Dream Archive 12: James Bond vs. Them

Dreamed we were all driving around looking for a Halloween store. We stopped in a parking lot in front of a restaurant. All these people—adults and children—came out of the restaurant dressed as cats. Their Halloween idea was a restaurant run by cats. There was a fog machine inside, and a weird ghostly light. I could see cat-shapes crawling all over the tables. It was just part of the show, though.

A car full of people pulled into the parking lot. It was James Bond's car. James Bond was being played by beloved English character actor Jim Broadbent. I remember thinking he was not a very good James Bond, because he would momentarily pass out after doing anything strenuous, and his entourage would have to catch him. He had some sort of projectile weapon which he aimed at the inside of the car window. When he fired it, it made a small, perfectly round hole in the glass. After he passed out and regained consciousness, he began pouring gasoline through the hole, down the side of the car, and onto the street. The gasoline spread across the parking lot into the restaurant. James Bond and his entourage got out of the car and began walking away. We followed them. James Bond lit a match and tossed it back over his shoulder. The car and the restaurant exploded in a huge fireball, killing all the adults and children inside.

I asked James Bond why he had to murder all those innocent people working in the restaurant, and he said it was the only way to keep "them" from following us. He wasn't clear about who "they" were, but he seemed very serious about it, so I decided to trust him.

Apparently, murdering all the cat-people wasn't enough, because "they" caught up with us anyways. We were on a train heading somewhere. Suddenly, other trains began catching up with us on either side. They were all black, with no windows. James Bond told the engineer to reverse the train immediately. We stopped, and then started going backwards, they way we had come. We seemed to be outrunning the black trains. Then, we came to the end of the line. There was a sofa tied to a metal post to provide cushioning in case we couldn't stop in time. It seemed like we were going to smash into the post, but when we actually did, it was just a gentle tap.

We looked around and realized it was too late. "They" had caught up to us. There were hundreds of "them," standing in silent regiments. "They" didn't move or make a sound. "They" wore long black or brown robes, with masks that looked like the one from Amadeus. Some of "them" had curled horns like rams' horns.

We didn't know what "they" were going to do to us. What "they" did was put us into some kind of dream where we were controlling the actions of a farmer who lived on a desolate plain. There were huge prehistoric boulders scattered across the landscape near the farmer's home. One day, out of nowhere, the Nazgûl witch-king appeared and began murdering the farmer's family in front of him. It took the farmer's wife and hurled her hundreds on feet into the air; we heard the sickening thud when she hit the ground somewhere nearby. The farmer had to give into some demand in order to save his children, but we didn't know what the demand was or how to give into it.

"If you're telling me how great Transformers is… the fact of the matter is, it's horrible. It's almost unfathomably horrible. You see it—it expands your brain, how terrible it is."

—Jesse Thorn, America's Radio Sweetheart

So, 13 miles is as many miles as someone should run, in my opinion. Now, 26 miles—at 26 miles, I think you're no longer an athlete, you're just kind of willful. At 26 miles, it starts to turn for me, where I don't like people running marathons. I'm not ready to oppose it, but I don't like it. . . . Half-marathon is a number of miles where, at the end of it, you're exhausted, and you feel like you've run too far, but you're not thinking that you're gonna die. It's not a distance that people were designed to run, and so the whole point of it is to prove that you are better than God. . . . Now, an ultra-marathon runner will run for 36 hours straight. And, to me, there comes a point where you're no longer participating in a sport, you're just taunting God. It's no longer about any kind of athletic achievement—it's no longer about stretching your body or making yourself the ultimate expression of your body, it's about telling your body, "Hey, fuck you. Look what I'm gonna do." . . . One of the top ultra-marathoners had written a book about ultra-marathoning, and they pitched this book to me, and I said, "No, sir. I'm not participating in this. I'm not encouraging this. It's wrong." To me, a marathon is kind of distasteful, and I don't like it; ultra-marathon is simply wrong.

—Jesse Thorn, America's Radio Sweetheart

Dream Archive 11: "The Secret of Chronos"

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Dreamed I was reading a Lovecraft story called “The Secret of Chronos” to my dad and my brother. I was reading it out of a huge Tales of Lovecraft omnibus that I had bought two months earlier. Apparently, in the 1920s, artists would make paintings of scenes from popular stories and publish them as little sticky trading cards. I had found some of these, and had pasted them into the book on various pages.

“The Secret of Chronos” was the one story in the volume that someone had turned into an elaborate pop-up book. The title page showed a great dark mansion with tentacles coming out of the doors and windows, and cultists running around worshipping things. The story was about a professor of arcane knowledge who was teaching his students about the Mysteries of the Deep. He described the time when Gojira had emerged from the sea, but said Gojira was actually a rather small specimen. There was a black-and-white pop-up picture of Gojira swimming the ocean. Then he described the legends of the Kraken, and there was a picture of the Kraken that looked far more sinister than usual. Finally, he told his students about the island of Chronos, which was hidden from men, but which they could find if they used the right charts and outwitted the cultists trying to protect it.

At the point where they found the island, my dad, my brother, and I found ourselves transported there through a quirk of dream logic. The island turned out to be off the southern coast of Manhattan, and it was bizarrely decorated to resemble someone's whimsical conception of a Greek island. There were little plastic temples everywhere, and fish ponds, and stone benches, and life-size plastic statues of gods and goddesses, and carefully-trimmed hedges, and well-tended patches of grass and gravel. In the center of the long promenade that ran down the middle of the island, there was a reflecting pool with a tower rising out of it.

As the story came to a close, the professor and his students found some discarded masks, gloves, and cloaks in one of the service tunnels beneath the island. Apparently, the cultists had tricked them into coming there, and then fled. This was the end of the professor's narrative, and the end of the pop-up book, but there was a folded letter pasted into the book on the last page, Griffin-and-Sabine-style. The letter was from one of the professor's students, and it detailed what really happened on Chronos after they found the discarded clothes. The tower in the center of the island began to rise into the air, and it became clear that the tower was only an unlit torch, and that the torch was being held by a colossal hand, which continued to rise into the air until the creature's entire body was revealed!

Dream Archive 10: Exorcist Bugs

We were all in some kind of real-life version of The Exorcist. It was like a theme park ride, but much more real and much more dangerous. We were trying to find our way out. There were demons everywhere. People kept looking at their hands and seeing little bugs crawling all over them. This drove a lot of people insane. Eventually, we discovered that the world we were in was a shared hallucination created by the bugs. The bugs had swarmed in through our mouths and filled our bodies. They were symbiotic. Once we learned to accept them and live with them, we didn't see them anymore, and the world became less frightening. It was still an hallucination, but they made it a nicer one, once we stopped fighting them.

Dream Archive 9: No More iPads

I dreamed that some catastrophe made it impossible for Apple to produce any more iPads, ever. In the dream, this seemed to matter. Why did I dream this? I don't own an iPad or even an iPhone.

Dream Archive 8: Barenaked Ladies

Me and a bunch of people I didn't know were at a Barenaked Ladies show. The band got in trouble for some comment that people thought was racist. Somehow we were implicated. We had to leave the show by making our way through the crowd. The crowd became an outdoor river filled with otters and reindeer. As usual there was an horrific crime involved. A Vietnamese family found out their son was gay and tried to murder him. I don't know if they succeeded.