The Medium is the Message

I haven't dreamed anything I could remember for a while now. But that changed last night. Instead of the regular weirdness that typicaly ensues when I close my eyes, I was inundated by ideas from a show that I watched earlier in the evening.

I suppose I am a sucker for punishment watching as long as I did; flipping back and forth through my three channel universe debating all the while if I should watch Diamonds are Forever. I decided to forgo the adventures of James Bond for another evening, opting instead for the documentary women who are sold into the sex trade. Sex Slaves.

A Russia-Canada co-production, the documentary tracks the multibillion-dollar trade in human trafficking in which young women are sent from the former Soviet Union to customers around the world. Hidden cameras and microphones are used as pimps move their product from eastern Europe to third-world brothels, in one case even to Canada where a young woman was supposed to work as an exotic dancer. Viewers are reminded that Canada's so-called stripper visas, now under review, have been aiding the trafficking. It is estimated some 600,000 women a year are lured, enslaved, raped and ultimately abandoned or murdered.
In one nail-biting sub-plot, a desperate husband agrees to wear a wire and go under cover to try and 'buy' his abducted wife back from a very dangerous Turkish pimp.
~
I am watching a truck drive away loaded with women. Suddenly the truck makes a sudden stop lurching the passengers forward, and as they resume their position a child's body bounces off the front bumper and hits the pavement like a rag doll. The truck lurches back into gear and carries on leaving the lifeless victim on the street much to the cries of the women on board.

The women are scared and tired and cramped in the truck. They are being moved to their next destination. Throughout this dream I am only a spectator. This opeing scene is too much for me to continue, and I wake up. I turn roll over, and adjust my pillows, and go back to sleep.

I resume dreaming. Much like the documentary the colours are drab shades. I dream of more women being rounded up, and it is taking on the charachteristics of past dreams where I am fleeing from an army, marching with hundreds of people to safety. I wake again.

I am caught in a pattern of sleep, dreaming and waking for the majority of my night. The dreams all quite similar. Flight or fight reactions are tunned to flight mode, and it is all about escaping captors.

Now that I have been awake for a while I'm slowly getting past yet another injustice imposed on the poor, imposed on women. As the street prostitutes make their way down to my end of 107, I can see why people move to the suburbs. It is a retreat into security, away from the grit, desolation and the disenfranchichised.

The land of milk and honey cannot escape the vile smell of sour milk.