Potatocide/T1J, Ticks, & emigranTs/An Alkie, Drunk/Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said: The Motion Picture

Monica Lewinsky was walking along a rocky mountain path all by herself, carrying in her arms an enormous Yukon Gold potato, when a man with a machete-sized butcher knife leapt out and attacked her. He tried stabbing her through the potato, but it got stuck in the tuber. After failing to pull it free, he ran away.

* * *

It was the early '90s. The YouTuber T1J

took his dog for a stroll through a boggy grassland. Walking through the long, moist grass, the dog picked up a number of ticks.

Back in town, T1J ran into a Haitian emigrant who spoke little English. The Haitian cleaned T1J's dog free of ticks, free of charge.

The Haitian worked as a cook at a "greasy spoon" diner owned by Vera Miles.

Dilapidated and unsanitary, the diner was failing.

* * *

The end times were upon us. A species of flying, biting insectoids of unknown origin appeared in massive swarms, attacking and draining of life-force all beings they encountered — even ghosts.

One of my sister's drunking buddies, having run out of booze, left the safety of the enclosed shelters to procure more. Contact with him soon ceased, phone and text messages going unanswered. My sister went into a frenzy, intent on venturing out to find him. We were forced to restrain her, heedless of her desperate pleas.

* * *

In the '70s, my mother wrote an adapted screenplay of Philip K. Dick's Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. It was an adaptation in name only; the plot and characters were wholly original. The screenplay was picked up by a major studio and made into a movie starring Yaphet Kotto and Leslie Nielsen.

Kotto's character was the primary antagonist, a hitman hired to eliminate a number of different people. Nielsen's was the decoy protagonist, a detective tasked with apprehending the hitman.

At some point in the film, the hitman sent the detective sliding down the side of a skyscraper to his doom.

From the Dream Archives: This Dream Is Fuckin' RAW!

I honestly thought I'd finished delving into the Dream Archives, but while browsing through old posts on a forum I frequent, I came across a transcript of a dream I had had on the morning of that date. It's from 2013, predating the first dream from the Dream Archives I shared on this blog by almost a year.

* * *

(ORIGINAL ENTRY DATE: 12 AUGUST 2013)

I had the weirdest dream this morning. Very, very weird.

I dreamed I went to some pristine white auditorium/kitchen to get some tutoring in math from Gordon Ramsay, who then happily had a fancy cappuccino with a large, layered cake floating in the middle of it made up for me. When I informed him I hadn't actually paid for the course and couldn't due to other commitments, he got angry and had other people eat/drink my cappuccino cake until only an inverted pyramid covered in silver foil was left sitting in the bowl.

Then some weird semi-sexual crap happened involving some '50s-type song playing in the air, Laura Dern trying to land some role in a play while wearing surgical gloves, and me sneaking past glass rooms full of exercise equipment in a slo-mo search for an exit while an unseen married couple conversed.

From there, I left the auditorium/kitchen, and then was chased by a pack of police dogs for crossing some layers of dried mud rings inexplicably called an aqueduct, escaping only when they were distracted by other police dogs chasing an alternate version of me. I then ran up a steep ramp/flight of stairs, found an exercise machine sitting there at the top, and asked myself "Who needs to use a machine like this after climbing this monster?"

And then I woke up.

4th Anniversary Special!

Today is the fourth anniversary of Dreams of a Randy Git-Fiend's existence. I neglected posting the last three anniversaries, so this one's been a long time coming, Luckily, I have a nice, full dream to report.

* * *

I struck up a conversation with a girl I had just met. She wore blue jeans and a pale gray t-shirt with dark red lettering on the front. She was quite lovely, a couple years older than I, with long waist-length black/dark brown hair.

(She looked quite a bit like Crystal Gayle, though her eyebrows weren't quite so arched and her eyes a less intense blue.)

She was new in town, and she inquired about good colleges/universities in the area. Sheepish, I admitted I had no post-secondary education and so wasn't the most knowledgeable on the subject. She smiled and told me I was cute. I was touched, as no girl has ever complimented me on my looks.

At some point in the dream, I was either playing Star Fox on the SNES or was physically in the game. Either way, a variant of the "Out of this Dimension" stage was involved.

At another point in the dream, I was in the auditorium of a local college/university. Seated on the stage were two girls. One was a very tall, broad-shouldered, quite attractive redhead who wore her hair up. Beside her was a shorter, more slender blonde who wore her frizzy hair loose. I recognized both as students from my high school, both in grades higher than mine, who I was familiar with but had never actually been introduced to.

I was walking home when I came across a pack of apes and ape/dog hybrids who were smuggling loaves of bread. They attacked, latching onto and biting me.

 (The bites were painful, though they didn't manage to break the skin.)

As I lurched through the doorstep of my home, I found my parents entertaining guests, who just so happened to be the masters of these animals. Using a combination of whistles and sign language, they tried calling them off, to not effect. I soon freed myself of the brutes. One of the guests apologized for the creatures' behaviour. In a foul mood, I basically told him to go fuck himself.

As this was going down, Jordan Peterson was present, holding a lecture in my home. Still surly, of no mind to passively absorb his reactionary tripe, I essentially called him a double-talkin' jive motherfucker. Insulted, he left.

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

The Infamous Lake Country Wildfire of '17

I, my parents, and my sister were out visiting neighbours when a wildfire sparked off to the east of us. It was so intense, it sent a veritable pillar of flame into the sky, a thick blanket of gray smoke unfurling to cover the firmament. The fire was very close — several hundred metres away at most — and due to its ferocity, it was believed it would grow beyond control and overtake our homes before fire fighters could arrive to contain it.

Fearful for the fates of my pets and belongings, against the warnings of all others, I took off in a dead run for home to collect who and what I could in the short time allotted. Something then happened to me, something which knocked me out cold. When I came to in the hospital, weeks had gone by. From my family, I learned that our home had been caught in the fire; all our possessions had been destroyed and one of our dogs had died.

The dream then jumped forward in time ten or twenty years. I found myself cutting across the grounds of the UBC Okanagan campus, where I crossed paths with one of the female students.

(She was the spitting image of Keegan Connor Tracy.)

I inquired if she knew of the infamous Lake Country Wildfire of '17; she said she did. I then asked her if she'd like to come with me to visit the old neighbourhood; she said she did. Together, we made the trip on-foot to my old neighbourhood. The townscape had transformed considerably since the 2010s. For example, where there had once been a small church now stood a series of Arby's restaurants.

(Arby's had transitioned from a chain of sandwich restaurants to a Dairy Queen clone in the intervening decades.)

Arriving on the site of where my house had stood, we found no remaining trace of it. In its stead were several white houses and sheds, some enveloped in clear plastic, all smouldering. There was even a Chow Chow lying on a front yard who was ashy and smoky.

(He was alive and uninjured in spite of this (I suppose some dogs are just more fire-retardant than others.).).

My companion pondered on how the area could still be smouldering after all these years; I gave an existential answer about how the location still retained the memory of that fire in its soil or something poetic like that, but I knew what was happening was truly the direct result of a recent wildfire.

All Dogs Go to Heaven (And Sometimes Come Back)

Dreamt that I was visited by the spirit of my dog, Sheba, who's been dead since 2011. She appeared to me as she had appeared throughout much of her life — chunky, but without the mass of tumours which had developed on her chest in the years preceding her passing. Accompanying her were the spirits of several other dogs, some of whom I recognized, others I didn't. They hadn't come to haunt me; they just wanted me to know that death was not the end.

R. I. P.

Sheba

c. 2000 – 2011