More on gun dreams
October 24, 2007 – 3:27 pmI have a friend who told me once that ever since he got his concealed pistol license, he’s been plagued by dreams of having to defend his life. When he told me that, I thought it was rather odd that I wasn’t in the same position.
For years, I’ve had dreams that circulate around my daily activities. For example, when I worked at Taco Bell as a teenager, I would routinely spend my nights in fitful sleep as my dreams forced me to make taco after taco on some unending assembly line. Shortly after I got my drivers license, my nights became interrupted by dreams of driving my car down some unknown highway and needing to slam on my brakes to avoid an accident. I’d wake, sitting upright in bed, slamming my foot into the end of my bed. Other times, I would wake with my arms flailing, desperately trying to find a steering wheel.
A couple days ago, I finally had a gun dream. Like any good gun owner, I constantly obsess over the 4 rules. I believe that my recent realization that pointing the muzzle downward in a 3rd floor apartment no longer constitutes as “safe” might have spurred this dream on. In it, I was attempting to clear the chamber of my Kel Tec P11 but was doing it in a rather strange way. As you may know, the P11 has a DAO trigger with a shrouded hammer but in dream land, my 1911 and my P11 merged and the P11 magically had a 1911 hammer. As I cocked the hammer, my finger slid onto the suddenly hair trigger and fired the gun. Even in my dream, I was incredibly frightened and angry with myself but I was shocked to find that it had not fired. I quickly racked the slide back to reveal that the 9mm Luger round had been inserted backwards and the firing pin had harmlessly fallen onto the bullet nose.
As impossible as this scenario may have been, I awoke with a bit of paranoia about me. I’m always very careful with my firearm handling and I know that a little reminder is always good, but I sure don’t want to have that dream anymore!