With "Friends" Like This, Who Needs Enemies?

I was sitting in my 7th grade classroom, watching an episode from a new season of Friends.

The episode was strange in that it wasn’t comedic at all. The tone was dead-serious, and the plot very bizarre; Monica was experiencing some weird Twilight Zone scenario where the world around her was transforming into one straight from a soap opera; even the look changed halfway through from a modern HD digital look to a worn-out, hazy, shot-on-video look.

And David Arquette was the guest star.

Taking a break from the episode, I stepped out of the classroom, and found myself outside in my front yard. I wandered under a tree or into a field (or both at different times), where these tiny, mite-sized black widow spiders began swarming over me.

They began feeding off me, which started leaving me giddy and light-headed.

After a minute or two, I returned back inside the classroom to continue watching Friends. I repeated this scenario several times, taking a break from the TV to go outside, allowing evermore spiders to feed off me.

And art was imitating life; on Friends, Monica & co. were going outdoors, where they, too, were serving as smorgasbord to tiny mite-sized black widows. In the end, everyone — myself included — were left desiccated husks drained dry of all fluids.

I think I remained alive in this state.

Revamp of the Jedi/Cavewerewolf/Masters of the (Parallel) Universe/Tim Sizemore in "The Grave Stalker"/I, Norman Bates

Had myself a dream where I watched footage from an early cut of Return of the Jedi. Here’re the details I recall from the dream:

• Luke had a different lightsaber. It was mallet-shaped, with a red blade.
• There was a scene of Luke slaughtering Ewoks.
• The big plot twist wasn’t that Leia was Luke’s sister, but that Darth Vader was actually his grandfather. Luke’s actual father had never fallen to the dark side; he might not have ever even been a Jedi.
• “Anakin” was played by Mark Hamill himself.

Here’s what Mark looked like in the old-age makeup:

* * *

An archaic human

(a Cro-Magnon, a Neanderthal, or a hybrid between the two)

became a werewolf.

The details escape me, but he wasn’t an animalistic killing machine; he retained his human intelligence and used his lycanthropy only in defense of his tribe.

* * *

Godlike entities transported myself and a number of other individuals to another planet/universe. Once there, we became overlords in possession of advanced technology.

I befriended one of my fellow overlords

(She resembled Suzanne Vega, but was curvier.)

and began hanging out at her citadel/supermarket, where I drank an entire pitcher of ice-cold milk which was just divine. She and I eventually entered into an intense romantic/sexual relationship.

Then she, I, and the other overlords were transported back to Earth, along with our advanced citadels.

* * *

I watched a horror/thriller starring Tom Sizemore.

Sizemore’s character was a real piece of nasty work; he volunteered at a soup kitchen only to deliberately contaminate the food with soap, rancid fat, and other unmentionables; he was a grave robber; and it was heavily implied he was a sexual predator who had molested his own daughter.

As I recall, the plot was about him stalking a beautiful woman who happened to live next door to his favourite cemetery.

* * *

Norman Bates and I had been combined into a single person living during the early '80s.

I wish I could describe this dream in detail, but it’s too convoluted to make sense of. All I can say with certainty is that the mummified corpses of Norma Bates and one of my victims looked incredibly cheap — like “gray alien rag doll” cheap.

Also, Susan Clark made an appearance.

Curse of Tales from the Gimpy Hospital

This dream began as one of my irritating “back to high school” dreams,

but evolved into a dream where I was a patient in a hospital. The chief physician

(who looked exactly like Bob Gunton)

wanted me discharged from the hospital. IIRC, I was actually being paid to be there, and Dr. Gunton didn’t like that. Plus he was involved in illicit business dealings, and didn’t want me around to uncover them.

There was another doctor there, a nice guy who kinda looked like Brian McNamara. 

He wanted me to stick around and tried devising ways to prolong my stay. In the end, though, Dr. Gunton got what he wanted; I was discharged. I stuck around, though, and tried to keep out of Dr. Gunton’s sight as I searched the hospital for clues. IIRC, I eventually found out that he was in league with evil Lovecraftian entities.

At one point in the dream, while I was wandering about the corridors, Audrey Horne from Twin Peaks manifested out of thin air before me.

She had come from the past, 'cause she was still young. She bore fresh burn scars, so I reckon she came from some point in time shortly following the second season finale, after she was caught in that bank explosion. Just as suddenly as she appeared, she vanished.

Later, the present-day Audrey showed up.

I, Dr. McNamara, and she discussed the event; she had no recollection of ever having experienced such a time warp in her past.

(I think David Lynch would be proud of this dream.)

[Un]Charmed

It was the late '80s-to-early '90s. A trio of young boys

were luring/rounding up the other neighbourhood kids to their basement, where they tortured/murdered them. The three boys, not being normal mortals, had bewitched the adults into inaction.

This left the neighbourhood kids to their own devices. In time, a large group of kids attacked the trio. Cornering the three in their own basement, the neighbourhood kids mutilated them – dismembering and disemboweling them – before tossing their still-living bodies onto a funeral pyre. It turns out the three boys weren’t really as young as they seemed. They were warlocks, hundreds of years old, who had kept themselves young and alive through sorcery. As their bodies burned, the magic which sustained them was nullified; their entrails and hacked off limbs rapidly aged and decayed into nothing as the centuries caught up with them.

The dream ended on a non-sequitur. A wooden bench which had some nebulous connection to the trio morphed into a pseudo-werewolf. Then a real werewolf showed up, forced the pseudo-werewolf into a corner, and tried enticing it with a cookie into performing a back-flip. When the pseudo-werewolf refused to perform the trick, the werewolf tore it to pieces.

Russian Drug-Trafficking Ponies vs. Yog-Sothoth/The Lady Vanishes/Wet Fever Dream

I got mixed up with a small group of Russian drug traffickers operating out of some snowbound region north of the tree line.

Bryan Adams was a social studies instructor, the ringleader of the traffickers, or both. They were trafficking blue crystal meth à la Breaking Bad.

The traffickers invited me to an orgy. One of the Russians, a 40-something blonde with a nice rump, offered said rump to me.

*↑*

But the orgy was taking place in a small, crapped office with garbage strewn everywhere; my libido was swiftly overtaken by disgust and I couldn’t stand to linger there, so I got the hell out.

*↓*

The traffickers transformed into MLP-style ponies.

A Lovecraftian deity – probably Yog-Sothoth – showed up and consumed the traffickers.

* * *

Andrea Nemeth

and I were each other’s first, true loves. Though we’d been separated at some point in our early teens, we managed to reconnect through the Internet during the late 2000s. Then around 2008, she vanished abruptly. She ceased sending me e-mails and her presence online became nil.

The only physical clue I had to the cause of her disappearance was a case of insulin vials.

For the next several years, I tried figuring out what happened to her. I got nowhere.

* * *

It was frigid and snowing outside. I had come down with a cold, and I was so physically weak that I kept falling over on my face, nearly paralyzed. At some point, I had a fever dream within a dream that I was clumsily trying to make love to a middle aged woman with long, straight, raven-black hair.

The New Librarian/Nic Olié/So-Called Chaos

I paid a visit to my local library. While at the check-out counter, I saw a new librarian had been brought on staff. She was five-to-ten years younger than I and rather short, only in the neighbourhood of five-feet tall. She wore her ash blond hair short and feathered, and her eyes were blue and watery. She wasn’t drop dead gorgeous, but certainly pretty. She was wearing a gray-and-cream striped T-shirt which really hugged her modest but perky chest.

We got to talking. That’s when she made it clear to me in no uncertain terms that if we weren’t in such a public place, she’d jump my bones right then and there. We made arrangements to meet somewhere after she got off of work to fool around.

I got the sense this woman was going to be nothing but One Night at McCool’s-style trouble.

* * *

I watched a version of The Phantom Menace where Ric Olié was played by Nicolas Cage instead of Ralph Brown.

“The deflector shield is too strong! Oh no not the blasters! Not the blasters! AHH they’re in my eyes!! My EYES!! AHHHHHHH!!!”

* * *

Dreamed that Alanis Morissette, nude save for a pair of panties she’d bought from Sears, had covered herself head-to-toe in red body paint.

I Can't Get No Satisfaction

I was invited to a party being held at a spacious mansion. Once I got in, I found I was one of hundreds of guests present. The door locked behind me, and I found I couldn’t escape the place. The hostess turned out to be the ghost of a woman who resembled Charlotte Rampling.

She kept her own perfectly preserved corpse strung up and used as a marionette.

I went up to the bar and ordered a glass of absinthe. Even though I was clearly thirty years old, the bartender refused to sell me any alcohol without first presenting ID. I didn’t have any ID on me, so the bartender refused to serve me the drink. I spent much of the rest of the dream wandering about the mansion in search of absinthe, but couldn’t procure any. I even came across someone else’s derelict glass of absinthe, but when I picked it up, it turned into a cup of coffee before my eyes. In between trying to satisfy my absinthe craving, I tried ordering White Russians as an alternative, much to the same degree of success.

At one point in the dream, I met Tori Amos, who got flirtatious with me. I repaid the favour, only to have her almost immediately sour towards me and ignore me henceforth.