It started out in a jail holding cell where I was being held anonymously with about eight to ten other "detainees" (i.e. no one else in the cell knew about the crimes I had been charged with). But then a police officer walked through the cell and, when he saw me, it was clear by the sudden hate and disgust on his face that he recognized me. But, instead of saying anything, he just continued through the cell and out into an adjoining room where the police "secured" their weapons before entering the jail.
Because of the way he looked at me, I decided to move to a slightly different position where I could defend myself better if he returned (it is normal for me to think "defensively" at all times when I am confined, especially with other prisoners --- I constantly evaluate potential threats and calculate my "position" accordingly --- it is just "old prison habits" to do so).
No sooner than I had sat back down in a better position, just a few feet away from where I had been, the wall adjoining the gun room where the policeman was suddenly exploded outward at head level exactly where I had just been sitting, making a fist-sized hole right where my head had been. A moment later, the policeman re-entered the room, ostensibly to see if anyone had been hurt. He had "accidentally" fired his gun into the other room (an "accidental discharge" as they call it in police parlance to make it sound like an ordinary hazard of their occupation). He was plainly surprised to see me sitting in a different location and unharmed.
The cop then addressed the entire cell and told everyone who I was and that it was "too bad" that I was not hit by the "accidental discharge". This, of course, suddenly brought the entire focus of everyone's attention onto me, and away from the "accident" that had just occurred. I knew instinctively that I had a few seconds to act before the information "sunk in" and the other men in the cell began formulating what they believed to be the expected behavior in such circumstances (namely, violence).
So, first, I moved to the center of the cell and sat on the floor. This was a counter-intuitive move designed to disarm potential violence by making myself appear as harmless and defenseless as possible. I could have moved to a more naturally defensible position, such as a corner, but I knew that doing so would have been expected and hence would have only encouraged an attack. I needed to show that I was not afraid (and I wasn't) in order to keep the men (animals after all, especially the cop) from becoming dangerously aroused by the smell of fear.
This worked for a moment. The other prisoners asked me if what the cop said was true. I told them yes, but I was only attacking children as men have throughout history in order to inflict as much pain as possible upon my enemy, "the System". I was trying to invoke the "common enemy"-argument in an attempt to gain at least some sympathy, perhaps enough to dissuade any actual violence. This also gave me a few seconds more (as the new information was being again processed) to try strengthening my argument with an admission of regret. But, as soon as I admitted that I had been wrong to attack children, I realized this was a mistake. I had misread one of the detainees sitting behind me (perhaps he had been abused himself as a child and my mere admission that I had "attacked children" was a trigger for him).
But, before the man behind me attacked, the cop moved in to spur on an attack by trying to kick me. I easily pushed his kicks aside, but they accomplished what the cop wanted and spurred the man behind me to move in. I felt him hit my shoulder several times from behind (incidentally, he hit me in the exact same place where I've been having a lot of unexplained pain in my shoulder in real life --- so maybe my dream was taking advantage of the real life pain?). At first, I thought he must be weak, and not a threat, because his blows were effectively painless. So I turned my attention to one of the other men who were preparing to attack. I stayed low in order to use the floor itself as a kind of "wall to put my back against" (i.e. if I tried to stand up, I would have to defend against hands and feet, instead of just one or the other).
The cop had stepped back, predictably, in order to let the other men do their thing (unlike their heroic antics of T.V.-fantasy-police, real cops are trained and lawfully required to wait for back-up, so he would have been perfectly justified for stepping back and letting the assault happen, even after he started it). I easily deflected the first few kicks that came at me from two different directions, but I noticed that they seemed to oddly defer to the man hitting me, he was stabbing me with a sharpened pencil (apparently aiming for my neck, but only managing to hit my shoulder as I instinctively "scrunched" my shoulders to protect my neck)!
I turned my attention to him, deflecting his next blow and somehow wrestling the pencil from him and putting it in his eye. While this happened (it took several seconds, which is a long time in any melee), a couple more men must have realized that they were equally "armed" (with pencils) and attacked also. The only blows that landed through were those from the two men trying to copy the cop by kicking me. But the kicks were landing on my legs and butt, safe to ignore. Instead, I focused on defending myself against any further stab wounds, and managed to wrest another pencil from one of the men, who now "unarmed" decided to back off (weak), and used it to stab the other "armed" man in his dominant shoulder. As soon as he realized that he was wounded, before he could even land a blow of his own, he also backed off.
That left the two "kickers" and one other man who had decided (correctly) that as long as I was free to move around, the attack was going nowhere. So he pounced on me, taking advantage of his greater size and weight, and tried his best to immobilize me so the "kickers" could get some work in. This made him (the "wrestler") the biggest "threat", so I used a simple high school wrestling "reversal" move on him, which put me in a good position to start stabbing him in the head with the pencil I still held. I knew I'd never penetrate the skull, but I didn't need to. I only needed to let him "see" his own blood streaming off his head and the "fight" was over (the "kickers" were only in it half-heartedly and not nearly enough to sustain the melee on their own).
I was relatively calm the entire time. I'm not sure if I'd be so calm in a similar situation for "real", but I like to think I would be (and some experiences I have had in "real life" seem to favor the possibility, like when I took down a drunk who was larger than me, using a wrestling move like the one I used in this dream, after he entered my apartment uninvited in Fargo, or the time I thwarted a rapist who grabbed me with clearly violent intentions in a park in Seattle; in these cases, and many others like them, I instinctively kept a clear head and acted with deliberate intention, just as I did in this dream).
In the dream, shortly after the melee ended, or at least the first round, the jail guards came in and began sorting out and tending to the wounded. And, since the three I stabbed were all injured worse than I was, they were tended to first. And, in the meantime, I heard the cop telling one of the guards about the "attack" (leaving out his role, of course), and I remember being concerned at this point that people (the "public) would be told only that another "child killer" was attacked in jail, and not the truth, that the "child killer" successfully defended himself against an attack. Instead, "the System" would make it seem that the attack occurred regardless of its best efforts to "protect the child killer", once more promoting the illusion of a functioning "justice system" where there is none. My own injuries seemed trivial compared to the lie I knew would be perpetrated as a result of what happened.
[J.D. February 8, 2017]
