In my last major dream, it was wartime. Rather, it was as though a war had passed, and I was the bodiless witness to the carnage. My attention focussed upon one poor man's bloody upper torso. His body had been ripped away from the waist down, and his eyes stared blankly into the void. He had a crewcut, and in portions of his facial skin, you could see the underlying skull. I could tell, from my astral vantage point, that he had begun to rot.  Suddenly a dog came along. It was a small dog, perhaps six inches tall, opne foot long. Brown patches splotched its fur. I do not know whether the patches were natural or the result of some other occurrence. At any rate, the dog too took an interest in the carcass, and grabbed the man by the arm, dragging him along to wherever it was going. The dog dragged this man over hills and rocks, through fields and lakes, through forests and mountains. As the dog did all this, little bits and pieces of the man kept falling off- he was being eroded away. Finally the dog came to rest with the man's remains, and I realized that they were laying at my feet.  I knelt down and examined the man. He had been nearly completely decomposed; he now had no chest, with the notable exception of a few jagged ribs. His skull was nearly intact, but now he had no eyes. Most of his skin had fallen away, only leaving a large sheet covering his back (which was unusual, since the dog had been dragging the man along his back- not his frontside!) The man's arm's (now skeletl) were intact. During this examination, I left my own body and became a witness to the scene. I think I was watching from the point of view of the dog, because I was low to the ground. This dream self said: "Wait, there's been a mistake. This man is not quite dead yet!"  Then I was watching the scene from above my own head. I saw blood pulsing within the skin of the skeletal form, and I began thinking to myself: "Oh god. This is going to be like one of those cheesy horror movies where the skeleton comes to life and strangles the guy." but that was not what happened. Down there, I pulled out a gun and tried to shoot the skeleton, but the shot did not harm it. Its jaw worked, and it reached for an antenna which was laying nearby.  It aimed the antenna at me, and it pulled an imaginary trigger. My head was suddenly filled with the wrenching noise of a telephone's ring, and suddenly, I understood what the skelton was trying to show me. It was illustrating for me that men are forced to be like machines in war. Further, when machines perform their duties, it is like getting a phone call; they (the machines) always involve people in some way. Conversely, when a man is killed it is as though he is receiving a phone call from the gods. The man always finds a way to involve one of them in his death. Hah!