Dream: Are How You?

 “Are How You?”

 

Had a dream that we had a small family reunion. There was a kid there, about 8. I didn’t know who it was and kept asking people, “Is that your boy?” They all said no, until someone finally told me he didn’t have any parents. He was owned by a local news station and was featured in a weekly storytelling show obnoxiously called “Are How You?”

I said hello to the kid, and he began to smile a grotesquely large smile. His eyes smooshed down into black lines and his head expanded as if filling with air. “Are how you?” he asked me in his saccharine, high-pitched TV voice. His head towered over me.

“Uhh, good job, kid,” I said, and his head deflated and face returned to normal. He laughed, sat on the floor, to play with blocks. People backed away from him.

“Why is he here” I asked a nephew.

“No one knows.”

Dream July 19 -- Interstellar Convenience Store

Dream July 19 -- Interstellar Convenience Store

Dream July 19, 2021

 

 

I had a dream that a relative became the leader of an interstellar space exploration program. I had never seen him so sincerely excited about something like this before. He wanted volunteers from the family, but I was hesitant. His wife convinced me.

The ships were small, not much larger than compact cars, but capable of light speed. I began my journey alone to a far off tendril of the universe. I arrived at my destination in what seemed moments, a planet with no atmosphere. Just an eternal night, a blackness that reached from the surface into the sky, poised forever at midnight with no close star as sun. But the heavens of this planet were not absent of light. As my spacecraft landed, it reversed and faced the sky, giving me a long glimpse of a galaxy of astonishing beauty, spirals of light and thousands of colors both known and unknown. It filled the whole of my vision and I wept as I tried to understand it and capture it to my memory.

The ship touched down beside a small, bubbled dome, and opened its egress portal to an adjacent hole in the dome, allowing me to enter the enclosure without having to suit up. 

The material of the bubble somehow converted the light from the galaxy into a bright and cold fluorescent shine, revealing to me that the inside of the enclosure was an abandoned convenience store.

At once the mystery of my destination was dispelled by the presence of shelves and shelves of candy, snacks, beverages, a profusion of beef jerky, and a clerk-less counter. The familiarity of it all depressed me. The fluorescent glare in the ceiling hid the strange galaxy from my eyes. I opened a drink cooler and took out a damn Dr. Pepper. Drinking a fucking Dr. Pepper on an alien planet! When I cracked it open, I caught sight of a door at the rear of the store. It was unlocked. I opened it and the bizarre dark light of the world splashed in. I held my breath for a second, expecting to suffocate or freeze or cave in or whatever, but the outside did not kill me. I walked out into a small grassy area suffused with the illumination of the galaxy above. At the corner of the area was a small, gray shed, and an oval garden filled the center of the space. With slow understanding I recognized this was a replica of the rear corner of the back yard of my childhood home. The garden was my Father’s, and here it was overgrown with alien flora that stirred in the breeze and reflected the light of the heavens. I cried again, seeing this, this time not feeling cheated by sameness, because while it was familiar, the garden and shed were now inhabiting and inhabited by the strange and distant.

I froze there, standing by the oval garden and had the sense that an enormous period of time was passing, a sense that I was both there and not, seeing my visits to this very space over eons and eons. I watched the flowers and plants in the garden evolve into fauna, alien creatures that ripped themselves out of the garden and ambled away into dark avenues to find their new way. 

The convenience store faded, while the galaxy lights in the sky grew and grew until my mind and thoughts and body were immolated by its star-clustered fingers.

 

Dream Over

Dream: Something Is Wrong With My Nose

 Dream May 27, 2021

 

 

I was living in a cheap, crummy apartment. I had a bed, dresser, and mirror, which was shoved up in the corner next to the door. All the other furniture was cardboard boxes. My television was a large panel of cardboard, upon which was crudely painted a scene from a movie I hated.

 

My neighbor across the hall was a woman with an enormous bob of blond hair. All day and night, she walked out into the hall in front of my door and stomped her boots on the floor. My door had a square cut out at head level, and was inset with metal bars. The neighbor banged her hair against the door and stuck her tongue through the bars, alternating between screaming and blowing raspberries.

 

“Ugh,” I said, and the cardboard chair beneath me crumpled. “Shut up! Trying to watch the scene!”

 

“Come outside and say hello to me!” she yelled.

 

I got up from the floor and went to the door. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw what looked like a filament of linen float up from behind the headboard above my head. It undulated in the air, floating around the room and gaining both length and girth. It flew behind the mirror and emerged from the other side resembling a cottonmouth. The snake lunged at me, knocking me down on the bed. I caught its head, but it surged again and bit me on the neck. Immediately I felt the effects of the venom, causing extraordinary pain and also an immeasurable peacefulness.

 

I passed out.

 

I awoke in a stupor. The snake was gone. My neighbor was staring at me through the bars, expressionless. The apartment was filled with an incredible buzzing sound. A yellow jacket the size of a chihuahua rose up from beneath the bed, buzzing on drunkard wings. Its giant, shrimplike legs brushed against my face as it fell on my chest and then launched again. Its stinger lazily darted at my face and shoulders, looking more like an ovipositor. I successfully dodged all attempts to sting me, then slapped at it; it was liked pushing at a heavy punching bag. The enormous hornet buzzed louder, furious, and quickened from its lethargic hovering. The stinger jabbed at my nose, making contact, burning up my snozz with pain. It clacked its mandibles together and darted away through the mirror into oblivion.

 

I went to the mirror to check out my throbbing nose. It was violet and swollen, the size of a grapefruit. Lines appeared all over it, like boundaries on a political map. One of the skin countries fell off my nose, landing with a wet smack on the dresser. Then another. A pink mass was revealed as the skin fell off.

 

My brother appeared beside me and saw my nose. “Oh, that is so gross!”

All the skin had fallen off now, uncovering a pulsing brain. The inside of my nose was a brain that writhed on my face as if trying for escape or some exercise.

 

“Quick,” I said to my brother. “Get some peroxide!”

 

He brought me some peroxide and a toothbrush.

 

“Why the toothbrush?”

 

“It will help.”

 

He stood back as if afraid of infection and doused my nose brain in peroxide. A globe of foam ballooned around the flesh. My brother applied the toothbrush and brushed at the foam vigorously; the pain made me weep. After a minute of brushing, he stepped away. I blinked away tears, which rolled down over the flat surface of a large clock. My nose turned brain had now transformed into a digital radio alarm clock radio. The radio was on, but it was static. The red digits on the clock were at 2400 hours, military time. When I peered closer at my new, absurd nose, the time began to count down.

 

“What happens when the time runs out,” my brother asked.

 

“I don’t know,” I said.

 

My neighbor stomped in the hall and blew a raspberry through the bars.

 

Dream Over

 

 

 

 

Dream: Flying at Larry David's show and more.

 Had a dream that I posted a picture of me on Twitter wearing a certain T-shirt. ??? got angry; he was sick of seeing the picture.  I closed my laptop and put it on the nightstand and went to sleep. In a doze, I said “Fuck you, Nick.” and I could hear him screaming at me from the closed computer. Subsequently, he started mocking all my Tweets so I had hundreds of mentions.

Then the dream shifted to me living in a mansion that was haunted by thousands of ghosts.

Then I went to a theatre where Larry David was performing a play. It was at that time I decided to show everyone I could fly. I flew up above the stage and floated all over the theatre. People were awestruck and distracted from David’s show. On one of my landings he grabbed my shoulder and told me to fuck off with the flying. I ignored him and flew to the middle of the room. David sent out a flying tiger to attack me. In that moment, I knew it was a dream, so I imagined the tiger was wearing boxing gloves and then it was, and we proceeded to beat each other against the head floating dozens of feet above the audience.

That’s all.

Over.

Not my fucking fault.