Dreaming of 4000

A meandering piano score; someone picking at the keys. A cluttered house. Objects stacked and draped on every surface. My mother sits in one corner doing something, focused on something. Knitting, perhaps; the camera never focuses on her to investigate. I know my mom is the age she is now, but my brother sits amongst the stacks of paper on the couch, and he is only five or six years old here. He is busying himself, looking for things to play with. He finds a coloring book: on the cover there is an odd drawing of a police officer in profile. The drawing is a caricature: it resembles him as he will look in 25 years.

My brother is restless. The book is just interesting enough, but will not entertain him for long. I want to protect him but I’m not there. I’m just observing. The police officer glares; the drawing is an accusation. From nowhere, a small red clown nose the size of a cherry tomato appears on the nose of the drawing. My brother plucks it from the cover. The foam clown nose is real and not a drawing. Another appears near the cover. And another, a little beyond it. I know this pattern: they will continue to appear, and they will make a trail. My brother will follow the trail, unsupervised. The trail will lead him to something horrible.

In another part of the house, a girl plays in a darker, paneled, carpeted room. She is playing “farm” though she has no toys. On the carpet she has propped children’s books up to make little houses. Old cardboard toilet paper tubes, with four pushpin legs, stand in for cows. Her father walks in — I don’t know who these people are, but it’s the same house and they must be my family. Her dad looks like Robin Williams, in a serious role. 

He smiles and gingerly steps over the toilet paper tubes. As he does so, the camera focuses in on one of the tubes. Despite being cardboard with pushpin legs, they bray and whinny uneasily. They make the same noises a herd animal does when it sees a snake nearby. I hear them, but no one else does. If they could rear up and back away, they would, but they can’t. They are just cardboard. They do not like this man. 

The girl says something silly, introducing the father to the farm. He takes a bow and waves to the cardboard tubes. He picks up a small action figure, like a Ken doll, and begins to play on the carpet. The room is too dark for me to see the doll’s face.

Now I am no longer a camera, observing these scenes. Suddenly I am very small, smaller than even the Ken doll. The girl and the father are gone. The cardboard tube cows remain, out of my field of vision. They continue to make frightened animal sounds, more pitched now, more urgent. I cannot see them, but I hear them to the sides and behind me.

What I can see, what completely fills my field of vision, is the starkly-lit side of the Ken doll’s head. I am looking at the head from reverse three-quarters perspective. The light on it is harsh, like that of a close flashlight. The face is away from me, and fully in shadow. I know the face will be horrible. Of course it is. I place my tiny hands on the head and begin to rotate it to the right, so that I will see the face. It is difficult. The head barely budges.

In fact, the head only turns about to profile. But it is still completely shadowed. I can’t make out any part of it, and it won’t turn further. I know that I’m dreaming now, and I think that the only way to end the dream before something else happens is to look at the face. But all I can see is the plastic back of his head, the plastic hair and one plastic ear.

I wake up anyway.

The next movie in the Saw franchise came out: it was the far future and the work of Jigsaw was now being some by nanobots, which lived in the bloodstreams of victims and formed small cutting instruments at preprogrammed times.

The ultimate goal of the nanobots was to create some kind of hybridized person. I don’t know the philosophy behind it. I do know that it resulted in dozens of people being held captive somehow, pairing off, and then having the nanobots essentially unzip them and carve them and disintegrate their bodies. Somehow they remained aware and cognizant.

I remember seeing tiny hacksaws emerge from their skin and begin cutting bloodlessly.

It was the end of the world. The only ways we knew this were scattered earthquakes, the moon growing larger in the night sky, and increasingly, areas of the ground glowed red, which meant that soon at least one long- and dark-haired Japanese horror child would be birthed from it. They were good ways of knowing.

In a below-ground parking lot, my friends and I had managed to group together, perhaps eighteen or twenty of us. A nearby dark corner between two abandoned cars glowed red as if the concrete was molten hot but not melting. One of them would come through soon, and we started running up ramps to get away to the surface.

The surface was chaos. It was dark and charred paper and embers blew through the city streets. Sirens wailed in the distance but there were very few people. We ran through parks and vacant lots and back roads as though armageddon only took the highways.

We were separated and rejoined many times and a big part of the dream was my worry about being caught separate from the group. We managed to find an old van that was still running, and packed into it.

There was a steel-and-glass dome, some kind of a settlement where the richest man in the world lived. He had a survival plan. My friends stayed in the van while I walked up to him across a huge field with trees in planted rows. He was having dinner on a small linen-covered table with two girlfriends, eating while meteors burned overhead.

One of the women said “once this all really starts to happen, maybe we can see where the moon will land in the ocean, and we can move our survival ship there, for the view.” The man said, in an English accent, “perhaps we can use some of my equipment to guide the moon down to where we want it.”

The women left, and I said, “man, when you say that with a British accent it just sounds so smart and plausible. When those ladies said it it just sounded so stupid. ‘Let’s git th’ moon down here so’s we can look at it while we eat!’”

The man was not amused. He threw a small bomb at my friends’ van, still full, but the bomb didn’t explode the car. It created a flaming force-wall that shielded their view of what was to come. The man then got in his Aston Martin and expertly drove across the grass at me, to run me down. I hid among the line of trees, which was just ten oaks in a row. He started to slalom through them, but I found a place I could climb into the branches and wait.

He called up, “it doesn’t matter, we’re only taking people with first names that end in A or B. That’s a huge number of people for the survival craft anyway. What’s your name?” I told him. It certainly didn’t start with either of those letters. I realized I didn’t know anyone whose names did.

common concepts in my nightmares: living dead; dolls; things behind glass on display; orthogonal intelligence; paralysis while conscious; impossibly fast or slow movement of incorrectly-scaled objects; reduction of behaviors to pointless ritual; compulsion to do wrong by outside force; final-but-meaningless conscious thoughts immediately before death

I was a soldier participating in a relatively new psychological warfare test that was rapidly becoming some kind of field standard. I stood on the bottom floor of what looked like an indoor three- or four-story pink-painted mall. There were escalators and shop fronts, walkways with glass and metal railings. I could not tell if it was day or night.

I wasn’t alone here; a handful of other soldiers participating readied themselves, each in their own corner of the mall. I looked up at a few of the shops in the mall — some of them had been replaced with what looked like a large glass case beneath a cloth. There were maybe only three of these cases in the mall, on the way to the exit.

I understood the test as I had seen it before. The cloths would drop, revealing what was in the cases: a 1:1 sized Native American doll, with long, dyed cornsilk hair in a traditional white dress. The dolls were about four feet tall, propped up on a metal stand and not moving or even particularly scary to look at. No, the entire point of this exercise was the buildup to the exercise.

As I said, I had seen (possibly participated in) this sort of test in the past, and I knew how difficult it was going to be. I rattled on about how you just had to push on through, ignore what else was happening, and get to the exit. The other soldiers weren’t afraid, but I honestly was.

A loudspeaker counted down. After one, the cloths dropped off the exhibits and revealed what I already knew was in the glass cases. I made my way past the first doll with some difficulty, and I tried to steel myself for the next one around the corner, knowing how the test worked but not how I’d react: they moved one of the dolls outside its case, so that it was actually standing at the end of a long corridor in the mall. I would have to walk past it.

The other soldiers moved through with no difficulty whatsoever. After all, they were not alive; they weren’t even doing anything. I realized as I must have before that this wasn’t a test for them but a test for me. But it didn’t matter that I understood; it only mattered that I was crumpled in a shaking mess on the mall walkway floor.

I was traveling with Kurt in some snowy Eastern European country. Kurt was driving, and the roads were jammed. Men in black hunting caps with rifles walked down every street. At one point Kurt missed a hidden off-ramp and we found ourselves driving down railroad tracks. There was road access further down the tracks, meaning at some point you were actually supposed to drive where a train might hit you.

Cut to an underground parking lot, the air teeming with white dust, spiderweb-like fibers. It looked industrial and unsafe, like everyone was breathing in wisps of fiberglass. Guards escorted Kurt and me. I covered my nose and mouth with my coat, and a guard demanded to see the inside, like I was folding my arms and covering my face to hide something. I told the guard I spoke only English and he handed me a flyer about visiting their country, making it sound incredible.

He said, “they invite Americans for the tourist dollar but is not safe; also comes terrorist, criminal who would hurt American traveler.” More guards demand to see other people’s belongings and clothes.

One flamboyantly-dressed man is wearing a huge gold choker with a box on it and leopard print coat. A guard gets suspicious and demands he open the coat, but there’s nothing dangerous. The guard gestures to his neck and says “choker, choker” to communicate “what about that?” The man says, “choker, I hardly know her!”

One or two of the guards get it and laugh. The first guard notices that my brother and I are still covering our faces from all the filaments and white soot in the air down here. He tries to make a joke too: “we have, um, kept some of your… September 11… gas,” not knowing how to refer to the ash in New York. And September 11 being something we’d all understand.

I had a very fun, cohesive dream about zombies that I just woke up from. It was identical to a movie. It had a lot of moments where I thought to myself, “oh, that’s clever” during the dream, as if I was watching a film. Early on Tony Stark didn’t show up, but since he did come in later, I want to say this was Iron Man vs. The Zombies.

It started with a father and son running over very elaborate rock formations in a stream. It reminded me of being with my dad at Eaton Canyon in Pasadena. Anyway, the father was running ahead of the son, played by me. We were escaping some danger, and were panicked. Dad was panting but not stopping. I shouted “isn’t this exactly when we should be careful?! Shouldn’t we be slowing down and watching for trouble?!” The dream was very restrained and didn’t have zombies attack us at that moment.

The stream/river finally ran up on what looked like the remnants of an amusement park, but there was something… British about it. There may have been a ferris wheel and roller coaster further in, but here near the stream there was a croquet field and a volleyball net on the well-kept grass.

We entered what looked like a small administrative trailer, which held an office and a little break room. A zany old inventor type and his young… granddaughter? Too young to be his daughter. Anyway, these two lived here and cared for the grounds. The inventor gave us both weapons to defend ourselves, but there weren’t really zombies in the area yet. They’d be out there and we’d have to clear them out. As a recharge, I took a long pull on a bottle of oyster sauce.

He gave me two weapons, which were awesome. One was a little brass and ivory tube, carved to look like a dragon. You put it in your mouth and when you spat through it, it converted your spit into a very strong anti-zombie poison. “Don’t breathe in through your mouth while wearing it,” he said. And the other weapon was enough to make that dragon unnecessary — it was essentially a lightsaber hilt, but it would generate any blade you’d want out the top, limited only by imagination.

We had a chance to take our arsenal out deeper onto the rolling hills. I actually was able to generate a running chainsaw from that hilt. I remember cutting into a number of zombies with ease — first with a longsword, then something resembling a kukri, and finally the chainsaw. It was very fluid, controlling that thing, and I was lucid. Also, cutting down the zombies wasn’t very bloody; it was almost like cutting through a block of cheese that looked and moved like a man.

Having killed about a dozen, we ran back to the office, concerned that they’d be getting overrun. To our horror, the granddaughter was outside, on one side of the volleyball net, while zombies approached her from the other side! But we watched for a moment… she was commanding them. She had managed to train them to play volleyball. Once in a while they’d break and try to come towards her, but she’d scold them and they’d return to their positions on the court.

Another group of uninfected came around to watch the game, and in the shuffle to get indoors, some of the trained zombies came along inside the office — I guess it had happened because the uninfected didn’t pay attention that the green guys were dead? But no one wanted to go off on the zombies coming in, for fear of killing the trained ones. They didn’t react and actually went back outside, except for one, a young girl in a schoolgirl jumper and glasses. She was indeed a zombie, and I got into attack stance, but she said, “listen, I have this under control. Some of us managed to retain control over our cravings even after we changed.”

I didn’t trust this. Suddenly, she lunged for me and grabbed me by the shoulders… and stopped. It was a test to see if I’d stab her. I didn’t, but not for lack of wanting to — I was just too slow. “See?” she said. “I guess you just go around killing anything that’s rotting, huh?” It was like an accusation of racism.

Cut to opening night of some physics lecture. I forget the name of the scientist, but her first name was like Theodora. Out in front was one of those “ONE NIGHT ONLY” type of posters.

She was… arranging some very artistic-looking cardboard diorama on stage, the show being later at night. The only person in the audience right now was Tony Stark. She said something about her current project, and Tony said “I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening, I was thinking about how much I love you.” I remember thinking “oh cool, they gave him a romantic interest that’s not Pepper Potts but another scientist.”

Then my alarm went off.

I am watching a Lost-like show — perhaps Lost? — in which some penultimate reveal threatens to blow the doors off the show. A woman is pressing some entity for answers as to why a disadvantaged neighbor kid wanted to find out about triangular beings of light that lived at the bottom of a nearby body of water. They kept referring to the aliens as “the napers.” The napers resembled the old ’80s special effect visual of a laser light drawing a triangle into fog or smoke.

There’s something about the idea that the aliens are the ones being asked the questions, and that they were trying to be helpful… all I remember is that they came to Earth and ended up in a lake and had some water manipulation powers. The kid wanted them to help his mother, and they ended up helping him instead.

In an appreciated twist on a time-worn nightmare scenario of mine, when the woman asked about how the napers were helpful, my dream featured a flash-sideways where I was the neighbor kid, in my bed, in the exact same position that I fell asleep in tonight. One of the aliens floated over my immobile form, and used invisible hands to pull the covers over me and tuck me into bed snugly, the same way a mom would.

(Typically in my dreams of being immobile in bed, there is a thing present that is awful that I don’t want to see, or is directly threatening me somehow. I woke up from this dream creeped out, but grateful that at least it wasn’t my usual.)

A remote orbital station above some forbidding planet. Cut to an interior: a huge, empty, hangar-like room, like a cargo area. Huge picture windows looking down at the planet. A single turbolift door in one part of the room.

Familiar blue chyron titles in one corner of the view: “Cause of Death.”

An ensign, unsure, hesitantly exits the turbolift. He looks around the well-lit, empty space. Mounted in a corner of the ceiling, a viewscreen. It turns on, showing an alien wearing a Starfleet uniform. A superior officer.

“Ensign. This is the room where it keeps happening.”

The room isn’t completely empty though: a podium-like wooden pedestal stands next to a long jewelry-display-case like object, large enough to hold one person inside. On the podium on some kind of holder, sticking straight up, is a syringe with the needle pointing into the air. It is full of something. A little bit lower on the podium is a severed alien hand, complete with frayed Starfleet uniform cuff still at the wrist.

“The creature came up with one of our early shuttle runs, that much is certain. Everything else we know about it: it is completely invisible, soundless, undetectable via any means we have. We have reason to believe it’s susceptible to the tranquilizer in the syringe.

“We can’t explain why, when it kills, it leaves the left hand.” The hand belonged to the last ensign to enter this room.

“We’ll give you four hours. Good luck.” The screen switched off. The doors shut and locked.

Now I was the unsure ensign. I approached the podium in the deathly-silent room. The floor was carpeted, so I made no sound; not that anyone understood how it hunted. I pulled the syringe off the stand and held it out in front of me like a weapon. I began to methodically sweep the room.

I dreamt we made love on an ironing board. It was noon.

I dreamt someone invented a recursive flyswatter — the further away from its starting point you moved it, the exponentially larger and further away a projected duplicate of itself grew. It wasn’t an illusion; the duplicate was solid and had its own mass, and mimicked your movements of the original. It was designed so that you could cover greater surface areas with it and hit more flies with a smaller swat.

But it hadn’t been tuned right; it was too sensitive. Moving it back only a few feet made the duplicate’s paddle like six feet across. Walking it from one room to another would potentially knock down walls in a building.

Somehow I flew the flyswatter to the moon. Its duplicate was now larger than the Earth. It still responded to my movements, but its mass was so great that the tides were shifting. I reared back, and swatted the Earth, and watched as seas and continents exploded through the lattice grid. I thought about celestial objects moving this fast and got nauseated and woke up.