The Sentence

A Funny Dream of No Relevance to Serious Real-World Concerns

TRIGGER WARNINGS: being beaten with rods; etching of a guy calmly watching spikes being screwed into his knees

A couple of weeks ago I dreamt that I was to be subjected to the Medieval punishment of being beaten with rods, until two (2) of my limbs were broken. I have to tell you: in the dream, I was not looking forward to this. In fact I frankly dreaded it. I just did not want to have any of my bones broken at all. I imagined it would hurt.

It occurred to me that the ordeal might be more endurable if, instead of just passively acquiescing to my torture, I were to resist—to try to fight off my tormentors, gouge out their eyes or bite through their fingers as they bludgeoned me. I actually proposed this alternative to my captors, who more or less shrugged like, Sure, whatever. All the same to them. They probably figured it wouldn’t be much trouble to subdue a guy like me and break the requisite number of bones despite whatever feeble flailing I put up. My counterproposal accepted, I found that I wasn’t much looking forward to this scenario either. In fact I’d probably get even more badly injured by struggling than I would by just letting them administer the prescribed punishment. Maybe, I thought, the adrenaline would at least anesthetize me against the pain. The fact of the matter was, it just wasn’t a great situation.

Luckily, this punishment was never administered in the dream. On waking, I realized I’d escaped my sentence—Hah! I was of course tremendously relieved that I would not have to be beaten with rods after all, until gradually it sank in, as I recounted this dream to friends, that I was still in much the same predicament, with the same unhappy options.

“Torture of Joost Joosten, Veere, Zeeland, 1560,” Book 2, p. 283 of Martyr’s Mirror, etching by Jan Luyken, 1685.