I don’t remember most of my dreams. I don’t retell the ones I do remember, because we all know that dreams tend to be odd (and boring). I also think people pay way too much attention to dreams as ‘signals of the subconscious’, which I find silly: I dream about things that came to mind during the day or week, not necessarily things that I ‘care’ about. Plus I find dreams to be a bit Heisenbergish, in that the more concrete information I excavate from memory, the less certain I am that some particulars were actually experienced in the dream rather fabricated in reconstruction.
However, a streak of fitful nights has produced a couple dreams (one pointless, one a nightmare) that I remember way too vividly. And seeing Paul Ford write about dreaming in Java code—code!—reminds me that mine aren’t all that weird. The first: I was at some sort of customs checkpoint filling out stupid forms, and listening to the administering agent talk to some people about politics. ‘Separation of Powers’, he was telling them, is absolutely ‘essential for a democratic country’. In actual life when someone says that, I’d just be skeptical, but in the dream I wanted to sock him in the face for being an idiot. His clueless exegesis didn’t stop there: he was talking about the nascent Iraqi state, and decided to prove his point by pulling examples from the Ottoman Empire, and then, of all things, Alexander the Great. I then realized that the idiotic questions I was filling out (biographical information about my mother’s youth, etc.) were actually optional ‘sponsored’ questions from TV shows, seeking character backgrounds for story ideas! So I put a spiteful red X through all of the optional blocks and handed the form in.
A cynical Jungian might proffer that, especially in light of the next dream (into which he’d read ‘alienation’), customs agents babbling stupidly while handing out government forms sponsored by TV shows is basically what I think of America, heh. But it isn’t. I think the early psychoanalysts did us a big disservice by their fetishistic devotion to ‘Freudian slips’ and the like. I mean, there’s enough to sieve through in the sea of conscious thought that grasping at straws of subconscious indicators seems pointless. And dangerous, as with quack therapists who conjure up ‘repressed memories‘ of nonexistent childhood abuse. In any case, since I can’t help but notice the irony in talking unqualifiedly about psychology after ranting about dumb political lectures, let’s move on.
The only nightmares I really remember are from childhood, but they were as much ‘adventures’ as nightmares: running down stairs as blood swept onto the tiles behind us, or waking up just before getting killed by a sword, even dying once, at the hands of a fluttering killer bat. Then there was a flood of red, fading to black, with a low-digit number suspended in view. I don’t think too much about the afterlife, but I suppose it’ll be somewhat anticlimatic if all we get on the other side is a flood of red and a final darkness.
This particular nightmare—rather, series of nightmares—had to do with my street having suddenly ‘vanished’. I was lost, couldn’t get home, everyone was confused, nothing was right. Some people were still human, many were ghouls. It was a series of vignettes, and after each one ended I’d be like ‘ok, I was dreaming then, it’s all sane now’, or ‘wow that sucked, but at least I escaped’, only to to run into things like a sympathetic soul who was agreeing with me, sitting on a desk to my right, suddenly disfiguring into a monster. Then more screaming, more running, more isolation.
I only remember one of these vignettes well, probably because it was one of the more ‘adventurous’ ones. I walked into a bar and leaned over a partition to ask a lady what the way home was. Her face was painted to look just like Frankenstein: green skin, hollow jowls, the works. She was so soft spoken that the first time I said “excuse me” I didn’t hear the reply. So I said “excuse me” again, and she nodded vigourously, mouthing softly to ask what I wanted. Sitting across from her, a scrawny guy with a high pitched voice asked another person at the table, “Do you ever think that maybe I look like a total badass sometimes?” Scrawny high-pitch was covered in green tattoos. She told me the path home and I left, but it didn’t occur to me to wonder why she was painted like a monster—there’s no accounting for taste, you know?
I somehow hitched a ride home, sitting in front with the driving man’s female companion between us. We rolled onto the street and it had indeed vanished: people were wandering around puzzledly, also looking for their houses, stumbling with weak backs. The air was misty, like there had just been a poison gas attack. Driving around confusedly, we stopped and stared at a pale yellow teardrop in the sky. Somehow, we suddenly realized that it was a scout for the ‘other side’. Now the teardrop started attacking us. It almost shattered our windshield by throwing a big blob of yellowish sap. We couldn’t speed past our assailant because the teardrop was somehow holding our car still, so it kept spasmatically flinging sap at us. The woman had almost lost her mind from shrieking bloody murder. The view was a bit like scenes from the Jurassic Park movie: dark night, reflectively illuminated glass, breaths heavy with uncertainty and fear. The teardrop ceased spraying for a bit, and I was fervently hoping that we weren’t going to be hit with another big blob that would finally break our windshield—but the resumed spraying was still just light. Except the liquid was now blood.
Our windshield was being sprayed with dark red trickling blood.
This left us rather alarmed.
Finally we were able to move—in reverse. But slowly, at about walking speed. And because we didn’t have enough problems yet, a skeleton with a machete began stalking us from the front, approaching the driver’s side, swinging for our windshield. We found ourselves backed into a huge group of people, or ‘beings’ if not people. Finally, normality! Someone yelled ‘kill them!’ The masses of our helpers were going to crush our assaulters like bugs. But guess who ‘them’ was? Us! So now we had a sap-flinging teardrop, a machete-bearing skeleton, and an army of random attackers after our battered car. A couple of large mechanical beings, striped in black and white, starting stomping towards us, gunning for our windsheild with god-knows-what. To top off the campiness, bad industrial music started playing in the background. I don’t recall what happened next—given the slight mismatch, not knowing is probably best.
I must say, I’m disappointed at the cinematic amateurishness of my ‘subconscious mind’. Women in Frankenstein masks, sky-suspended popping whiteheads, animated skeletons ripped off ‘Pirates of The Caribbean’, killer robots out of Japanese animation studios and an inexplicably crippled vehicle? Come on.
For what it’s worth, I do believe that the best horror fiction deals with this ‘world turned against me’ aspect, such as two stories I can’t remember the titles to, some parts of ‘The Excorcism of Emily Rose’, and to an extent, ‘lost in the wilderness’ movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Wolf Creek, perhaps Hostel, etc.
(Speaking of Hostel, Lance Arthur guts it in an amusing ‘review’.)
PS. While on the topic of horror: I walked onto a subway carriage the other day to see a girl holding, between her thighs, a woman’s severed head. Jeez, how realistic do they make cosmetician’s models these days? Too realistic!
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