Last night, I first had a weird dream that involved an elephant and her handler who worked in the forest, digging up old bones. I accompanied them, and they found a site with many skulls, but no other bones. All of them had holes from a gunshot or a sharp object on the top of them. Some of them were fully intact. Others had only their lower half intact, while the upper half had somehow "melted" into transparent, glass-like substance and filled up the lower half. The handler said, "It's the ice", and pointed at the chunks of permafrost that the elephant had just broken up.

In the second, less interesting, dream, I was still living in Kävlinge, and came back from university to find my apartment door broken up. Burglars had stolen my stereo and most of my CD's and also my cassettes (!). Not my computers, though. They'd also taken my couple of DVD's and the CD's where I've stored photographs and scanlated comics.

I figured I'd call the police, and didn't touch anything, in case there would happen to be fingerprints or something. I locked the door as well as I could and closed the kitchen windows, but everytime I checked they were open again ... Then I remembered that I had a storage room (only in the dream, not for real), accessible from the living room, and checked it. It was completely empty, although I couldn't remember having anything but boxes of clothes in there. Well, it wasn't so much the loss of material possessions that bothered me (none of my comics or notebooks were missing, thank dog), but that someone had been in my home and dug through my things.

In my area there was a local hobo (also only in this dream), whom I'd made friends with a bit. I saw him outside my window and chatted a bit with him, and he said he might know who it was - a guy who wanted to impress his many girlfriends (perhaps a bit influenced by the manga Ciguatera I read yesterday night?). In the dream, it somehow made sense to me, as all my pretty clothes and "girly" CD's (I don't have any "girly" CD's, actually!) had been stolen ... And I could somehow understand the motives of the burglar and thought I shouldn't feel any resentment towards him anymore.

But the atmosphere was still bad. I felt frustrated anger at the fact that someone had done me wrong, but I was "supposed to" understand and forgive. I knew I'd never get my things back, even if the police arrested him, and he would never ask for forgiveness, because to him, his actions were fully justified. And I couldn't do anything about it, because I could understand him.

I woke up at half past six, and was extremely relieved when I realised that I wasn't living in Kävlinge anymore, and that no one had broken into my apartment. It had been the kind of dream where you don't know that it's a dream.

The dream was a bit inspired, I think, by the situation that occurred when the guy who rented my Kävlinge apartment while I was doing my internship last year stopped paying the rent and apparently disappeared. I went to check my apartment, and there really wasn't anyone there, and a neighbour who had taken care of the plants didn't know anything about when he might return, either.
I stayed in the apartment, cleaned up (the place was filthier than it had ever been before, even when I had been deeply depressed and didn't clean for months), and stowed his things in boxes, after sending him E-mails, asking him to come get them or send me money so I could send them to him. Since he still had the keys, I felt a bit insecure there. Following my intuition, I mounted metal loops on the door and the doorframe, and tied them firmly with a piece of string.
Then, one night, around midnight, as I was already in bed, I woke up when I heard someone opening the lock of my front door. This someone tried to pull the door open, but with my additional "string lock", it wasn't possible. I was still half asleep, so I wasn't thinking very clearly - I just listened intently with my heart beating fast, and didn't move. Then I heard steps walking away, and went to check the lock. It had really been opened. I soon had my landlord change my lock, and then, I could finally feel at ease again ...
Packing up his things, I found out that my former tenant had serious money problems, so I wasn't that angry with him about the rent or anything - I just wished he'd been able to be honest about it. Then everything would have been okay, and stupid situations like this nightly visit would never have happened.

Anyway, this morning, after waking up at 6:30, I couldn't sleep anymore. Instead, I kept involuntarily thinking about all the things I've ever done wrong - not in the sense of doing someone else wrong (either I'm ignorant of the situations where I've done that, or I've really been able to avoid it), but in the sense of not having handled a situation right.

Quite many of those have been situations where someone has done me wrong or hurt me, but I've ignored it or just not said anything, because I could, in a way, understand why they were doing it (although it was certainly petty and stupid), and thought it was somehow "below me" to care about it. (In the sense of "if you get angry/start crying/kill her, you lose".) I guess I wasn't always that strong - I still cared, and they managed to hurt me.

I've been thinking a bit lately about whether you should speak up and give lip when total strangers behave in a rude way. People do that quite often here, but it's unusual in Sweden (there, people just ignore it, or stare but don't say anything).

Should people just feel sorry for others, that they are so petty and stupid and don't know how to behave?
Or is it the duty of fellow citizens to "help" each other "improve"?

There should be a way to do it in an encouraging and constructive way ... Maybe to laugh a bit, and ask in friendly disbelief, "But what are you doing?", as if it wasn't actually understandable why they would behave like that.

Damn, I wish I was still young and naïve, not able to understand why people often behave in "bad" ways.