Warning: A Dream, a Morbidish One

A woman, an elderly one, set herself on fire in my dreams. She sat down in front of some kind of courthouse--it was white and neoclassical, with the steps and the columns--and lit herself aflame. We who came upon the scene fell to our knees and screamed and cried, and eventually I could not bring my eyes to look.

She didn’t die though. When the flames petered out on her back, someone near me said, “Looks like it didn’t take this time.”

I wonder now if she was protesting something, the war, or some other politics, or if she was just wanting to die in a public way.

I also, in the dream, wondered if she could describe to me the feeling of having your body burned from the outside in, but I knew that kind of question had to wait.