Dream Grimoire

Dream one -

I am hanging out with some 'friends.' These are people who do not exist in real life, but my brain has invented them solely for this dream. They are a couple--the girl actually kind of reminds me of the girl who used to live upstairs from my apartment. I never actually spoke to her. The guy, her boyfriend in the dream, is indistinct. We are sitting around their apartment.

They introduce me to their cat. He is a smallish, dark grey male kitten. I can't remember his name. Something like Ivan or James Joyce or Oppenheimer. The kitten and I lock eyes upon being introduced. He has very big green eyes. We stare at each other for a very very long moment. The couple resumes their conversation with each other, ignoring us. Myself and this strange kitten just sit there and stare into each other's eyes, transfixed, for several seconds, the kitten with an almost searching expression, like he is trying to decide something about me. The air becomes pregnant with meaning and I finally whisper "you can talk, can't you?"

The kitten replies, in the voice of young child voice actor, "yeah, I can. Don't tell anybody."

The kitten and I start talking. What about, I can't really remember. Possibly he told me about the secrets that lie in the hearts of dead stars, or the wisdom found just within the event horizon of a black hole, or what it was that laughed in the moment before the Big Bang...

At one point he tries to swallow a telephone or a vacuum cleaner. I tell him "no no, you can't eat that," and pull it out of his mouth, the elongated appliance emerging from his throat like the lamp coming out of Mary Poppins's hand bag. As I slowly pull the object out of the kitten's gaping mouth, I can see all the way inside his body--he is pale pink and hollow and ribbed on the inside just like the whale from Pinocchio. I can see all the way to the back of his body. Some light is shining into him from his butthole.

The kitten and I talk some more. I wake up. It's about 4:30am and I can't get back to sleep right away.

Dream two -

I am at a bonfire or some kind of outdoor party at night. It must be summer. The location is in some small, rundown back street in some small rundown town--it reminds me of a shabby, Chesterfield Township version of Harsen's Island--some place on a waterfront but populated by seedy bungalows, trailer homes, and bait-and-tackle shops that triple as diners and bars.

In my company is a polyglot crew--people from real life--Joey Gunnells, Aaron Aitken, Tony Khaled, possibly Luke Larson--scrubby, unchanged versions of minor characters from high school--Chris Ponton, Tim Papiez, maybe an Ebel (Greg or Ryan, I can't tell in the dream)--and a confusion of redneck/trailer trash types who don't exist outside of this dream.

We're all hanging out and talking. Joe is sitting in the bed of an orange pickup with Papiez and Ponton. He is smoking and expounding upon some subject at length. He is wearing his leather jacket. I keep yelling at Joe, "Why are you smoking? My god, don't you know you're hanging out with Chris Ponton of Vaseline-in-the-hair fame!"

Tony Khaled comes up and starts confronting me. He's pushing me and complaining, in that awkward sort-of-joking way of his, that I think I'm too good for him. He has a cigarette tucked behind his ear, and another one somehow tucked under his dyed black bangs. He is smoking a third. I don't actually answer him, or respond. I merely grin as he shoves me around, half-friendly, half-bullying.

The party tapers off into various conversations that I am not following. Some of the redneck kids are standing behind me. They are talking over a kid sleeping on a bail of hay. One of the redneck kids, a tall boy with longish blonde hair, reaches down and puts his hand on the sleeping kid's face. He starts crushing the kid's face with his bare hand until the kid's head caves in and his eyeballs smoosh out of the sockets and blood starts gushing out his ruptured skull. I stare at this. The redneck kids kind of laugh.

I turn back to the party and after some more conversation one of the redneck kids his crushing someone else's face, maybe Ponton's or Tim Papiez's. The crushee is kind of standing there letting it happen, his head collapsing in a kind of 80's Italian horror movie slow-motion. The lethargic implosion of this random minor high school character's face looks like a cheap foam latex practical effect, which is what makes it all the more gruesome and unnerving.

Now everyone starts noticing what's happening.

Someone yells something at the redneck kids about their band sucking. Someone else says something about them becoming a better band when they take peoples' souls. Suddenly a bunch of really weird-looking rednecks pop out. They have big, colorless moon-faces, stand taller and bigger than everyone else, and they look ready to take souls. Souls for their band to become better.

Mayhem erupts.

A youngish trailer-trash kid appears out of nowhere and wraps his arms around my ribcage. He starts to squeeze. I tell him to please stop squeezing me. It actually hurts. It hurts a lot. He doesn't stop but starts walking down the dirt street, holding me in the air while he squeezes my ribs. I feel like I am suffocating. It really hurts in the dream. I tell him to stop, but he won't. I tell him his band sucks, and he lets up a bit. "Our band won't suck...after we suck out your souls." He grins, his little boy face innocent-looking under his lank, moppy bangs.

As he drags me down the dusty street, chaos all around us, I grab a random farm implement and jab him with it. It breaks. I grab another out of a rack that just happens to be next to us. It looks like an enormous rusty scalpel blade attached to a long wooden handle. Just as the boy starts to squeeze my ribs again, I bring the implement down on him and chop his arms off cleanly in two or three easy slashes. Then I am running away.

My alarm wakes me up at 9am.