No Dogs, No Masters/Witchspin/The Mutant Calicoes Beneath My Garage/Ghost Dad/And the Suns Became as Red as Blood ...

My mother and I joined a plethora of anarcho-communist/anarcho-syndicalist organizations, all of which catered to cat lovers in particular.

* * *

Had a bi/transerotic dream which included witches and werewolves in powdered wigs. I remember nothing coherent about it.

* * *

There was a hole in the floor of my garage. The hole led down to a cave/hollow beneath the foundation. All my cats which had gone missing over the years had gotten trapped down there, where they survived and bred. After nearly twenty years of inbreeding, they were almost all calicoes, and while a portion of them remained attractive animals, another portion was mutated/deformed; one cat had three heads, another had a teeny-tiny head as a result of getting their head permanently stuck in a bottle cap as a kitten.

* * *

The ghost of my father began manifesting about the house. He stayed in bed for the most part, sick as he had been in the months leading up to his death. Though he'd periodically talk to us, I got the sense that this was no sapient Earthbound spirit; this was just a spectral recording, a semi-interactive ectoplasmic hologram, and his true soul had moved on to the next phase of its existence.

* * *

I was in my kitchen, washing dishes, when the power went out. After about a minute, the overhead light came back on, but the rest of the house remained without electricity. I looked outside the window; the sky was black with thick cloud. Showing through this otherwise solid blanket of black, haloed in red, was not one, but two suns.

Exsphinxtion/Up in (SUV) Smoke

I was taking a casual stroll, minding my own business, bothering nobody, when I crossed paths with a Greek sphinx.

She gave me a friendly smile, then proceeded to attack me. I took off running to get away from her, but she was incredibly swift, so I really had to pump those calves to keep ahead of her.

I soon came to a tall flight of dirt steps which led to a Greek temple. I ran up those dirt steps, telling myself not to look back, that if I looked back I'd see the sphinx right behind me, falter from fear, and be swiftly overtaken, so I forced myself to keep looking ahead.

Unbeknownst to me, the sphinx had circled around, and before I could reach the temple, she was before me, rearing up, ready to take me down with her claws. I tried warding her off with a baseball bat, but she was too massive and powerful; I was dead meat.

* * *

Just north of my house lies a large empty field. Seated inside my sister's F-150, I was parked on the edge of this field, just staring straight ahead at nothing in particular. That's when two SUVs came driving through, racing each other at breakneck speed. One of them passed too close, knicking a headlight. After the SUVs were past, I leapt out of the truck, yelling after the one who'd hit me. When I went to check the Ford for damage, I found it hadn't so much as a scrape, luckily.

A small pack of wild dogs came running past, following the SUVs. Fearful they'd get run over by those careless assholes, I followed them, trying to persuade them to leave the area. That's when I found amongst them Cheech, my dog who'd gone missing this April. Around his torso had been secured a plaid bandage. Apparently he hadn't been killed by coyotes as the family and I had believed, just injured then nursed back to health by some good Samaritan.

Getting my family to assist me, I picked Cheech up and carried him inside the house, taking care not to jostle him too much because he was still healing from his ordeal. At this point, I began suspecting what was happening wasn't real, just a dream. Then I awoke. Cheech is still gone, almost certainly dead, and I miss him.

R. I. P.

Cheech

March/April 2004 — 25 April 2019

101 Ways to Accept Payment for Stolen Money

In a big city, amidst traffic, a work crew was excavating the street. Having broke through the asphalt, they uncovered in the underlying earth what were assumed to be a number of fossilized angel skeletons.

(O hai, influence.)

Right away I could tell these weren't the remains of real angels — the skulls were oversized and exaggerated, the skeletal structure cartoonishly simple and lacking articulation — yet for reasons I couldn't fathom, everyone believed these to be genuine angel fossils.

The dream switched gears. I found myself watching a woman as she rose from a sea of blue paint. She was Hispanic/Latina and incredibly voluptuous.

(Due, in part, to silicone.)

I felt my slide whistle rising. But as the paint ran off her body, I could see she was covered in tattoos. There were tattoos running down her arms; four large tattoos on her back; several tattoos on her backside. Since I find heavily tattooed women gross, my carbonated soda went quickly flat.

What follows is fragmentary, imperfectly recalled.

I was in the hallway of a shabby motel/hotel. An oldtimer

(man, woman, don't recall which)

had accidentally dropped some cash. Some fugly punks — one of whom reminded me of Lil Wayne

— tried stealing the money. I scooped it up before they could snatch it and took off. Through the turning, twisting corridors I ran, trying to catch up to the oldtimer, to outpace the punks.

I don't recall the intervening details, but I eventually found myself inside a clean, upscale bar/restaurant. Now I was an old man. I was seated at a table, and seated with me at the table was ... Somebody™.

I was led to believe that by passing the oldtimer's money over to Somebody™, the oldtimer would get their money back in due course. As I exchanged the money, however, Somebody™ gave me a cheque in return. I then realized Somebody™ was in cahoots with the punks I'd met earlier, that he was paying me for stolen money.

(Dream logic, amirite?)

Billy Dee Williams, who was working there as a server, carrying a platter laden with hors d'oeuvres stuck with fondue forks, happened to witness this transaction. Incensed, he took the fondue forks and attacked Somebody™ and his punk cronies, stabbing them with the forks.

I recall the tattooed bimbo making a brief, unremarkable reappearance. I weighed the pros & cons of making a weiner-taco with her.

(CON: Fugly tattoos, are Fugly. PRO: Phat ass, is Phat.)

Then the dream ended.

Swedish Tongue/Back to the Dead/Burtonverse: The Special Edition

It was the '60s and I was in Sweden, on the set of a movie being filmed by Ingmar Bergman. I'd been hired as an extra, but due to an actor's absence, I was promoted to bit player. I was to deliver my lines in Swedish, but not being fluent in the language, I had to recite them phonetically; I flubbed them badly.

On the plus side, Bibi Andersson and I shared a mutual attraction; we spent the whole time flirting and consulting a Swedish-English dictionary to bolster my understanding of her tongue.

*swoon*

* * *

In the near-future, the end times came upon us. The human birth rate had fallen to zero and the souls of the dead were no longer permitted to pass into the afterlife; they remained tethered to their decaying bodies, intelligent zombies which maintained an uneasy, sometimes hostile co-existence with the living population.

Marty McFly had developed an addiction to pizza; he ate multiple slices of pizza multiple times a day every day until he became obese, died of heart disease, and came back a zombie.

He continued eating pizza — old, dry, mouldy pizza topped with human skin.

* * *

Dreamt that I watched alternate cuts of the Tim Burton Batfilms which had been re-edited to better conform with the Schumacher films. Not only had a mention of the Riddler been inserted in Batman '89, but a new scene with Dick Grayson had been placed in Batman Returns; he was Vicki Vale's new boyfriend, and he was shown driving a shape-changing holographic car.

The dream ended on a mortifying note. In a Returns post-credits scene, the soul of the Penguin — reduced back to infancy, back in his gothic baby carriage — was sailing down the River Styx. As his androgynous soul made its voyage along those brown waters, the disembodied spectral head of Tim Curry materialized over it.

Looming large over the carriage, Tim Curry's disembodied head metamorphosed into the disembodied head of Pennywise the Clown, complete with large, burning red eyes. Looking directly at the viewer, me, he showed a ghastly grin of sharpened teeth. For several seconds I had no choice but to stare back into those hideous eyes before I forced myself awake.

The Wood Pushers Meet the Killers, Mario & Luigi

I really wish I could remember how this dream began. The beginning was particularly wacky, involving superheroes and my family and I living on a deserted island with carnivorous dinosaurs.

I recalled these sequences in some detail after I woke up, but I went too long without recording them, so now those details are lost. 😒

The dream proper I do recall quite well. It was another one of my frustrating "back to high school" dreams.

IRL, there's a hallway showcasing photos of all past graduates. In the dream, however, only grads from the last thirteen years were represented; grad photos from 1960-2005 were tucked away inside a folder, which was sealed in a glass case on the wall. This flustered me greatly, as I wanted to see the '05 grad photos.

(that's the year I would've graduated IRL if life hadn't bent me over a table).

Thwarted, I left, taking care to hide my face from any teachers/counsellors/etc. who would've recognized me as I crept along the halls. As I stepped outside, I peeled off my shirt and discarded it; this drew the attention of douchebag jocks, who started heckling me over my copious back hair and less-than-trim physique as I left school grounds.

As I entered downtown, I found myself in a heavily industrial area (IRL, no such area exists in my hometown). There I stumbled upon four old casual friends/acquaintances/occasional enemies from my high school years who were on their lunch break. We got to talking, and I came to mention my mother's heart attack, my late father's cancer, and that we were constantly in need of firewood to heat our shanty. This is when they informed me they were wood pushers — i.e. sellers of illegally acquired firewood. They agreed to sell  me a cord if I met them at the abandoned power plant where their deals went down.

Deep down in the power plant's humid, musty, rusty innards I met up with the four guys. There I learned from them their supplier had given them crappy apple wood. Taking a piece, one of the guys deposited it on the ground for me to examine; though it resembled a ruptured potato, I thought it looked perfectly burnable. Then we heard commotion outside. Telling me to stay put, the four left to see what the deal was. Minutes passed. There was loud shouting, cursing, then abrupt silence. More minutes passed. One of the four returned, panicked. He told me a pair of contract killers employed by rival wood pushers had killed his friends, were coming after him, and that we had to get to safety quick.

I followed him deeper into the plant. As we came upon a final door, I saw strong light coming from behind it and assumed it was a back exit. Instead it was a small, cramped room containing empty lockers, a medical examination table, and other detritus; there were no doors or windows to escape through and no decent spot to hide. The guy was skinny enough to squeeze into a locker, but I was too big to fit in any. He hurriedly told me to hide under the two foam mattresses stacked atop the examination table; I hurriedly secreted myself under the mattresses just as the killers came through the door. Somehow I could see right through the mattresses and hence see the two killers. They were Hispanic/Latino (they spoke in Spanish/Portuguese), dressed as Mario and Luigi, and armed with flamethrowers.

As you can very well guess, they knew someone was hiding in that there room. While I remained still, hoping beyond hope they hadn't noticed me and thought my comrade was the only person in the room, he left his hiding spot, offering to cut a sweet deal in exchange for his life. They agreed, but only as a fake-out; once his guard was down, Ersatz Luigi toasted him with his flamethrower.

Now it was just me, clumsily hidden beneath two mattresses, a pair of merciless killers armed with deadly weapons standing before me, blocking off my only escape route. I didn't know if they knew I was there and didn't know if they wouldn't torch the place regardless. That's when my body forced me awake.

Me & Mia Malkova/My Uncle's Antique Typewriter/Son of Tales from the Gimpy Hospital

I was sealed in an impenetrable safe room with Mia Malkova.

Usually I enjoy dreams where I get some, but I didn't enjoy this one. The safe room was dank, I got the sense she was only jumping my bones because my bones were the only bones available, and the dream had this undefined but pervading Lovecraftian atmosphere to it.

* * *

An uncle and aunt of mine moved into the bottom storey of the duplex I lived in briefly back in late 1998/early 1999. When me, my parents and sister visited the place, we found they had renovated it so thoroughly it only barely resembled the home we had known.

My uncle had in his possession an antique typewriter from 1908.

He allowed me to try it out. My mother was miffed at this 'cause my uncle had inherited the typewriter from their father, who had inherited it from his father, and she considered it a family heirloom too priceless to use for such everyday, mundane purposes.

* * *

In my original bedroom, an old CRT TV had been set up in the otherwise empty room. I believe I'd set it up so I could play Super Nintendo games on it, but there was no SNES console present and only snow playing on the screen. It was summer and quite hot in the room, so I'd opened the window to cool it down. I'd opened it only a crack, though, because there was no screen over the window and I was fearful of yellowjackets entering through the spaces in the gauzy white curtain.

For some reason or other, my parents wanted me to visit the hospital, so I took the bus there. At the hospital, I found a black, brown, and white tabby kitten wandering the corridors.

Taking the kitten with me, I went outside to the bus stop. Climbing aboard the bus, I asked if this was the bus for my hometown; D

who was present on the bus, told me this was indeed the right bus. I took a seat back away from her and the bus rolled off.

During the trip, I took up a conversation with the young woman seated beside me. She was a pleasant lady, so I offered the kitten to her as a gift; she accepted the kitten, but in a strange roundabout way. 

As the bus entered my hometown, I looked out my window; the landscape was recognizable, but the landmarks eerily different somehow, as if certain buildings had been demolished/relocated/replaced during my brief absence.

A Nightmare on Shanks Road

It was the early 1980s and I met Heather Langenkamp/Nancy Thompson.

The dream proper was preceded by this random bit where I was chasing after a faux Heave-Ho.

Unlike a real Heave-Ho, it had two smaller, separate platforms which operated side-by-side rather than a single larger platform, and it was not built strong enough to flip Mario-sized objects. Even though it wasn't capable of launching me into the air, the thing remained dangerous to come into proximity to, so I was cautious in apprehending it. Once I got my grubby little hands on the mechanical bastard, it became a miniature Audrey II and started singing. As I offered it my thumb to suck from, I immediately found myself watching a videotape of Little Shop of Horrors, recording a copy in EP mode as it played.

Suddenly I found myself in the '80s. I don't know if I travelled back in time or this was a universe where I was a baby boomer — the dream was vague in this regard — but there I was, in my late teens, having just watched A Nightmare on Elm Street on the big screen, emerging from the cinema only to meet Heather/Nancy and Johnny Depp/Glen Lantz as they were also coming from watching the movie. Though I said we had all just watched ANOES, it wasn't 1984; Heather/Nancy was still in high school — about 16/17 years old — so the year was 1980/81. Also, though the two had starred together in the movie, Heather/Nancy & Johnny/Glen acted like they didn't know each other and had only now just met for the first time.

As the three of us stood out there, making our acquaintance, I tried my damnedest to keep Heather/Nancy from forming an attraction to Johnny/Glen, striving to get her interested in me instead. It seemed to have worked to some degree, 'cause I soon found myself hanging out with Heather/Nancy and her girlfriends with Johnny/Glen nowhere is sight.

A rusted can of pop and a woman's magazine in hand, one of Heather/Nancy's friends read out a list of the attributes Heather/Nancy found most desirable in a man. From the way she spoke and the combination of words she used, the girl sounded like she was singing the lyrics to a Bruce Springsteen song. I can't precisely remember the lyrics, but there was a line in there going something like "Together, we are drawn to things which will/won't burn us."

Then I woke up.

(I think Wes Craven would've been proud of this dream.)

All the Dream World's a Stage...

It was about 1992/1993, and I was the 15/16-year-old star of a "shot on shitteo" teen sitcom.

My hair was long — so long, it trailed down my back — and styled a mite feminine.

In an episode we were filming, my character joined a play, a committee, or a play committee (the dream was a tad vague). A female character

(played by the incomparable Lindsay Ellis)

was in/on this play/committee; my character quickly became smitten with her. Also in/on this play/committee was another girl (I got the vague sensation this was a girl I knew in real life, but I couldn't get a fix on her identity); my character quickly became smitten with her.

My character ended up bungling his play/committee duties something fierce, drawing the ire of his peers, love interests included.

The Unholy Trinity

Had myself an unwelcome bout of sleep paralysis.

I was in bed, dozing, when I heard my sister calling for me upstairs. Her voice sounded distant, muffled, so I figured I was asleep and dreaming all this and didn’t bother to get up or respond. Then I heard the music from the Pink Floyd song “In the Flesh” playing in the background.

It was if my sister had turned it on at full-volume to rouse me from sleep, though it had the same distant, muffled quality her voice had.

Then I felt myself being shaken. I opened my eyes and saw three figures over me; the first was my father — some 20-30 years younger than he was before his recent passing; the second was a rail-thin man with fine hair and stringy beard who looked vaguely familiar; the third was out in the corner of my eye and I couldn’t see them clearly.

(My sister?)

My father looked kinda-sorta concerned for me, but the second man had something of a malevolent look on his face, and he moved forward in a creepy herky-jerky fashion.

All of them made these unsettling noises, like something between roars and hisses. I shut my eyes and tried to move but couldn’t. Then I felt a weird sensation, like the room was quaking around me. Then it was over and I was fully awake.

(I guess this is what comes of a night spent watching horror movies and reading Hellboy comics.)

Let's Do the Time Warp Again

The earliest part of this dream I recall is standing in the living room and noticing a heavily rewritten-&-reshot version of Stargate Origins playing on TV.

(Unlike the real SGO, the costumes looked good and the plot wasn’t shit.)

My father then started complaining about something, so I left the room.

It was late August, but the weather was unseasonably cool, so it felt more like fall. I found a medium-sized lizard outside; it had grown sluggish from the chilly weather. Carefully, I picked it up — it had sharp teeth and didn’t like being handled, so I wasn’t gonna be careless — then brought it to the garage so it could go into suspended animation in a sheltered area. The Joker then appeared.

The Clown Prince of Crime started handling the lizard, subtly implying he was going to harm the creature. After some minutes spent begging the Joker to let the lizard alone and leave, he lost interest in the animal, set it down, and went away.

I was then taking a leisurely walk in the back yard. A sensation of foreboding fell upon me, a strange “time lapse photography” effect occurred in the sky, and I suddenly found myself in the dead of winter. Going back to my house, I found things were stranger than I ever could have believed; I had experienced a time warp and was now 62 years into the future. Having taken anti-aging drugs, my parents were still alive (indeed, they looked younger and healthier than they do/did in real life) and my sister had had a sex change; she now had man-abs and a three-man army in her pants

(Yet for reasons beyond my understanding, she still wore her hair long and was in makeup.).