In which, JR relates a most peculiar bit of nocturnal hallucinations.

For the past year and a half or so, I’ve routinely had horrible nightmares. Many times, they wake me up in the middle of the night, sometimes on the verge of tears. As a result, I am seldom well-rested.

I’ve sort of trained myself to get up in the morning and will myself not to think about the dream. I push on with my morning routine and shut out any and all memories of what went on. It works pretty well.

Last night, though… Last night was a real doozy.

In the beginning of the dream, I was walking around in Cradock, looking for my mom’s house. I’m not sure why. My aunt drove by in a van with her kids and offered to give me a ride. Instead, she took me back to her house. I was trying to make excuses so I could leave when my uncle came home. He tried to talk to me, and I just left abruptly. I continued walking and ended up at my grandparents’ house. Somehow, I had to move through their house to get to my mom’s. I walked in, said hi to my grandmother who was sitting in her chair as usual and looked very sad. She said something to me that I didn’t understand. I went through the kitchen, into the back room, towards the back door. My grandfather was sitting near it, working on something. He looked up, smiled, and looked back down at whatever he was doing.

I was now at mom’s, except it wasn’t her house. It was some sort of… farm house, or something. When I got there, this very weird guy started telling me he was having problems with his printer. He had on very big, very thick glasses, his teeth were missing, he had a mullet and no shirt. He asked me to look at the printer, and I agreed. He led me out to this field, full of very run-down wooden barns and fences. There was an old dot matrix printer set up in the middle of the field. It was spitting out page after page of HTTP traffic, apparently. I know that because I picked up one of the pages and it contained the headers for an html request. He was telling me he was sure that the printer was broken, and it was just spitting out gibberish. I told him that this was actual traffic, and it had to be coming from a device hooked up to the internet. He argued with me, very energetically. It escalated into a fight. I was screaming at him, “Why did you ask me for help if you weren’t going to listen to a word I say?” over and over. He said he was going to call his cousin to come kick my ass, and went off into the house. While this went on, my mom, dad and sisters showed up, wondering what was going on. Dad had that look on his face when he’s enraged and ready to fight, and I figured I’d just get him to fight this guy who was coming to beat me up, since he enjoys such things. So we all went inside to wait. I remarked on how ridiculous the whole situation was. A crowd gathered around in the front yard, waiting to see the fight. I waited on the porch.

At length, a car you might expect to see in a Westside Connection video pulled up and this weird little guy got out. The crowd descended upon him. He was wearing a white hat, backwards, a white wifebeater, jeans and a lot of jewelry. Judging by the crowd’s reaction I could tell this was the person they were waiting for. I started to get a little antsy.

This is were things get weird.

A person in the crowd exploded. Literally exploded, sending this bright orange goo in all directions. When it touched the others, they would swell up into the monstrous caricatures of themselves and begin doing all manner of crazy things, attacking each other, screaming these horrible screams. In turn, they too would explode, causing a chain reaction throughout the crowd.

I freaked out. I jumped off of the porch and ran across the street until I was out of range of the orange goo showers. It was a horrible scene. Cops showed up, but they were “infected” themselves, and they had guns, which made things worse.

But then I woke up (in the dream) on my mom’s couch, feverish and wrapped in a blanket. I kept thinking that the orange goo was in the couch cushions, and I wrapped myself tighter in the blanket, imagining that it would protect me. Then I realized I’d dreamed the whole thing, so I got up, and I walked over to the fish tank. In it was a goldfish. A bright orange goldfish. I looked at it, then it looked me directly in the face, and jumped out of the tank. It chased me around the room. It kept just missing my feet. I was jumping off of the walls and furniture, around and around in circles, because this fish was somehow the origin of that orange goo, and it was coming to finish the job it had started in the dream.

Meanwhile, mom, Buddy and my sisters laughed. Apparently it was all very entertaining.