School of the Hard Knocks

Dream: (2008)

In an asteroid colony, an autistic boy was being interrogated by two men and a woman in an office. The colony had broken off contact with civilization and fallen back to medieval ways, believing the boy was a devil. But they got no word out of him, and as they became more insistent, he got an attack of catatonia, rocking back and forth and muttering. They saw this as all the proof they needed, interpreting his catatonia as a demonic ritual.

The men said they should execute him by firing squad, not wanting to deal with the boy himself. The woman said sarcastically that it might be too traumatic an experience for the firing squad, and decided to do it herself. She took the boy to another room and gave him an injection, and the boy became limp.

Just as they thought the boy dead, however, the boy came to life again, transformed. Within seconds somehow his tormentors fell to the ground screaming. The boy, thinking its revenge fulfilled, lay down again for its eternal rest. But the woman had survived, and dropped her disguise to rise from the body as a winged demon. Intrigued, it took the boy’s corpse to its lair, where it bit its face to suck it dry. It left the drained body as a trophy in a corner. Just as it turned away from the body, even now the boy rose again to finish its revenge.

"You do not know me," the boy said. "You said that Jesus was the heart of love, and in his name you killed me. I, I am the heart of hatred." 

With that, the monster flew suddenly to the top of the cavern, and from his arms, lightning arced across the cavern. I paused the movie I was watching, but found that I could not turn off the screen. Panicking, I woke up.

Interpretation:

The office is a sketch “School of the Hard Knocks,” in which a teacher interrogating a pupil is about to strike him with a hammer. The woman is the worst teacher I ever had. The injection was the ADHD medicine, and my first dying is my first depression early in high school (which my psychologist blamed on the medicine). My revenge is my becoming home-schooled because of depression, and my second dying is my second depression early in university. The teacher was the teacher for the last grade of basic school, associated with the transition from home-schooling to university and symbolizing the transition into depression associated with both. The the autistic kid reminds me of Rain Man when asked why he didn’t win money at one point, so that the interrogation is not only an examination but also an extortion. The interrogation of an autistic kid for suspicion of being a devil is from the Falcon Tower by Erik Fosnes, which I associate with ostracism and suicide.