The Gangster Couple - a dream about my ancestors?

The Gangster Couple - a dream about my ancestors?

I had a strong sense during this dream, that I was meeting some of my ancestors, this sense was present throughout. 

Its a different era in the dream, cars and clothes look older though sometimes they mix up with something from the present.

There is a man and a woman. He is a gangster, a big gangster, constantly on the run, though the authorities are catching up with him. There is a sense of options closing down throughout the dream. The woman involved with him is not a gangster, but by association she has become wrapped up in this environment of crime and fear.

I watch them both, they are frozen and rigid in their bodies, sometimes they walk comically a bit like zombies from a corny zombie apocalypse film. There is a sense that they are greatly suffering. There is a police presence throughout gradually moving closer and closer. There are many stories of evasion and near misses. This all goes on for a long time though I can only recall a few fragments:

He has been captured and is with the police. He is given leave to go visit his elderly parents, they are in a mobile home, on a site like the Romany one locally to me at the edge of the marshes. He tells the police "give use some space, this is all about my parents, its all for them" and the police relax their guard a little empathising with him.

But as soon as the police disappear, a dark blue van appears. He is rolled into a carpet, slung over a mans shoulder, carried and put into the back of the van. The van move slowly out of the trailer park and begins to climb up a hill. They have an old fashioned police radio and are listening to the police. They have noticed already that he has gone and the gangsters driving the van tense a little ...

But then the police say "alert we are looking for a white transit van" - completely different to the small blue old fashioned van (maybe like an old butchers van?) they are driving. The gangsters laugh, they have clearly bribed someone in the police to lie.

Later I see the woman and the gangster standing side by side again. It is so painful to see, their love so pure on the one hand, so fated on the other.

Finally - later - I am there as myself in the dream (I have been more like a witnessing presence till now). I am walking around a prison, it becomes clear that my relative did eventually get caught and spent his life in an institution.

He is now dead, but there are people talking to me. They tell me that he went into prison, but there he started a whole new life that was actually very healing for him. So it felt like the end when the one thing he feared happened - he was caught. But actually it was a whole new beginning for him.

I was told he got involved in a therapeutic programme which included breathwork (a modality I am training in) and that he actually found a great deal of peace and meaning in this, and in helping others.

I feel happy to know that he finally found peace.

trapped pregnant woman

There is a pregnant woman in a squalid flat, all dark as if the windows are boarded up.

I understand that she is captive, has been held there by her captor for some time. She gets up off the bed quietly and starts to move around the flat. She moves as if she believes she is tethered at the ankle by a chain, only when I look at the place I expect the chain to be trailing along behind her, there is nothing.

There are I believe camera's the 'he' has set up on the ceiling - but are they working though?

She moves around the flat looking for things - a knife? A weapon? An exit...?

She heads towards a room and in typical horror movie fashion she is moving towards a room where we (the audience) know that something terrible happened before: we are all screaming "No, don't go that way...!" but of course she does not hear.


She enters the room and I hold my breath. It is even darker, even more squalid in here and the space reeks of a crime. She looks to the end of the room and there are thick floral curtains full length curtains, a patio window maybe...?

She moves quickly towards them, with a dramatic gesture pushes them open. We (the audience) are now ahead of her and see her face close up looking down in horror for several seconds: 'what has she seen' we wonder!? Is it perhaps the 'last victim' - a corpse all mangled and rotting?

Next the camera pans back and pregnant lady is standing...

on the edge of a cliff. It is a dramatic and beautiful scene, maybe Cornish - high cliffs, blue sky.

Silently she topples forward off the edge of the cliff to her freedom.

(strangely I do not get the impression that she crashes on the beach or the cliff face, in fact I suspect there may have been a big wooden double bed with white cotton sheets suspended in mid air and that after her fall, she in fact found herself waking up, as if from a bad dream, in this beautiful bed?)

The cresta run

I am at an art event watching a film made by an artist of a cresta-run (the winter sport where people propel themselves at very fast speeds down a tunnel of ice in a bullet shaped vehicle) - she has mounted a camera on the front of the vehicle.

She sets off at a steady pace, but quickly builds up, faster and faster...

We now see her from overhead (and I realize it is ME) and the containing tunnel of ice has disappeared, she is careering out of control on open mountainside with little control of her direction.

She approaches a sheer scree face (one might say a cliff!) coming at it horizontally from the snow field above. The momentum of her speed takes her perilously across the scree face and it seems miraculous that she does not just fly off into the air.

Just as she arrives at the other side of the scree onto safer ground, we see an avalanche behind her and as she looks back, she knows that she crossed just in time to avoid the crushing ice, rocks and snow.

I look at her / me and think "wow, how spectacular, what a brave feat!" but in the back of my mind a voice also nags "but is it really? Is it not just foolhardy? She seems a brave adventurer, but I am not so sure about the core motivation of her activity, whether it is really sound...?"

Later on I am looking at a photo of her on a living room wall; next to it is the photo of a handsome man. The pictures are both kept in beautiful silver frames and each has a swirling motif rather like a shell.

I understand that he/me/she/they are married and very happy, they radiate contentment and bliss beyond the silver frames and there is something deeply beautiful about this.

A massacre

I see a group of men in the khaki, brown, beige clothes of the army.

They are all bound, legs and knees bent, hands behind back and with black bags on their heads. They are terrified, their fear is so palpable, they are in a cart being taken through a city.

They are unloaded from the cart in a central square and their captors now visible move away leaving them in a terrified huddle, they start to scream and shake sensing that the end is near. The captors begin to shoot - at body and limbs - and they fall over twitching and kicking against their bindings, the scene is horrific.

An officer (it is now clearly a Nazi officer and I notice that several of the soldiers are black) goes round shooting each whether dead or still alive in the head. He comes to one unshot soldier helpless and bound, struggling on the floor.

The officer looks around him and then leans down to take the mask off the man below him.

Why does he want to uncover his face?

Is it to further frighten him?

Or is it to restore his victims humanity?

Is it the gesture of a torturer?

Or a penitent saviour?

Has he relented and found compassion?

The dream end poised in these questions,.

A victim, tyrant and 2 officers of the law

Two police officers (one male, one female) discover a horrible mutilated but still alive victim (female) and her oppressor who is male. I am aware of myself being all four characters in the dream simultaneously.

The victim has practically starved herself to death. She lies on a bed, her arms limp and immobile ("yes" the male officer says "it often happens that the muscle will detach itself from the body when not used"). Her two sides (her midriff area left and right) are like two deflated balloons hung from her boney ribcage. The male officer slightly lift one of the limp fleshy sacks and when he lets go it flops back down to the bed.

The tyrant who has little to say was going to put this poor specimen to use in a dishonourable way (employ her for shoplifting perhaps?) but law and order is restored with the arrival of the two officers and the tyrant is safely disarmed.

Blue Heron

I am overwhelmed by the arrival of a Blue Heron; its presence is majestic, awesome. This is one of those rare moments in dreams where I become suddenly sentient, aware that I am dreaming and of what I am dreaming.

I leave this conscious space and dream next that I am the keeper of a Jail. I have granted a pardon to two men and am releasing them from their cells. One is old, the other much younger - they both have the appearance of having lived life on the street.

As they are walking away, I have the sudden realisation that a potentially fatal theft has taken place. Instinctively I run to the older man and tear at his trouser leg. Attached to his calf (and bound in a most cruel and distressing way) is the blue heron.

At first I fear it is dead, but then it opens it's eye to look at me - I easily release it with a sense of relief that I spotted and averted this 'death' in the making.

Thieves

I am in an attic room with Steve (a friend and ex partner), hearing noises downstairs I go to investigate. I come across three burglars (they do not see me) and in the dark I try to muster an authoritative voice to command them to leave. I find though (once again) that I have no voice and so return to the attic.

I wake Steve and he descends from the loft to challenge them whilst I remain hidden. Some time later I come down, and find Steve chatting with them! He is reasoning, making friends, rationalizing their actions and forgiving their trespass.

I motion that it is time for them to leave and we all descend the stairs, looking around me I see lots of valuable antique furniture: sideboards, candlesticks and china. “We must be doing well”, I think to myself. I study the three robbers as they walk on ahead: there are two younger men (of no real note) and an older more distinguished gentleman with longish white hair, clothes of faded wealth.

I see that the thieves are drunk, they engage Steve in jovial banter but I feel paranoid that they will steal something on the way out. I try to see into their pockets and at the threshold spot that the old man is indeed carrying something. It is an abstract painting - blue, violet and green – small and slightly tatty (oil on canvass), a battered old sketch pad.

“STOP” I scream, for the first time finding my voice. “GIVE THAT BACK NOW”. The old man seems sheepish, like a small boy caught out - “Amidst all the rich furniture that you have, I didn’t think you would notice this one little thing missing” he says, and puts it down.

I grab hold of it knowing that something very important has been rescued, just in the nick of time.