Pleasant dreams.

The weekend's going by far too quickly, but it's been a good one so far. Got to see one of my all-time favorite bands (with a new cover of Maiden's "The Trooper," hell fuck yeah!) Friday night and hang out with some of my absolute favorite humans, and that always rules mightily. To top it off, driving home from that I must have seen 30 deer; whole herds of them were running through the neighborhood at 3:30 in the morning, like grey ghosts with glowing eyes. Freak-ay, but kinda cool, especially since I didn’t hit any of ‘em.

Plus, I found this very happy-making photo:



Goin' to hell for that, maybe, but totally worth it!

If that doesn't charm you, maybe this will:



And if you'd been hoping for a music post, here's Steve Earle's "Copperhead Road" just 'cuz I love the damn song even though country's far removed from my usual thing:



Anyway, it's October. Hallowed be thy ween! My existence centers around horror in all forms (except the actual killing of hitchhikers 'n' stuff, but, of course, if someone were into killing hitchhikers, that's exactly the kind of thing they'd say), so I think my blog posts all month should do the same thing. It's the reason for the season

"Run and hide when I'm on the streets
Your fears and your tears, I'll taunt you in your sleep
I just wanna give you the creeps
The creeps, the creeps, the creeps"
-Social Distortion

To kick the month off with maybe my weirdest (and longest) post ever, let's talk about... NIGHTMARES.

In most cases, I actually like nightmares. I'm fond of the dark, locked rooms of my subconscious, and in the past I've done some rather odd things to encourage them (short of drug use, but seeking bad dreams is the only thing that's ever even tempted me to experiment). I've slept with weird music or movies blaring (this actually works pretty well). I heard eating bananas before bed would give you weird dreams, so I tried that. I haven't yet encountered Welsh rarebit but since a vaguely creepy episode of Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C centered around the weird dreams that stuff's supposed to cause, I should probably look up the recipe. Cheese in general is supposed to be dreamogenic, something about the way it acts on neurotransmitters.

The reason I like 'em is because I write horror fiction (or, lately, just say I do, lazy bastid) and nightmares provide me lots of free material, often scarier than anything my conscious mind can hhhhhork up. I keep a notebook by the bed to write down the really good ones, anything with some particularly creepy imagery, effect, or an actual plot that I could use.

George Carlin once said something along the lines of "There's nothing more boring than listening to someone describe a dream." Either I'm weird or George was (or, hey, why not both?) but I actually like listening to other people's nightmares, just to see if they dream the same kind of stuff I do (so feel free to put ya'll's in the comments section). So far, as entertaining as hearing those dreams is, I've determined that my nightmares are actually more morbid and potent than the average. If the average nightmare was Cinemax porn, mine tend toward triple-X. Maybe that's because I'm desensitized to horror from constantly dwelling on horror books and movies and listening to so much creepy music, so my subconscious has to up the ante and break out the black-label stuff from the cellar. Kinda like, "So, you fell asleep watching Suspiria, eh? Let's see if you can handle THIS, then, tough guy!" Or maybe I just have a really twisted psyche, I dunno... I’ll leave that for the amateur Freuds out there to decide, because I’m okay with it. If I've got anything really dangerous squishing in there I figured it would've manifested itself by now.

Anyway, if you're from George's school of thought, this is gonna be one borin'-ass post for you, because I'm going to recount a bunch of my nightmares for ya. Ideally they'll work like a bunch of really short, surreal, scary short stories, but we'll see what kind of weight I can swing with my current state of writer's block. I plan on making short stories or novels based on them someday, maybe. A couple of novels I wrote (Deadhouse and Steve’s Trailer) were based on dreams I had, and so is the Daisyland novel I’m supposed to be working on, and I think I’ve described those already in previous posts so I’ll leave them out. It'll be a long post but maybe you can print it out and keep it in the bathroom or somethin', maybe it won't be too dull if read in installments.

First, some childhood nightmares I remember. I used to get reoccurring dreams a lot. I don't get 'em as much now that I'm older, and I have a whackjob theory for that: I think your subconscious is a lot like a big black ocean full of stuff, and nightmares are derelict ships adrift on that ocean, which you occasionally bump into in your sleep. When you're a kid, you haven't experienced as much stuff so your "ocean" is smaller, so you tend to bump into the same ships more often. Eh, it makes sense to me.

Here's a few I had over and over:

The Kid In The Paper Crown. When I was around 2 or 3 I used to get repeated dreams that I'd wake up in the middle of the night, walk down the hall into the kitchen, and find this mean little kid sitting at the kitchen table. He was wearing a crown he'd made out of newspapers (it was more like an Indian chief headdress, really, kind of a headband with long streamers of paper hanging down around it), and the whole kitchen was lit up with this strange orange light. The kid said he was the devil and this was his birthday party and I was the only guest he wanted. I don't remember what else he did, but it was scary stuff. Come to think of it, maybe this wasn't actually a dream, and that's why I think things like that "YMCA" picture are so funny. Hail Satan.

The Lightning Man. I used to dream that I got up, just before dawn when the light's starting to come in all greyish, and would go out to the kitchen, look out the window. Lightning would flash and there'd be a guy right outside the window, looking back at me, and he was made of lightning. I'm not sure, but I think I may have gotten this dream from seeing an episode of a TV show called Ghost Story that always haunted me. For years I didn't know what show it was or if it was a movie or what, and I looked everywhere, but I finally tripped across it on the Nostalgia Channel about 20 years ago. Totally freaked me out. Anyway, it was an episode called "The Concrete Captain" and now it's even on YouTube. The "lightning man" looked a lot like the ghost at the end of this episode, and I would have been about 5 when that episode aired, which would be about right.



Half-People. I had several dreams about people cut in half, and for some reason they were centered around a pear tree in my back yard. One I barely remember at all, but it was something about a guy who had all of his skin ripped off and he was chopped in half at the waist, and I remember his hand dripping blood into a box of Bugles (I had a box beside my bed, which made it even more disconcerting; I didn't eat them for about a year after that dream). People dressed the upper half of his torso in all kinds of golden mummy regalia and buried it under that pear tree with great ceremony. Then, on another occasion, I dreamed that it was stormy out, and some old lady was hanging from the neck from that pear tree... or at least the upper half of her body was, since she'd been cut in half at the waist. She was wearing a white nightgown that was dripping with black blood where the waist had been severed. When I walked past her, her head would turn to look at me and she'd gibber idiot "glab-glab-glabble!" stuff at me and her face would wobble around on her skull. Keep in mind I was dreaming this sick shit at around 5 years old. To this day, I'd be scared to go digging under that pear tree. There might be something down there.

"White" Dreams. What I call "white dreams" didn't have any particular story, it was just an effect that would sometimes appear in just about any dream I was having (even happy ones). They were the absolute most horrifying things I ever dreamed. I can't explain what happened in those dreams, but I always got maybe 30 seconds of foreboding, knowing the dream was going to turn "white" and I'd desperately try to make myself wake up before it did. Occasionally I managed to do that and was always too scared to sleep the rest of the night since it might come back. When a dream went "white," whoever (or whatever - I remember once it happened in a dream about the Easter Bunny) I was with in the dream would freeze and start staring balefully at me, and they'd suddenly retreat into the distance, like a camera zoom-lens pull-back. Then they'd start rushing forward at me, right on an eye-level, always coming forward but never actually reaching me, and then I'd feel this huge, cold pressure like being crushed in a press, and everything would go very white and hellishly smooth, and it caused absolute terror and actual pain until I woke up. I was really young when I had these dreams, and I don't know if I was flirting with sleep apnea or what (I was a skinny kid so I wouldn't be predisposed to it, but who knows?) and the dreams were a manifestation of some physical attack or what, but I used to get those "white dreams" every couple of months and they were scarier than anything. I remember years after I stopped them, Johnny Carson (who liked to talk about nightmares) mentioning dreams he had of a white lion running at him on eye-level but never reaching him, and I wondered if he was having "white dreams" too.

Now, onto "adulthood," or as close as I get to it, narf narf. I'll start with Morpheus's most recent gift (just a few days ago - thanks, Mo, I think I can use that one!) and then work my way back.

The Running Girls. (10/1/09) I was walking home from some event I don't remember with some people I knew ("dream friends" - people you seem to know in the dream but they're not anyone you recognize from real life). As we came out of the building, the street was full of women and girls, and they were all running or walking very quickly. I asked a guy what was going on, and he said that some kind of Jack the Ripper killer was loose and all these women were trying to get safely home before he could catch them. I told the girl I was with (we'll call her "Jill" for clarity purposes) that I'd walk her home to make sure she was safe, and she said thanks and started running anyway. A couple of hundred yards down the street, we saw a small crowd around a girl lying in the street, half-naked and bloody, and I thought, "Uh-oh, Ripper victim." Jill rushes over to the girl to see if she can help, and the girl's not dead; she's got a little pocketknife and she's slowly stabbing herself with it. Jill tells me that she can't get the knife away from the girl, but I should go try. Needless to say, I don't want to get anywhere near a crazy, bloody person with a knife. A girl steps out of the crowd and manages to twist the knife out of the girl's hand. Then Jill says, "Wait a minute, I've got a knife!" and she runs over to the crazy girl and puts it on the ground in front of her, while I yell "What the hell are you doing? Don't give her another knife!" The crazy girl picks up Jill's knife and starts stabbing again, and meanwhile the other girl's started stabbing herself, too. Then the two girls start slowly stabbing each other. It's almost like little girls putting makeup on each other. The crowd are suddenly in chairs, watching, like an audience, and nobody's trying to stop it. At this point I have no doubt that everyone has gone crazy, and maybe there's not a "Jack the Ripper" loose, but the whole world's gone insane, maybe from some virus outbreak or chemical leak. The two girls, streaming blood, decide to turn on the audience, and start walking around, sticking people with their pocketknives. They both focus on me as the only sane guy left, and start smiling, their eyes wide and dialated, gleaming black They're trying to climb through the crowd after me, and I grab a chair to fend them off with and try to escape. Then I woke up.

Embryonicus Necrovivicus. (date lost) This dream unfolded like watching a film, and I dreamed it while I was up late watching the very-creepy movie The Innocents (based on Henry James' "Turn of the Screw") - dialogue and screams from the soundtrack of the film worked their way into my sleep and my subconscious supplied the visuals and storyline. I later tried to turn this into a short story but never completed it.
A woman driving home in the rain pulls over because of abdominal pain. While the rain pounds down, she has a miscarriage in her car. She didn't know she was even pregnant and doesn't want anyone to know about it, so she opens the car door and drops the bloody fetus in the mud, cleans herself up with rainwater, and drives home. Then, for weeks afterward, she looks at the side of the road where she threw the fetus, and it's bloating, larger and larger each day. Flies are all over it, and soon it's the size of a watermelon, and then even bigger, just this dirty, bloodstained pink thing curled up on the roadside. One night the woman's daughter runs into her bedroom and shakes her awake, screaming, "My sister is coming home! My sister's coming home!" The next night it rained very heavily, and the woman woke up and something was stumbling in her room, dripping and snuffling and wheezing, and she could hear flies buzzing, then a cough and a baby-like cry.

Farmhouse of Blindness. (10/16/08) I was exploring an abandoned farmhouse with some "dream friends." The place had a reputation of being haunted, and it was really creepy and decrepit. Suddenly, sheets of corrugated metal slammed down over all the windows and locked in place, and the doors were bolted tight so we couldn’t get out, and the house was left in almost complete darkness. Then these scrawny, psychotic, inbred albinos came out of a secret room and started hunting us in the dark. They were all blind, so they were used to the dark and knew the layout of the house, and had a huge advantage over us. They’d hide in the dark, jump out and slash us with knives or hit us with sticks, then scurry away laughing and yelling rape and torture threats, in no hurry to kill us because we were a source of sadistic amusement. They also had traps, like big tangles of barbed wire, that they lay around the house to chase us into. (I was sure I could turn this into a novel, but since then Brian Keene came out with a novel called Urban Gothic that’s pretty similar, other than the blindness factor. Damnit.)

The Little Girl and her Crazy Grandfather. (5-2-08) I was living in an apartment and this little 10-year-old girl (we’ll call her Jill, again) kept knocking on my door to borrow food and stuff. Jill said that her parents were dead and she lived with her grandfather down the street. I’d met him once and knew he was very nice but a bit senile, so this little girl was having to take care of herself to an extent, so I’d give her whatever food she wanted, just to make sure she was okay. One day she told me that her grandfather was scaring her because he kept talking about an operation he needed, but he didn’t trust doctors. He kept talking about kidnapping some local children and doing the surgery on them and making Jill help him, so she could learn how to do the surgery on him while he was asleep. Jill said she’d always thought he was just talking, but lately he’d been dwelling on the idea so much that she worried that he was going to act on it and hurt someone. She said he’d go homicidaly mad and kill her if he knew she’d told anybody, but wanted me to think of some way to get him help. I was still pondering this horrific situation when I woke up.

Necro-Girlfriend. (10-1-06) I was sleeping with a girl who had her face nuzzled into my neck, and she started sleepily talking about how she died in a car wreck years before. I told her that was very funny and she was doing a good job of trying to creep me out. She said she didn’t know what I was talking about and started (in a drowsy monotone) describing how the metal mangled her and how she’d bled like it'd never stop, and I told her that this was getting too morbid and told her to stop it... and she grabbed me really tight, pinning my arms, and leaned up and there was just enough light that I could see that her face was grey and rotten and gnawed by beetles. I couldn’t break free of her and she started trying to kiss me, and I woke up.

Radiator. (date lost) I was walking my dog and some crazy guy broken down on the side of the road started chasing us because he wanted to fill his radiator with my dog’s blood.

The Magician. (12/25/02 - Christmas Eve and I get nightmares!) I was watching TV and the signal started to fade, and kept getting interrupted by barely-seen ghosting of a magician in a cape and top hat doing lame, corny tricks (interlocking rings, multiplying billiards, cards, rabbit from a hat, etc.) I could just see little bits of it before it’d fade out again, but I recognized the magician from a dream I’d had about him, where he was a really bad dentist. I turned off the TV and went to visit a friend in the hospital who was there to have surgery, and he was complaining about the TV reception in the hospital, and said some really awful old magic show kept ghosting over the picture...

Vardamin. (date lost) In my grandmother’s backyard was a huge, ruined antebellum mansion that had, at one point, had a big dome, around which was the name of the house: VARDAMIN. Somewhere in the rubble of the house I heard a cat crying and I thought it was trapped, so I climbed over the rusty chain-link fence that walled off the condemned property and went looking for the cat... only to find out the noise was actually being made by some psychotic surgeon and his crazy assistant who were trying to lure people in to practice organ-replacement surgery on them, seeing if decayed corpse organs could be made healthy again by putting them into living bodies. I woke up before they could get too far with that. (Turns out there’s actually a town in Mississippi called “Vardaman.” I don’t think I want to visit it).

Where The Fuck Am I? (12/8/01) I was walking through my house and looked out the window... and saw my house across the street. Then a guy I knew in high school showed up and was pounding on the door, telling me I had to let him in and he was crying because he wanted to tell someone how he died. (to my knowledge, this guy’s not actually dead)

Up The Stairs Where The Windows Are Painted Black. (9/26/02 - I turned this one into a short story of the same name). I was driving through an old, mostly-abandoned neighborhood and it looked like a storm was building. I drove past this huge (like 5-6 story) old house that was on the verge of falling down, and noticed that the roof was on fire. The yard was full of grubby white-trash kids and dogs and cats. I stop the car and run out, yelling that their house is on fire and ask if anybody’s inside. They say there are more kids, an old lady, and a bunch more dogs and cats in there. I tell one girl to go to a neighbor’s house and call the fire department, and she doesn’t seem very interested, so I yell at her and she finally wanders off to do it (I hope). I go into the house and these kids must be squatting there, because the place is a wreck. It’s rotting and filthy and there are old broken toys, discarded furniture, dirty clothes, etc. piled all over the place. I can barely climb the stairs because so much garbage is piled on them, and all along I’m telling any kid I run into to grab up some dogs and cats and get out of the house because it’s about to burn down. Upstairs I find an old housekeeper with a foreign accent, and I tell her to round up the kids and get out. She starts gathering up handfuls of knick-knacks and junk (including a crossword puzzle she was working on) and I can’t make her understand how serious the situation is. There’s a little girl who seems saner than the old lady, so I ask her to help me get everyone out. She says everybody’s out except a baby that’s upstairs, but that “it’d be better to let that baby burn, anyway.” I tell her we can’t let a baby burn, but she says it’s really deformed and it “does horrible things” and “gets inside your mind and makes you sick.” They refuse to help me get the baby, so I send them outside and go up the stairs after it. Things are getting really smoky up there, and all the windows have been spraypainted so hardly any light gets in. I find the baby in this dark, dingy, rank-smelling nursery and grab it up and run downstairs with it; it’s so dark and smoky that I can’t even see what the kid looks like. The house is burning enough that pieces of it are falling into the yard and setting surrounding trees on fire now. I get away from the house and set the baby on the ground, then pull the blanket off of it. It has a weird, blocky head, kind of like an Easter Island figure, and it sits up, arranges itself into a “Buddha”-like position, and starts singing this weird, high-pitched wail. When the kids hear the song, they start laughing and all run back into the house to play hide and seek from me while it burns down. They won't come out no matter how much I yell at them. The baby sits there serenely basking in the light of the fire.

Teeth Marks. (7-26-01) A neighbor called me to go check on something in their house because they were getting weird messages from their alarm system, and told me where to find a key to get in. I went over there and went inside, and it’s empty, but I notice that there’s a weird little girl outside on their patio. She’s got curly, blondish hair, big crazy black eyes, and looks retarded. I peek out at her through the sliding glass door, trying to figure out who she is and what she’s doing. She notices me and starts making faces (they’re manic -- you can’t tell if she’s happy or angry) and keeps silently mouthing words I can’t make out. She keeps looking at the window like she thinks I’m playing some peek-a-boo game with her, and occasionally yells inarticulate things. I think she’s crazy, so I go back and lock all the doors to the house to keep her from getting in, but when I get back to the living room I notice the curtains moving over the sliding glass door. I go over to look out at the girl, and she has a somber look on her face and is reaching through the glass (it’s not broken; she’s melting through it, like a ghost) and is grabbing at my face, trying to reach down my throat. I try to bite her arms to get her off of me, but I notice that her arms are already covered with bite-mark scars from where other people have tried that...

Clock Tower. (12/25/99 - Christmas Eve again!) I was standing in front of an old building that had a high clock tower, and suddenly got showered by a handful of human fingers tossed down from the top of the tower. Then I notice that the trees and bushes all around are littered with bits of human offal, like someone on top of the tower was brutally cleaning a chicken. I had to go up and see what was going on, and heard enraged grunting as I neared the top, but woke up before I got open the door to see what was happening.

Where’d He Go? (11/99) Some guy who was all in shadow so I couldn’t see his face showed up and said he had car trouble, but when I let him in to use the phone he ran to the back of the house and hid somewhere I couldn’t find him.

Friendship Card For The Devil. (6/3/99) This one also played out like watching a film. A little kid has been tormented by a demonic presence in his room, and unwisely decides that maybe if he makes friends with it, it’ll leave him alone... so he makes it a friendship card. He falls asleep holding the card, and wakes up with another card in its place, and this one’s a disturbing, pornographic card, and he can smell the demon on it (he smells like stale sweat, old blood, and whiskey breath). The card scares him but he decides he has to hide the card and keep it as evidence that the demon’s real (but the card looks homemade anyway). When he turns the lights out, the demon shows up (you can't see him in the dark) and says he’s glad they’re going to be friends and that exorcisms won‘t work now that he feels welcomed. He starts telling the kid that demons have hobbies when they’re not haunting people; they get unnecessary surgery for fun, and he’s still achey and recovering from one of those. He shows the kid visions of Grover muppets from Sesame Street, dancing, with gleaming yellow fat and liver-colored muscle under patches where big patches of blue fur’s been ripped off.

Toadman. (5-30-09) I got chased through the woods by a big flabby grey thing that I barely got glimpses of, but it looked like some large toad with some human characteristics. I hid in the woods but could hear it snuffling around, searching.

Sick Margaret (4-19-94) In the dream, I was a little kid riding my bike through a huge, shady neighborhood, and got lost. I found this prissy, ugly little redheaded girl with glasses (she looked sort of like Margaret from the Dennis The Menace comics) and she creeped me out but I was lost, so I went home with her. She starts telling me about this fantasy life she’s built around this female DJ she listens to on the radio late at night, about how the DJ is actually an exiled princess and all this other stuff, and it starts to sound familiar. I remembered that “Margaret” is the really creepy, crazy girl that my friends are all scared of, and that she does nasty things like killing pets and hurting other kids. “Margaret” pulls out this dead turtle and says that this boy she knows fucked the turtle and the semen is still preserved inside. That’s when I decided to get the hell out of there even if I couldn’t find my house.

Vent People. (9/16/93) Stuck home alone on a stormy day, some friend and I discover that if we yell down the air conditioner vent it creates a weird, distorted echo, so we’re playing around with this discovery, seeing what noises we can make. Then some other voice - female - starts answering back from deep in the vents. We ask who it is and only get crazy laughter, and it starts pouring down rain outside with hurricane force.

Farmer Brown (date lost) Another one that played out like watching a film. A man (we’ll call him Jack) who’s scared of dying dreams he’s a kid in a field, standing in a small plot of earth that’s going to be a tomato patch. He finds two little girls to talk to, but then a little black kid in overalls and a big floppy hat that droops to hide his face comes running over the horizon toward them. The little girls start running around the tomato patch and Jack is afraid and tries to catch them, but they lose him in the weeds. The black kid comes up and he’s not really black but just covered with dirt. He tells Jack he’s a farmer who “plants things that don’t grow.” Jack asks the kid if he wants to be friends, but the kid just shakes his head and says not to try to make friends, because he’ll just be scared again, and says “Nobody wants to play with me because my hands are always dirty.” We cut back to adult Jack who’s died in his sleep, and the paramedics who are hauling him out notice that they hear a sound like a frightened boy running around a tomato patch.

Coin Collector. (9/19/92) A guy who’s a big coin collector walks out of a room that has exploded, and he’s unmarked. He says he’s okay, but his friends are afraid of him because, given the condition of the room, he must be dead. He still says he’s not, but then he turns an empty bowl upside down over a cup, and rare coins -- blackened from fire -- fall into the cup. He sees them and cries and fades away before his friends’ eyes.

Mafia Goons (3-2-08) On my way back to my car after work, I got stopped by two big, hulking Mafia-thug type guys in black suits who were pissed at me for some reason. I had a switchblade, but they weren’t very scared of it. It seemed to just piss them off, and they started circling around, saying “You want to play, huh?” The one with a mustache made serious attempts at hitting me with a big chunk of wood, then they settled on a knife fight instead... but instead of knives they pulled out these surgical clippers, to take big snips out of me instead of stabbing. Can't tell ya how scary that is. I managed to bump past them and took off running, but knew they were in better shape than me and there wasn’t much of anywhere to go. Then, luckily, I woke up.

The Program In The Gym (2/15/06) I was in high school again (I know exactly what Kurt was getting at, because I have those dreams all the time) and there was some kind of play or something happening in the gym. The gym was as dark as they could make it, and there were about 20 or 30 people standing very still and silent with their backs to the audience... and that was the play. Nothing ever happened, and it gave no indication that it would ever end, but it was too dark to find your way back out of the gym if you tried to leave.

Dream After Dream (12/30/03) A redneck couple were shooting out car tires in front of a house my parents used to have in Florida. I went out to stop them and the girl pointed the gun at me but I managed to get it away from her and told her she could get it back from the cops. The guy -- who oddly seemed nice -- led me to his house down the street and told me he’d pay me for the tires. When we got there, it was a crazy old house full of junk, and he and the girl and a couple of Native American women with mustaches were torture-murdering people, and the guy pulled a pair of scissors on me. I took them away from him and threatened him with them while trying to back out of the house, but the guy wanted me to stab him in the eyes with them, and kept trying to jump at me so I’d stab him in the eyes. I finally threw him headfirst down some stairs and ran through the trash-house and hid in an outbuilding where there was a stained chemical-suit hanging on the wall. I noticed a shop across the street that sold stuff made out of glass, so I went in there to call the cops. Behind the counter was a friendly black girl who I seemed to recognize as somebody who’d helped me out in other nightmares, and she said I should get up and go to the bathroom to end the dream. So, I woke up (or so I thought) and went to the bathroom, but the sink and toilet were backing up and the whole room was full of gushing water. Then I woke up for real.

Dream After Dream After Dream After Dream (2-15-03) I was driving down a highway, but there was no car-- it was like crawling really fast -- and I came to a cliff-like eroded place on the side of the road that I remembered seeing years before (or in another dream). I climbed up and was looking around, and got a big view of a nice neighborhood (although it didn’t look as nice as I remembered it from the other dream). The ground was full of marbles and plastic toys embedded in the dirt, like kids had played there a lot long ago. I also found a big chunk of pumice. Some guys from across the road came looking for me (didn’t like me taking the pumice, I guess), so I hid and tried to sneak back to the highway... and ended up in some old lady’s house just as she was coming in. I apologized for being in her house and explained that the people across the street were trying to kill me and that was the only place to hide. I paid for a pizza that was being delivered and she was very nice and understanding. Then I left and went out through a garden were little fish were flying around, landing on plants like dragonflies. Some were dead and ants were eating them. Then I dreamed that I woke up and had to go get my work ID card fixed. It was cracking in half, and these two geeky guys tried to fix it with postal tape (which was kept on a table in some woods in the back of their neighborhood). They knew the lady whose house I’d invaded in the other dream and said she was really cool about stuff like that. With the card fixed as well as it was going to be, I kept going and went through a small town that had a diner called “The Exploding Throbber.” I thought that was both disturbing and hilarious, but at this point I needed to buy a Coke, so I went in and these two weird pimps were harassing some guy at the counter, asking for his phone number. He stupidly gave it to them and one of the pimps told him they were going to go “dance” in his car and said “When I talk to you I’m gonna talk fast.” I snuck the hell out of there and tried to wake myself up, because at this point I realized it was a dream and was going bad. I woke up in a car with my dogs and someone who I thought was my dad, but we were driving slow and aimlessly in the middle of the night with no headlights. The driver seemed to be asleep and the dogs were jumping all around the car. The driver would wave his arms and babble, like he was talking in his sleep, and I shook him and asked where he was going and he yelled “I never remember!” Then I woke up for real. I had so many false-wake-ups in this dream that I actually dreamed I was writing the dreams down, during the subsequent dreams.

The Ice-T and Vanity Snuff Channel. (7/27/03) I was staying at a weird old beach house and something bad had happened there once. A partially-autistic kid told me that he could confront the ghosts in the house because part of his brain was dead. He also explained that he had a pet goat who could talk to him, and it wanted him to build him a pedestal out of soup cans or it wouldn’t be able to breath correctly; it needed to “foam.” I left him in the house to do that and I went outside and found this gorgeous girl with an Irish accent. We hit it off and lay down on the wet ground, watching stars fall out of the sky. It looked like all of them were dying out. She didn’t want to go back inside but it was starting to rain, so we ducked into a shed and she said she’d stay there forever, and I looked down and she was staring up at me from inside a bag of peat moss. It was too small to hold her but she was in there, anyway, packed in peat. I freaked out and ran back into the house and the autistic kid was gone, but he’d turned on the TV and found some horrible channel where Ice-T and Vanity were in a hotel room, killing girls -- all one camera angle and looked like a snuff film, but I was sure it wasn’t, because it was Ice-T and I didn’t think he’d do a thing like that. Vanity, maybe -- she’s nuts. I tried to go to bed, but the light in the bedroom was very dim, and down the hall somebody who nobody else in the house knew was sleeping (or trying to - fitfully). all of a sudden this sleeper jumped out of bed and started dancing a frantic jig down the hall with a crazy grin on his face, bumping into things, like a wind-up toy out of control. TV’s with the Ice-T movie were all on all over the house, and it was about 4 a.m. and very dark. I went into the bathroom and fingers were trying to reach out of the sink drain, and a guy trapped inside the mirror was trying to pound his way out. His hair had been cut to look like skyscrapers.

There are probably more, but that’s probably more than enough, no? Your turn...