Watching '80s Horror Movies on VHS/A Chat with My Inner Spirit

I was watching B-grade horror movies from the '80s on VHS through an old CRT TV.

(By gum, those were the days.)

A young(er) Donald Trump appeared in the first movie I decided to watch, playing himself.

(Could he ever play different?)

He chastised a female character for finding religion, then began monologuing to himself on how he once sought belief in a higher power before deciding to believe in himself.

(What's that, subconscious mind? Donald Trump worships himself? I already knew that, but thanks for the info anyhow.)

Gears shifted and the second movie was on.

A small group of rich, spoiled teenagers/early twenty-somethings

decided to hold a séance in the last house remaining from a poor, decaying neighbourhood that was otherwise completely bulldozed over and replaced with brand spankin' new homes built for the rich decades ago.

Assembling at a large square table in a room located in the centre of the dark, decrepit building, they used florescent ink and florescent gas

as conjuring substances to summon forth a spirit of the house. Quite suddenly a short, squat woman with messy red hair, wild eyes, and an impossibly wide mouth materialized atop the table.

(Imagine a three-way cross between Fiona Dourif, Henrietta from Evil Dead II, and the Cheshire Cat and you get the unsettling picture.)

Scared shitless, they all bolted from the room. Some got lost in the dark trying to escape, but most managed to get out to safety. I don't know what became of those trapped in the house with the spirit made flesh.

(But really, I do.)

* * *

I was now in a sterile classroom, where a social worker

(who will now be played by the saucy Elisa Donovan)

gave me a list of outfits which could help me find a job to copy down. I tried writing down some of the addresses, but for some reason I couldn't concentrate on the words and failed to do so.

In a flash, I was then on the back porch of my house. I was there with the social worker, and she was trying to communicate with my inner spirit, which looked like a human-shaped bundle of dead leaves dressed in a blue vest.

(Close enough.)

When I told the social worker her presence wasn't helping, that my inner spirit wouldn't emerge with her standing around acting all demanding, she left.

Then my inner spirit took on its true form; it looked like a dirty Avery Brooks.

(Grime to be added in post-production.)

My inner spirit then began lamenting on how it — and by extension, I — should've married and had kids by now.

"On second thought, I shouldn't have driven the saucy redhead away."

Plan Deep Space Nine from Inner Space

It's 2017, people. The abomination known as 2016 AD/CE is finally dead, and long may it rot. In celebration of its much-belated demise, here is the last significant dream I had in that cruddy year!

* * *

Had myself another Star Trek dream. It took place during the Dominion War, before Jadzia Dax's death.

(She may have left this world, but not our hearts.)

The premise was this: For the last several decades/couple centuries (the dream wasn't clear which), an offshoot of the Federation of Planets had been living within a pocket universe in self-imposed exile. With the coming of the Dominion War, they'd decided they wanted to return, rejoin the Federation, and help them out in their struggle against the Dominion.

Assuming the role of an anonymous goldshirt who had the hots for Jadzia,

(We would've been able to make it work, too, if it wasn't for that meddling Worf.)

I accompanied Sisko, Jadzia, Bashir, and a security team to a neutral, uninhabited planet to meet with the representatives of the Offshoots.

Once we were there, we were almost automatically attacked by Offshoot ships. Taken prisoner, we were sent into the pocket universe to the Offshoot capital world, where we learned the Offshoots' true plan was to conquer the Federation and absorb it into their own compact empire.

Some weird metafictional crap then went down. We were placed in a watery cell, 

but it really was just a shallow tank on a set with cameras trained on us.

"Could you be faster, Avery? More intense?"

"..."

Then the tank was a waterlogged wooden floor, which I laid upon and slapped to produce the in-camera sound effects.

We then found ourselves in a small room, where we found a twelve-year-old boy sitting at a table under a solitary bright light furiously cutting and trimming photographs out of magazines.

(I like him already!)

When we asked him if he was putting a collage together, he told us that while the Offshoots sometimes allowed him to glue clippings into a scrapbook, for the most part they were just forcing him to aimlessly cut the pictures out for hours on end as a form of psychological torture.

The dream got hazy from there. There was something involving an evil bulldog alien, a large cardboard box full of Simpsons comics, and Sisko being distantly related to the Offshoot ruling family, but nothing concrete and nothing I can recall past that point.