A Very Weird and Strangely Moving Dream

In my dreams last night I was walking around a mall in a wealthy suburb of New York (Scarsdale, I think) and I ran into a guy I haven’t seen in years—once a close friend of mine, but a person so remote and oddly autonomous in his thinking that “friend” isn’t really the right word. “Influence” might be more accurate. In the mall of my dream, I ran into him, walking around a men’s clothing department. I was deeply moved by the shock of recognition: this person has always had an inexplicably profound effect on me. I can only compare it to the charismatic pull of a David Koresh (or perhaps a less sinister, but similarly magnetic personality).

We sat down on a bench and I asked him how he was. He told me that he was living in France (entirely possible for this guy) and that he had joined an anti-American terrorist organization (also not beyond the limits of imagination, for said friend). He had done some illegal things with this group, for which he was being pursued. He began crying as he told me this, and I was moved to a profound, piercing kind of pity. I saw this friend as a deeply troubled, perhaps mentally disturbed person who had always needed help and had instead received only baffled admiration from his so-called “friends,” like me.