomposed and the torso falls apart at the waist. The top half of the body falls next to it. I remain on my knees, frozen, staring at this half a corpse rotting next to me as the maggots and the rats have at it. I look up and call out loudly for help. "WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO?"
Bury your dead.
The voice is calm again as it was at the beginning.
There is only the one bed now, and the one broken corpse. The unending room has been replaced by one with a single bed, and while the room is still dirty and unkempt, it is not as disgusting as the room was before. There are no maggots and rats. The dead body is intact, in the bed, covered by a sheet.
Bury your dead.
The image of the beautiful woman with the impish grin flashes again, like a flashing yellow light late in the night on a small town road. When it stops flashing and disappears, I find myself on my knees in the middle of this small town road. In the center of the intersection. There is a funeral, in the middle of the night. Everyone has dark hoods pulled over their heads, dark robes, and they are humming. There are no cars aside from hearses, and there is a line of hearses stretching all the way down the road. No one seems to notice.
A song is playing. I recognize it, the song is very familiar, but can't place it in the dream. Later, when I am awake, I will comb through all my music trying to find it. It is Bob Dylan, "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again." I remain on my knees in the intersection watching the funeral in the graveyard on the corner.
Bury your dead.
I stand up and find myself standing instantly at the side of the burial, looking down at the casket in the ground. The robed, hooded mourners all turn to me and wait silently. There is a single black rose in my hand. I toss it into the grave. The mourners nod and I sense I am dismissed.
The image of the beautiful woman with the impish grin appears again.
Your connecting flight is in transit.
It begins again.
I look up and the sky has turned to gold. There is a feeling of peace and I wake up.
This dream repeated fairly regularly and with pretty much the same context for nearly two weeks, contributing to some severe insomnia. | 
