Back to the Eighties

I travelled back in time to 1981. Somehow, my arrival caused a retrograde ripple effect, 'cause I found the 1981 I was in different from the one of the history books. Return of the Jedi had already been filmed and released; Pepsi came in bulbous, peanut-shaped bottles; and global warming had already reached 2020-level severity. For some reason, my physical form kept oscillating between that of Marty and Lorraine McFly.

The dream realigned. I was still in 1981, but I was in my own body and my mother was with me. We were walking through the crowded streets of a big city like Vancouver or Toronto, followed by an Indian woman who was literally just a head with two feet.

We tried to lose the walking head in the crowd, but she kept right behind us. She demanded my mother give her her clothes, so my mother kept stripping off articles of clothing and tossing them behind her.

The dream realigned again. Now I was now in my hometown, in the late '80s/early '90s. The landmarks were different, in keeping with me being in the past, though the architecture recalled the '50s rather than the '80s, with lots of neon-fronted shops.

Then I slipped further back in time, to the 1880s. The landmarks were really different now, the architecture looking straight out of Oz, with emerald green buildings. A train station stood where the local high school would stand inside a century. Beyond the station, where there are trees/hills in real life, was a sprawling sea.

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.