Ordinary David and His Ordinary Dream
I've got a lot of giraffe content in me. Might take more than a few stories to let it out. This week, it's a short one. Enjoy :)
David got into his rusted 2003 Toyota and stuck the key into the ignition. The car sputtered to life. In the back seat sat a near-empty backpack. It was filled with one bottle of his sister’s pepper spray and a hammer. David signaled left, zipped up his black sweatshirt and drove off.
David was an ordinary man with an ordinary job, who had many extraordinary dreams. Not the kind that you're thinking of; not dreams to see the world or make a million dollars. He had many dreams at night. He dreamed of fantastical creatures, mythical gods, and broken characters. His dreams took him to places he never thought he could live while he was actually alive. His dreams were the most frustrating thing about his ordinary life. David didn’t like that his wildest experiences happened confined beneath his gray blanket.
Until one day, David came home from his ordinary job, went into his ordinary bed, and had, for the very first time, a seemingly ordinary dream. He was in a zoo and locked in a cage. It was 4am, or 2am, or maybe midnight. He didn’t know, but it was dark and no one was around. There were no stars, because the zoo was close to the city, and there are no stars in the cities these days. David looked across the the brown and wet grass that had been stamped on many, many times, and saw he wasn’t alone. Deep in the shadow, beneath a bare tree, stood a giraffe.
In his dream, the giraffe started speaking to him. With a low, sweet growl, the giraffe said “let me out, let me out, let me out”. The giraffe kept repeating it over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again, until, in his frenzy, David woke up.
Believe it or not, this was an ordinary dream, because David’s usual dreams took him to places of three horned animals (not real animals), and lava lands (not grasslands). Yet here was a dream where David felt like he could understand the message. Maybe, David could even fulfill the experience in real life.
Maybe David was sick of his ordinary job, with ordinary people, and a ordinary house, which is why now, he was in his car, with a backpack, and dark clothes, and a hammer, and he was on his way to the local zoo. It was 12am. Mind you, David never cared about animals. He didn't even have a pet fish, didn't smile when he saw cute puppy, and never understood why people connected to anything but humans. But David decided that he understood what the giraffe wanted: he wanted to be let out. He was going to let it out.
David drove up to the zoo. The night guard sat snoring at the gate. David watched him for a bit, kept watching him and then turned his car off. David waited until he thought he was ready to go, break into the zoo and let out the giraffes. As he kept watching the guard, David kept feeling how ordinary he was. He felt so ordinary that at some point, maybe around 4am or so, he turned the car back on, made a u-turn in the zoo parking lot, and went home. He went back to his ordinary house, to his ordinary bed, and fell asleep to extraordinary dreams.