Strange Dreams

The first thing I remember is my house from senior year college, a tidy white three room in Home Park. However, it’s now been transformed into the last house on the left, complete with brown, rotting wood, broken windows, crooked towers of shingles and brick. Inside the floor is brown with mud, carpet scraps, trash. But it’s a jolly place, full of buzzing stoners, wayward peers from my sister’s Uni, maybe a few granola types, and some scabby skunk-rockers doing the jig. The back half has been converted into a greenhouse shack, except it’s open air and girded by jagged mesh fencing. Inside, dog’s yip and play with smudgy unidentifiable objects.

And who should be the patron of this grungy abode? None other than Richard Adams, prophet of this dirty cult, leading his flock through the valley of the shadow of trash. He’s all grins, that beaming smile so true. At least, that’s the faulty snapshot I have of him. We chat unmemorable lines, small talk about the weather and the changing architecture. “Can’t say I love what you’ve done to the place, but it does have a certain rustic feel to it. In the hardcore urban hunter-gatherer sense.”

After that, the logic of the scene fades, as it always does in dreams, and I’m driving my car through the streets of Seattle. It’s the vide-game version, with hairsplitting turns and absurd inclines. In my zippy auto, the pavement might as well be a BMX trail. I’m pulling all sorts of aerials, floating weightless through the upper atmosphere, eye-level with the Space Needle.

Then I realize I’ve gone too far, I’m not headed for a graceful sloping double yellow line, but a shimmering blue expanse. But the GTI might as well have sprung a parachute, because I’m not plummeting, but drifting into the sea. There’s a strange fear of death – Newton’s age-old logic states I should soon be liquidized via blunt force trauma inside a plastic and steel box. Dream logic lets me plunge underwater like a whale shark in an 8 million gallon tank.

I’m not alone in this wet haven; dozens of others are honing their backstrokes. Fellow victims of foolish unhindered air? Undoubtedly, and they come complete with personalized memorial totems. Not tiny woodcarvings that float on the crash site – huge canoes and logs, painted red or black, festooned with the assorted native gods of the Pacific Northwest.

These logs sink under the surface, the entire spectacle choreographed into some twisted Disney masquerade. We’ve got the living dead, bloated from seawater, veritable hors d’oeuvres for crustaceans and mollusks, doing the twist at twenty fathoms below. Along with red spinning totem poles. I was half-expecting Sebastian and Arial to pop out from under the coral, when our festive scene was brutally cut by some sort of advert.

It’s Britney Spears humping a blue iPod-esque gadget, moaning to a hip hop soundtrack. She’s back from the rib-cookouts and baby birthin’ in all her photoshopped glory. Some phosphoric streamer things twirl around her gleaming airbrushed thigh, then we’re back with the showtunes.

Simultaneously, in some otherworldly post-modern way, I’m off sitting at a desk, reading this gelatinous glob of nonsense on an internet forum, fohguild.org or Something Awful. I’m hardly amused – the gifs represent archaic rehashes and mundane wankery. Someone rates the thread 3 Britney Heads, complete with garish animation of the spinning skulls. Meh, I’d give it 3.5, and wouldn’t hesitate to wield the p-shop katana to fashion the bisected cranium.

Then alarm, the relentless patter of rain, and the true otherworld is calling. My first conscious resolution is to record the madness in print, and publish on teh interweb. Hoo Rah.