Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep

Last night I had a Law Nightmare. It was probably also a Death Nightmare. A former client, someone I never should have met but I did, and became his rock and his salvation, given that he had not the least idea how to live in this particular world. If whatever it was couldn't be accomplished by shouting or pouting or desperate acts of self-mutilation, he was lost. Dutifully, and despite his inability to ever come up with any money, I kept trying to represent what he told me his interests were. Such as taking his tiny daughters away from their drug-addled Mom and keeping them safe in his stinky little dog-filled house in a neighborhood where no female could venture outside without a male protector. And then, of course, he'd add a woman to the mix: someone from the neighborhood who lived on SSI and had a weakness for kinky sex and marijuana or someone who came to the door selling candy bars for a high school charity and was perfectly happy to settle in with takeout from McDonalds and a lot of hashish.

The tiny girls got bigger, started school, had learning problems, acted out. What else could be expected? The trick was to keep the matter out of the hands of CPS, to keep the family in Family Court, thus out of the juvenile justice/dependency system. When one of the no-longer-tinys told some school person she was being sexually victimized by her dear old Dad, it was no longer possible to keep the social workers at bay. Nor, I must say, did I want to. So I passed the caveman on to my office mate, a fighter, and advocate and much more familiar than I with the perils of the juvenile courts.

In my dream, Caveman had decided I had mishandled his matter and was determined to have justice, no matter how long it took to get there. He needed all his files and I found him looting my denuded office, searching for files I had long since shredded. And suddenly my old office mate, my dear dead friend, stalks in sporting a chic blonde bob and a sneer for me. She's going to represent him in whatever action will bring me to my knees! She won't look at me or talk to me, just stomps around looking stylish and forbidding. And I wake up, with my heart going hundreds of miles an hour and no idea why these two want to team up for anything, let alone inhabit my dream life.

I'm not sure I want to know what it means.