This is my dream, but it isn't my story, exactly. It's someone else's script. I don't know who. All I know is, I was reading this script in a dream, and the introduction said:

"I gave up on human characters; I think people are out of their depth, overwhelmed by the modern world. The only metaphor that works any more is to show them as animals lost in a world they can't understand."

The script, whoever wrote it, comes alive as I read it. Here it is.

A young fawn named Fawn, barely old enough to talk, lives on a rented farm with her single mom, a gorilla.

That must have been some marriage.

One day, Fawn goes along with her mother to see Mom at work.

Mom's job is robbing banks.

She pulls this one off, with Fawn watching big-eyed and scared, but not crying out or distracting her mom. She knows how to be a good fawn. Don't attract predators.

They make it home to the farm with a bag of cash. Enough for months.

Swollen with pride at a job well done, Gorilla Mom grows even bigger, into a sort of hipporillatomus. She rests on the porch after all this uncharacteristic exertion.

Little Fawn hears something faint but scary off in the distance, and whimpers "...'ama!" But her mom is on Page 263 of a steamy paperback--she's in a boardroom high in the Transamerica Tower, where Lance and Emily are finally, finally, FINALLY tearing off their power suits and doin' the two-back beastie. No way is she getting up till she's finished this chapter!

So poor Fawn hoofs it nervously all alone through the brush to the back fence to look.

Cops! Coming to investigate. Fawn crouches, praying her spots will hide her, and listens. They're looking for the gorilla witnessed at the bank, not a hippopotamus--and by now, Mom, swollen-satisfied, is a full-on hippo.

Still, the cops brought two bloodhounds to sniff for the thief; they won't care about size or shape. And Mom smells like Mom, mai-tais or not.

A school bus pulls up and a young girl gets off. She's the farm's owner. When she sees the cops, she too hides in the brush and sneaks up to listen in.

The cops are arguing. Which trail to set their dogs on? "Wait," she thinks, "isn't that the dogs' job?" But they argue on and on, reining in the hounds.

And so Fawn's mom is saved! By the prayers of her daughter and landlady? Or by government ego.

Meanwhile, out on the back deck, unaware, Mom the hippo rests in a deck chair reading her hot bestseller. Big cool stylish shades, acres of sun-lotioned skin, a drink with a parasol, and soft porn. What more could a hippo want? The frame sags under her weight; broken lounge chairs litter the deck... she turns the page and sips.

Ahhhh. Another job well done!

YEARS LATER

I still don't know quite what to make of this one. As a shy creature, I identify readily with Fawn. My parents were unobservant, off in their own world(s), and I was lonely, perhaps neglected or even subtly endangered--but not on this scale!

So is the bank-robbin' hippo me, too?

It's taken me a long time to see, but... the best fit is neither me nor my mom, but how my snobby, well-off grandma treated her daughter. My mom grew up a blatantly neglected girl--wandering brushy hills alone.

Even that's a so-so fit. My grandparents were neglectful & sexist, but not criminal--right?

As I illustrated this I couldn't help picturing Fawn a few years later, as she starts to question their peculiar lifestyle... first the ethics of robbing banks, but later, in therapy maybe, the effects on Fawn herself.

Perhaps the worst: isolation, due to transience. Soon as suspicions build up in one county, Mom moves you on to a new identity elsewhere. Fawn, of course, pays the social price--always the new fawn in school. Hard to make friends, and you can't tell 'em the truth about your family business, and it's unsafe to bring 'em home... and then you leave and never see them again.

This may be the real point of the dream. I tend to take it for granted, but that was my school experience. Up until high school I rarely went a year (never more than two) before I had to skip a grade or change schools entirely. Goodbye friends--if any!

Usually none. As a severely gifted kid in conformist suburban schools, and as a shaman having psychic dreams, I constantly had to hide my real nature, perceptions, opinions and interests. When I did get noticed, I got viciously bullied. Only after a broken rib did my parents act--not to sue the school, or at least to pull me from it, but to make me see a psychiatrist... since I must be provoking the attacks. Not the bullies' parents deflecting blame from their kids to me. My own parents.

The therapist was a pedophile--he later died in prison for molesting dozens of his underage clients. I mistrusted him from day one, and played a wary waiting game with him, steering the conversation away from sex, playing stupid one minute and precocious the next, for three wretched years... a deer freezing to hide in plain sight... under a predator's gaze.

Like Fawn, I learned how to hide. I needed to.

Anyway, my dreams didn't whine about my clueless caretakers--just pointed out their neglect & child endangerment arose from earlier neglect! And laughed at the whole pathetic farce.

But they didn't laugh at Fawn.

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