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.).

No Soap for You

This dream was set in a Soylent Green-type near future, after the Americas had devolved into Third World countries, where hoarding soap was illegal.

The Mask

got into a fight with a supervillain who resembled Billy Idol.

They unleashed nuclear attacks upon each other, but as they were both essentially omnipotent, they weren’t able to inflict injury on one another.

Then faux Billy became a chrome-sheathed villain with no face.

Every superhero from the MCU confronted Chrome No-Face and crucified him to a crystal objet d’art, reciting a prayer as they did so. I thought to myself the prayer was too exclusively Judeo-Christian for the more syncretic orientation of the Marvel Universe.

I was then inside a dilapidated office building.

While actual office work went on inside some of the rooms, in most people were just partying and engaging in substance abuse and illicit sex.

I was striding room-to-room, lip-syncing to the Nine Inch Nails song “The Hand That Feeds” which was loudly playing from some nebulous source. While doing this, I came across a woman who resembled Tori Amos. I took her by the shoulders, lifted her to eye level, then kissed her succulent lips.

What a Story, Mark/Last Priest of Krypton/Brunette Bonanza/Apple Binldings/Tuning In Tuning On

I had a dream I told my mother and sister about 

They both got a kick out of my descriptions of the plot and Tommy Wiseau’s persona. I know in real life, though, they’d never be able to enjoy The Room; “so bad it’s good” is a concept utterly foreign to them.

* * *

Superman was an ordained Catholic priest.

He took a demonically possessed teenage girl (who may or may not have been my sister) to a cold, dark, abandoned church with broken doors to perform an exorcism. During the exorcism, the demon periodically hopped in-&-out of Superman's body, using his great powers to wreck havoc across the land.

* * *

I met both Heather Langenkamp and Brooke Shields at a convention.

My reaction was thus.

* * *

In my hometown, on the waterfront of the lake closest to me, were buildings constructed from old apple bins

which had been arranged/stacked together then bolted in place.

* * *

I was watching/inside some Kim Wilde music videos. At least one of these videos had been shot in my hometown. In this particular video, Ms. Wilde walked backward through town, from the lake to the highway. As this was happening, the seasons were passing in reverse, from summer through to winter.

During the dream, I caught some of the lyrics; they weren’t bad, but could’ve used some polishing.

(I forgot them soon after I awoke.)

Outside the video, Ms. Wilde and I met up in a local thrift store. We made chit-chat in front of a small shelf bearing gaudy, ugly clothing.

Diabolical Death

Had quite the complicated dream. Most of the details have escaped me, but here’s what I recall:

I was a kid again. Me and the other children in my class had taken a field trip to some rural farmhouse while had lain abandoned since the '90s. The house was very strange; the front door and doggy door were in the shape of a human and dog, respectively, and there was this general atmosphere of foreboding localized over the property even though the weather was bright and clear.

I got separated from my classmates while exploring inside. That’s when I found a pantry door which had been nailed shut since the former occupant’s disappearance. I got the door open, and that’s when the former occupant — the undead, desiccated corpse of a rather rotund woman — lurched out of the pantry, arms outstretched for my throat.

I got a chainsaw and sawed her arms off.

That didn’t stop her; prehensile tentacles sprang from her arm stumps and ensnared me.

Somehow, I managed to maneuver the chainsaw into her mouth and promptly rammed it down her throat. That put an end to her right-quick.

Swing on This/Bart Simpson: Husband, Father, Neither/Cat Baby

I had a dream I was Jerry Cantrell. It was the mid '90s, and Layne Staley and I were writing a song together about hatred for neighbours.

During the writing process, we both realized we had to incorporate a famous Hollywood starlet into the song’s narrative. Charlie Sheen was there. He suggested an obscure actress from the Golden Age of Hollywood. We decided the actress had to be both young and contemporary, so we didn’t run with his suggestion. We ended up choosing Denise Richards.

I recall the first few lines of that stanza:

🎵Denise Richards lives next door to me. Looking sweet and pretty as can be.🎵

Essentially, the stanza was about the narrator realizing he hated Denise Richards 'cause she was a neighbour, too.

As we were finishing the song, Staley offered this as the closing line: “No singing, just a hum.” There was actually a bit more to the line than that, but by that point, I had run out of fresh pages in the notebook I was writing in and my OCD wouldn’t allow me to jot the line down on a page with even a minimum of writing on it. Once I finally found a clean page, I asked Staley to recite the line again, since I'd forgotten the extra bits, but he was too far into a heroin-induced delirium to care anymore.

* * *

A grown up Bart Simpson fell in love with a green-haired Allison Taylor.

After they were married and a daughter followed, wife (and possibly daughter) were murdered by gangsters and/or a fallen angel. Bart then took to the bottle pretty hard and became a drunken souse.

* * *

I had a child, a baby girl. The mother was nowhere to be found, so I gave her to some cats to nurse.

The cat milk had a mutagenic effect on the child; she developed cat-like ears and black fur over her body.

I didn’t mind having a cat-person for a daughter. I was just happy to be a father.

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.