Sleep...
2000
You arrive suddenly at a shallow river flowing through thick jungle. On the other side, a silverback gorilla with a spear, and a mask of mud and straw.
You regard each other silently for a moment.
“What is this place?” you call out.
The gorilla-man pauses. “We both know where we are.”
It’s true. You do know. But you do not want to accept.
“You must be thirsty,” he says. “Come down to the water and drink. It’s very sweet.”
You want to drink, but you do not like the tone of the gorilla-man. He would snatch you, you know.
(The mud mask is there because he is fucking rotting away dead! There is only fetor-slick skull beneath it.)
Many more times you find yourself back here, and each time there are more gorillas in mud masks, watching you, imploring you to cross over... One in the ford, close enough to snatch you...
You surmise, after a time, that they are in the Land of the Dead.
You are wrong.
You are in the Land of the Dead—they are in Limbo.
They want what you have, an afterlife.
2015
Garbage trucks downshift and gun black pennants from the pipes in order to crawl up the slope of a Möbius strip highway; as they invert across the sky the trash begins to spill out and rain down, only it isn’t trash, it’s babies, and people run to catch them in buckets and tubs (some padded with hasty quilts, some not) and as they thump down into the lucky bins and unlucky ground some onlookers get creamed with a six-story baby to the head, knocked flat, and the rest begin fighting on the gore-slicked pavement over the best parts, feeding and pulling hair as the first truck comes unstuck from the asphalt clouds and begins its ponderous, energy-gathering descent toward the crowd below...
2016
I had a cut on my arm, and as I investigated with gentle fingertips I felt a strange lump inside. I pressed and prodded and finally expressed the thing with not inconsiderable—but curiously pain-free—effort. Turning it over in my hands and wiping away blood and tissue the thing suddenly resolved into a weird teratoma: conjoined fetal skulls.
Being hollow, I decided I’d use it as a dice cup.
⁂
I was in an Ace of Base cover band.
I’d like to think we were called something cool like “Ass of Bass” but I didn’t have time to figure out the band name what with our whirlwind international stadium tour. Actual dream-thought: “Wow, fifty-thousand people are about to be deeply disappointed.” But somehow they loved it even though we weren’t nearly as good as the source material and I seemed to be organically predisposed to being incapable of remembering the lyrics.
⁂
2018
the man-frazzle on the throne leered from the smoke
⁂
a bikini rod is a lead dildo designed to prevent bikinis from going critical
⁂
Vacuum had become currency, and all the mines were in the sky.
Everyone carried around little metal flasks, and you paid for something by letting air hiss into your flask.
Using a pump to create more vacuum was counterfeiting.
2019
I went off-roading in deep desert canyons with J.K. Rowling. Afterward, she invited me to a party for billionaires, where I stumbled into a couple making hasty love in a bathroom. The man was in a hospital bed, complete with incomplete gown, tubes and wires. The woman invited me to join in but I just wasn’t sure how that might work, so I demurred.
⁂
I was in Italy, and there were no bathrooms.
⁂
My wife woke up, stretched, and said, “I was having a good dream, so I wanted to finish it.”
“What was it about?” I asked.
“We were swinging—”
“???”
“—but it was for a good cause. We did it to break up an international spy ring; we were having the press conference about it when I woke up.”
Upon further questioning I learned it also involved Disneyland, numerical tattoos, animatronics, me taunting the animatronics and the animatronics painting me with goo—a goo that would allow them to track us anywhere in the world.
This is pretty much why we’ve been married 30 years.
2020
The dreamgirl said I fucked better than Arnold Schwarzenegger, so I got that going for me.
⁂
The board game I designed in my sleep last night had two resources: chrome & blood.
⁂
Fog is actually ghoul urine—they piss it into air after they devour a corpse, and in enormous quantities.
⁂
The good news: The Fountain of Youth has been discovered! Peel back the years! Live smooth and bendy and pain-free like you did in an earlier onion-layer of yourself!
The bad news: It requires threading a throbbing lumpy-chunky vat-grown umbilicus from a lady’s hoo-ha to a man’s belly button, and they have to remain within five feet of each other for months and months and months like an eye-rolling performance art piece.
The worser news: It only works for men, and for some reason men are having a hard time finding women who will put up with that shit.
⁂
The dog has dog toys that contain microscopic pixel art made from individual atoms which require a special viewer to see. Patrick Stewart warns me that I shouldn’t look at them too much, as every time you look—aw, shit, there goes another one.
⁂
Riann Wilson had a ludicrous horse penis, and wanted to shoot some hot “lucky Pierre” action with his girlfriend and another man who also had a tentacular member. The kink was that this wouldn’t be any mere x-rated movie, but an x-ray movie, so really just grindy skeletons with ghost-meat wafting around them. I’m not sure if I was the director or coffee boy, but at one point I accidentally walked in front of the beam and stood there, gawking, for something like four astronauts’ worth of chest x-rays.
⁂
a fragment:
by concentrating really hard, like so hard I could only hold onto it for the briefest of moments, I could shapeshift—not into terrestrial animals but things completely alien and unknowable...
and then my mind would flag and I’d pop back into a people shape
⁂
The aliens were ultradense gray prisms, man-sized, thin and angled—but I didn’t know that yet as they were wearing people-suits. They were very helpful, nudging me in all the right directions as I tried to figure out the mysterious flight characteristics of the UFO I saw. It spun with a wobble due to the hideous mass of the pilots themselves! When I saw through their ruse (imagine a pry bar as heavy as a truck inside a blowup doll) they showed me another human who knew them, one they had convinced to build his house over a volcanic vent which they then triggered. And that’s how I came to do all this petty shoplifting, officer—they demand Slim Jims and nail polish, and they’ll kill me if I don’t!
Then there was a hazy part about my hotel room, and how one entire wall was open to a busy shopping mall, which made getting dressed interesting.
⁂
There is a robot crawling toward Las Vegas. It used to walk but somebody smashed its legs. What will it do when it gets to Vegas? No one knows... but it won’t be good. People drive out into the desert to see it, to stand on its back, to attach their cars by ropes and chains and have a picnic while it drags them ever on. Some people put things in its way for it to crawl over or around or tunnel under, stunts it pulls with dogged, machine-like tenacity. There is a robot crawling toward Las Vegas...
⁂
The mariachis—hundreds of them—were dead in the park because the cartel had glued their faces shut. I drove over a few, with great wincing regret, in my efforts to flee the scene.
⁂
A titanic moth, dead, gliding still in the upper atmosphere... A city built upon its back, flight maintained by the Pinion Guild. No one talks about the Antennae People... or the Mouth Mines.
⁂
The guy in the disco cowboy outfit wore an undergarment body rig that vibrated him into invisibility so he could shoot people at the party... Luckily for all of us Will Smith had a head clamp that vibrated his head at the same frequency, so he shot him first.
⁂
The Melungeons who were hosting the convention in the swamp had bred two enormous hamsters—like the size of mid-size sedans—to act as guardians. As I was making my way out of the swamp I saw that they had killed a stag, and though they ignored me (perhaps I still smelled of the convention?), I kept my souvenir cardboard tube pointed at them, knowing it wouldn’t do a goddamn thing if they decided to charge.
⁂
This is what happens when you flip randomly through the choose-your-own-adventure dream:
- The robot was a three-foot black chrome skull suspended between two wagon wheels, and it wanted my burrito. We fled (the burrito and I), but the burrito was so scared it shit itself, beans down my forearm, tortilla gone floppy, as we hurriedly picked through the ruins, and that terrible, hungry robot rolled impossibly ever on...
- As the armored troop carrier screeched to a halt in front of me, its angular door scything upward, I shook my lunchbox, a self-constructing mini-missile launcher that unfolded over my shoulder and into my hand, placing the trigger over the pad of my right index finger—I squeezed and popped a pencil-thin missile that tracked for the vehicle interior in glorious super slo-mo...
- I slid toward wakefulness in the middle of a confused ramble about the Second Amendment with a female firearms instructor who was infatuated with my beard (she was a staff member of a post-apocalyptic CITADEL OF KNOWLEDGE where handsome and beautiful young people in uniform yoga pants learned to shoot real good); I clawed at the fabric of sleep to haul myself back in to add nuance to my point, which was far too blunt—
⁂
Super stoked to have coined the word “intranquil”—woke to find it already in the dictionary. Somewhere, somehow it darted in through the eyes or ears and lay dormant in the sediment of the unconsious, needing only the stick of sleep to stir it up...
What else is down there?
WHAT ELSE
⁂
On Mars, no one is interested in my new book, Astrology on Mars.
⁂
When you’re the only human in the room on the pregnant vampire’s due date, run.
⁂
I am the walking life support for a killer whale. His heart has failed him and so the arm-thick red and blue hoses plugged into my chest mean my heart is beating for two. I can go places, but not very far. Outwardly, I worry that my meagre monkey heart can’t possibly serve us both—but it’s somehow working, I feel his ocean-bullet strength in me and am secretly proud.
⁂
...and wake.
