Another dream post!
In an uncharacteristically vivid and narrative dream I had last night, I was a boy living in a poor village on the coast of Thailand (I guess it would have to be southern Thailand). The waters were notoriously devoid of fish and the village had no other real source of income, so most barely got by on what they had. However, there was one greedy, rich, and self-obsessed man who lived in a palace. He didn’t share anything he had and I didn’t know where he got his wealth from.
He had two daughters and one son, the latter of whom was my best friend. They all hated their father for not just being selfish with his possessions but also very controlling of them. Being a shameless egomaniac, the rich man had built a theater in his palace right along the coast, and had regular circus/feats-of-strength performances that he forced the family to participate in. The entire point of this was basically to bring more glory to himself. Although the villagers didn’t like him, the circuses were free and their only source of entertainment, so they attended.
As legend had it, the rich man had acquired some kind of power and he could only be killed 1) while performing and 2) by a well-dressed gentleman (yeah, I don’t know). Because this was common knowledge, the man was extremely paranoid and distrusted everyone, including his family, which is probably why he exerted so much control over them. And with good reason - the son was in fact secretly planning to end to his father’s life and restore balance to the village. The two daughters, my friend, and I devised a plan where the son was going to kill him while performing together on the highwire. When the time came, the son decided he couldn’t do it, so I took his place by dressing as him and going out on the highwire. I stabbed the rich man through the heart while he was performing. I actually don’t remember that part very well, except that he didn’t try to stop me.
The plan was share to the wealth with the rest of the village and end these selfish practices. But almost immediately after the killing, my friend started to have a change of heart. As head of the household, he inherited the palace and the power started going to his head. All three of the children descended into decadence and selfishness. In fact, even before I killed the father, the two daughters went off to sleep with their boyfriends (which he had forbade them to do).
My friend and I had a fierce disagreement that night, and it ended with me leaving and telling him, “I’ll be back one day and I’m going to kill you.”
And one day I did come back and infiltrated the palace, but he was ready for me. We had a long fight; me with a double-sided sword and him with tiny needle-like daggers that he would stick in me whenever he found an unprotected spot. I retreated from the fight and went down a staircase to the main level of the palace, where candles lit the entryway. I knew that if I used the candles to set the lush curtains ablaze, the palace would go up and he would have no way out. However, the other innocent people in the house would also burn to death. While I was deliberating, he came back down and stuck me in the wrist with a knife. I pulled it out and used it against him, pinning his two hands together against his body so he couldn’t move them. I did something similar to his guard.
So there I was, holding my double-sided sword against their throats, one on each side of me. My friend seemed to have accepted his fate just as his father did. But just as I was about to slit his throat, there was a commotion outside the palace. Villagers came running in from the streets shouting about an abundance of exotic fish and crabs that had just been caught off the shore. They were overjoyed, and shouting about how they would all be able to live well, and thus my friend’s selfish wealth-hording no longer posed a threat to the well-being of the others. There was so much fish, they were flopping in the streets and even started pouring in through the doors.
I was happy that I didn’t have to kill my friend. And, this seemed to break the control that wealth had over my friend. The dream ended with everyone happily dining together in the palace.
As if TV product pusher