Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #226 – Clown Hospital

(Male, 40’s) This nightmare was strange because it was a dream inside a dream.

“…a commissioned series of art photographs of circus clowns from the 1930’s who also had great physical deformities, like side show performers…”

I was dreaming that I was visiting my great Aunt Clara in the hospital. Aunt Clara died 30 years ago, by the way. She was having some kind of heart surgery. In her recovery room there was a commissioned series of art photographs of circus clowns from the 1930’s who also had great physical deformities, like side show performers. Grainy black and white photographs.

I spoke with the doctor. He gave the standard line “…resting comfortably… too soon to tell…” But then he mentioned that the photographs in my Aunt’s room had given him nightmares the night before. He started to walk away and, inside the dream, I thought “I gotta ask him about his nightmare so I can tell Jim.” Isn’t that hilarious?

So the doctor thought about it for a moment, like whether her was going to tell me. He said in his nightmare, he was in a hospital that he’d come into a patient’s room. The bed was made up but the sheets were made of rubber, like a tarp, I guess. He pulled back the sheet and discovered there was nobody there. Just then three of these creepy clowns appear at the door. They were carrying a covered metal serving tray. They lifted the lid and said with a disturbing giggle “Would you like some instruments, doctor?” To be honest I didn’t see what was so scary about the nightmare but the doctor seemed pretty shaken.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #225 – Smothering Humidity and Heat

(Male, 30’s) The weather around here has been crazy hot and humid the last couple days. That’s the only explanation I have for these couple nightmares. I sent them in together because they’re not too much on their own.

First Nightmare: I’m on a roller coaster, sort of. It’s also sort of like public transportation because it travels on city streets, just a little bit too high so the sides of the car are whipped by the tree branches. All the passengers are locked into our seats by a metal bar that locks down across our bellies. And everything is super hot, made even hotter by the costumes we have to wear. Yup, to ride on this trolly or streetcar or roller coaster you have to wear one of those full body, furry team mascot kind of costumes. They actually lock the head piece on top of the costume so you can’t take it off until the end of the ride. You can only see through these round holes in the side of this head. There’s no breeze and very little air getting inside too. So there’s this whole car of people dressed up like life sized teddy bears. I got through the ride – I don’t like roller coasters because I get nauseous pretty easily – and I get unlocked from the trolley car but I still have to stand around waiting to get out of the teddy bear costume. In the heat and the dark, I finally start to feel myself pass out and I’m terrified I’m just going to suffocate.

Second Nightmare: I’m at home and it’s evening. But instead of everything getting dark, the whole neighborhood is getting flooded. Like instead of darkness, there’s water. It’s warm, like skin temperature so it’s not shocking but it’s also not refreshing either. And it’s kind of invisible so I’m not really certain how deep the water is. I find it rather hard to breathe. Everyone else is gone inside and they all highly suggest that I do too before the bugs come out. The first thing I see that looks like a “bug” is something I take for a crawfish but it’s over a foot long. It’s flexing its tail and as I watch it, there are suddenly two of them, and then three of them. All this time, I feel like I’m getting bitten by mosquitos. I look down at my arm though and I see that I’m being attacked by tropical fish, like the kind that people keep in fish bowls except these fish are huge, like the size of a dinner plate. As I look around there are lots of things around me. The water must be as high as the tree tops now because there are weird creatures swimming around at least that high. I’m a little scared but since I’m standing on my front porch I’m not panicking too bad yet. Then I see some kind of a flat worm that’s bigger than I am. It’s translucent brown and it keeps appearing and disappearing, each time getting closer. It looks really scary, like if it bit me, it’d take a big chunk. I started pounding on the door but now no one inside seems to be able to hear me. And once I started to panic, I also started finding it hard to breathe again so even if I survived being attacked by the brown worm, I still would likely drown in this weird, warm water.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #224 – Workplace Panic

“…As I kept talking, my voice started to fail. I was unable to make any words, just the honks and squeaks that might come out of a saxophone…”

(Male, 40’s) To my knowledge I’ve never had an actual “panic attack” but those are exactly the words I’d use to describe this terrifying dream I had the other night. I was at work talking with a co-worker in the hallway of an unfamiliar building. She was explaining how the IT department, that is, our department were entirely unable to manage certain key attributes of the computers we’d deployed just last spring. As I asked more questions about what that actually meant, I learned that the computers couldn’t communicate on the network, though there would be no error given to suggest the attempt didn’t succeed, and what’s even better, these computers couldn’t reliably be counted upon even to save data to their own hard drives. Again, no error message would be given. My co-worker was telling me all of this in a matter-of-fact, world-weary sort of way, I gather the same way that we were supposed to inform the users. But I started going crazy. I couldn’t believe the callous attitude. I also couldn’t believe that there hadn’t been daily if not weekly memos from the IT director warning the users that, basically, none of the work they were performing was safe in any way. As I kept talking, my voice started to fail. I was unable to make any words, just the honks and squeaks that might come out of a saxophone if you didn’t know how to play it. My direct manager had been listening in but at some point, she had wandered off and this frustrated me because she needed to hear about these problems.

At this point, I found it impossible to stand still anymore so I just walked off down the hall. It was an unfamiliar, one-story building with offices that looked like elementary school classrooms. I was trying to find my cell phone. Inside these offices were large desks that were covered in construction paper, safety scissors (remember those? the kind with blunt tips so students couldn’t stab each other?) pots of that sticky white glue like they used to have in kindergarten… all this stuff on the surface of these executive’s desks. I needed to find my cell phone because I could tell there was a conversation I needed to be a part of. I could “hear” part of it when I held a can of spray paint. But it was white paint. I needed to find a spray can of black paint because I needed to spray paint my hair black. I started just running up and down this hallway, looking into similar offices, entirely unable to relax. I grabbed onto the can of spray paint tighter and tighter until my muscles were shaking. It was horrible.

Boy am I glad there’s a weekend coming up.

Categories
"What We Fear"

Monogamy, Morality and the Consumption of Media

I often try to puzzle out my attraction to “trash culture” given that I have advanced degrees in “snob culture.” A strange correlation came to me today. Many defenders of snob culture assert something like a moral superiority to certain kinds of media. For instance, it’s “better” to read than to watch TV or more recently, it’s “better” to surf the internet than to watch TV… like a Paper-Rocks-Scissors game where everything seems to beat on TV. And then even within certain media there’s the familiar claim that, say, literary fiction is “better” than romance fiction or whatever. And further there are grades of literary fiction too where the classics are better than the contemporary. During the big canon wars of the 1990’s, various explanations were trotted out to defend this intuition. One idea said that the best kind of literature is the kind that could be re-read profitably, that each time through the work the reader gains some nugget of lasting value from the experience. I think I’ve had that idea at the back of my head for quite awhile.
But today, I realized that that sort of argument sounds pretty similar to an argument for monogamy, literary monogamy. Stay true to the classics. Don’t be lured into the iniquity of all that faddish, contemporary fun stuff. Virtue over pleasure. And if you happen to read the million or so books that are on any of those “lifelong reading lists,” then start over again because you STILL can learn more from them. Again, there will NEVER be time in this life for casual texts.
And what’s funny of course is that the consumption of media is really nothing like sexuality… Roland Barthes and the Pleasure of the Text notwithstanding. And even if reading was like sex, at least it’s not like sex between two humans. When I close the covers on the latest novel, I don’t ask “Was it good for you too?” Books are objects and humans, regardless of our endless attempts to treat ourselves otherwise, aren’t.
I don’t know if it really belongs here but I am also trying out this thought, namely that there are only two kinds of writing: successful writing and unsuccessful writing. All this “genre” talk is a way of selling writing, an honorable, noble pursuit because it helps grab a paycheck for a writer, but one that really doesn’t say much about the writing itself. It’s a way of managing expectations for the consumer… and I suppose also why ColdPlay sounds so much like old U2. There are of course several ways of evaluating “success” not the least of which is to answer the question “Why Write?” and the other “Why Read?”

Categories
Movies Other Haunts

Movie – Buffy and Edward

As a footnote to the post from yesterday about how vampires suck, er, that is, how they don’t seem to suck anymore, here’s the obvious video clip. I know you’ve already seen this clip but I still crack up when I watch it.

Categories
Book

Book – Gilgamesh

I joke about teaching a class one day called “Poetry for Guys” and if I ever get that opportunity, Gilgamesh would have to be on the reading list. I’ve meant to read this ancient poem (poem fragments, really) for years but I finally picked up a copy of the Stephan Mitchell translation from a guy who sells used books from a folding table he sets up on State Street. Ya gotta love a college town, eh? It’s short but I savored every page.

Gilgamesh is an epic tale about a king Gilgamesh who is oppressive and unbearable to his subjects until the gods create a perfect friend for him, Enkidu who is a wild man living in the wilderness. Enkidu is tamed by a temple prostitute, then he challenges Gilgamesh to a wrestling match after which they become best buddies. It’s a very touching story of a friendship between two guys that really can’t be summed up under the phrase “male bonding” let alone “buddy picture.” The pair go on epic adventures together, all slightly tinged with Gilgamesh’s concern that people will forget him when he’s dead. Then, Enkidu falls ill and dies. Gilgamesh is distraught with grief. He tries to seek out Utnapishtim, the only mortal who’s been given immortality. More adventures occur frequently with the refrain, and here I paraphrase “Gilgamesh, dude, you look like crap.” If nothing else, Gilgamesh depicts the grief process very palpably.

I’m mentioning the book here because there is much to commend the poem to a genre-interested reader. Gilgamesh is basically a super hero, depicted as 2/3’s divine and 1/3 mortal. There are monsters that haunt a cedar woods, scorpion people who guard the long tunnel that the sun traverses after sunset, stone-men who pilot a boat… It’s folklore from a radically different time, one not to concerned with ethics, where stories didn’t need morals. Gilgamesh also recounts a worldwide catastrophic flood that bears many similarities to the description in Genesis. The differences are also pretty interesting. The world of the Gilgamesh is polytheistic so there is disagreement and deception among the gods, gods who more or less maintain the same attitudes throughout the story, whereas with the more monotheistic world of Genesis, the God must change his mind, from anger to repentance. There’s a similar though not identical release of birds at the end of the flood. Both narratives mention a gift given as a sign that never again will the world be drowned, one is a necklace, the other a rainbow. Utnapishtim is granted eternal life whereas Noah seems to be plagued by survivor guilt and turns to drink. In an alcoholic stupor, Noah curses one of his sons thus perpetuating the kind of evil the flood was allegedly intended to wipe out. I’m sure folks have spilled much ink comparing and contrasting these two narratives. Frankly, if I had to write a dissertation on Gilgamesh, I’d focus on Shamhat, the temple sex priestess who acts as a sexual intermediary between Gilgamesh and Enkidu.

Plus, it’s short. The poem itself is roughly 120 generously margined pages accompanied by a gently pedantic introduction and an exhausting set of end notes. I’ll slog through end notes when I’m reading seriously but not for summer reading. And I have to say that Gilgamesh actually does make pretty good summer reading at least I read it this summer and it just felt right.

Categories
"What We Fear" Fears & Phobias Other Haunts This Just In

Other Haunts – “Vampires Suck” @ Slate

Fun little article at Slate.com about how contemporary vampires suck, or more precisely, that they don’t. The once terrifying Other is now just a cuddly idealized boyfriend – who no longer sucks blood. The article nicely traces a line from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, to Anne Rice’s tortured immortals to Buffy’s beau Angel to the monster’s nadir in the paranormal romance genre a la the Twilight series.

( http://www.slate.com/id/2223486/ )

Makes me wonder if all objects of terror undergo a certain domestication, a processes of Disneyfication where anything that is truly terrifying is sanded flat, made safe and consumable. Happens with all attempts to depict the wholly Other, I suspect, making that “make no graven images” commandment a bit more sensible. After an experience of awe / wonder / terror / amazement it’s understandable to make some record of that encounter. But then there will be folks whose only experience of that Other is via the representation, through the vicarious thrill. At the risk of sounding like a neo-Platonist here, the continued repetition of representation pushes the Other farther and farther away from our actual experience. It’s how that piss-your-pants / fall-on-the-ground-numb / struck-blind-with-scales-on-your-eyes experience of true religion becomes gradually codified into something boring and mundane like ethics and orthodoxy.

Damn. Did I slip from talking about the Monstrous to talking about the Holy again?

Categories
Movies Poe

Movie – “Web of the Spider” (1971)

Spend a night in a haunted castle; win a hundred pounds. Familiar set up for a ghost story but this one has a few nice touches mixed in with various bits of silliness.

Like many horror films of its era, Web of the Spider was released with wildly different names in different countries, ranging from And Comes the Dawn… But Colored Red to Dracula in the Castle of Terror – though Dracula does not appear and there is only the slightest reference to vampirism – to several titles involving spiders – though, again, no actual spiders appear in the movie. Its origin is Italian and it is supposedly a remake of a 1964 movie Danza Macabra (aka Castle of Blood in the US and UK.) There’s a restored version of that movie available so I’m going to scare it up.

Poeposter

The version of the movie I saw was hardly restored and in fact, it presented a collection of faults from various source media. There were scratches from film stock and several passages of chromatic aberration likely from video tape transfers. And a maddening pan-and-scan attempt to collapse the widescreen composition to a TV. I feel like an idiot mentioning these problems, like a book reviewer who comments on the margins. The overall feel of the movie is a psychedelic mishmash. The costumes don’t match in period; the colors are wondrously lurid; the soundtrack is distortion and harpsichord; the audio felt like it was dubbed in later. In other words, a pleasant enough way to spend a summer afternoon.

This movie appeared on my Netflix queue because it features Klaus Kinski playing Edgar Allen Poe and because it is supposedly based on a story by Poe. Like many of the Corman Poe movies, the resemblance to anything actually written by dear E.A.P. is mostly one of suggestion and mood. Given Poe’s insistence on mood as the primary effect of literature, this isn’t as damning as it might be of other adaptations. Kinski is only on screen for 10 or so minutes in the framing story but his performance is everything I expected, a deranged, drunken, brooding Poe who insists that his writing is journalism, that everything he has described he has actually observed. There is a particularly nice P.O.V. shot of Kinski smashes open a coffin lid, filmed from inside the coffin.

I found Web of the Spider interesting as well as irritating. Some of my criticisms of the story could be directed at some ghost stories. I think the high brow academic description is the changing rhetorical position of the protagonist. Our hero, American journalist Alan Foster enters the house and spends most of the first act poking around, giving himself scares by seeing himself in mirrors, etc. Then he mistakes a portrait for a person and begins having auditory hallucinations (voices, music.) He plays a keyboard and thus joins the music/delusion and then is invited into a very physical interaction with Elizabeth, one of the ghosts. Nudge-nudge. Know what I mean. She is murdered by another ghost, then disappears. Then Alan happens upon a Dr. Carmus, a book of whose Alan has just been reading. Carmus is a metaphysical researcher and he lectures Alan somewhat tediously throughout the middle of the movie until Carmus leads Alan to a vantage point to observe a ghostly party. For a large portion of what I estimate is act two, the protagonist is even less than a passive observer. He is not depicted in the action and he does not interact with what he presumably is watching. He’s as good as taken the seat beside us in the theatre. After this segment ends, Alan is able to watch a previous attempt to spend the night in the now haunted castle, again as a pure spectator, and to see the tragedy repeat. However, this time, Alan appears in the frame of the action and actively tries to interact and prevent the tragedy. He cannot and the participants again dissolve. After that “play” has ended, poor Alan finds himself all too apparent to the ghosts, now who move in narratively convenient slow motion. They need his blood to live, evidently, though that metaphysical explanation didn’t seem to be adequately foreshadowed. All he needs to do is survive a few minutes more and to escape through the castle grounds. But he dies, crushed by the castle gates and in a voiceover Alan says he did it to spend eternity with Elizabeth, the ghost he was intimate with earlier. The various rhetorical placements of the protagonist with respect to the action could have been exploited better to be more effective. For instance, say Alan finds he is no longer able to carry a candelabra that he once was carrying around. There are moments shown when he is unable to move certain doors but the overall effect was to muddy the action rather to heighten the terror.

I am not a gore-hound but I really would have appreciated a bit more vivid depictions of the deaths. It was sometimes so understated (or censored?) that it wasn’t entirely clear who was being killed. Also, geesh, a little more sex too, or at least “chemistry,” that electric attraction between characters. I find it hard to believe that Alan would give up his life for such a passion-less one-night-stand. But then again, little is revealed about Alan’s character. Perhaps he was fated to land in this particular spider’s web… and I would have felt so much more satisfied if I had the slightest inclination that was the case. There was really nothing connecting the central character with the events of the story.

Quibbles all. As I mentioned earlier, I think the mood of the piece was Poe-esque and to be brutally honest, Poe’s own characters and plot-lines were often not the most interesting aspects of his stories. Web of the Spider was a good popcorn movie, not particularly scary though moderately intriguing. Think about screening it next January 19th (Poe’s Birthday)

Categories
Other Haunts

Other Haunts – Cremation Urns that Resemble the Deceased

personalurn

This clever marketer produces cremation urns that actually resemble the deceased. Seems to me, you could keep it on the same shelf as the honey jar that looks like a beehive or a cookie jar that looks like a chocolate chip cookie.

Cremation Urns that Resemble the Deceased

( http://www.cremationsolutions.com/Personal-Urns-c109.html )

Categories
This Just In

This Just In – Police Stage Alien Abduction

File this under “All the Fun Stuff Happens in England:”

Just when I thought police budgets were being squandered on surveillance cameras that no one watched and tasers with lethal force, I at last hear of some police who are taking an active and more narratively direct approach to inciting paranoia and fear. These officers staged the crash landing of a spaceship and the abduction of a schoolteacher by aliens all for the benefit of a school children. The intention was to heighten the students’ power of observation and I’ve heard of stunts with a similar goal though nothing on this scale. I for one wish this story had detailed every glorious moment in photos… though I realize that sort of defeats the purpose.

Children (allegedly) traumatized by War of Worlds abduction of teacher

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5842324/Children-traumatised-by-War-of-Worlds-abduction-of-teacher.html?farkworthy

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #223 – Sad Apocalypse

(Female, 40’s) This is probably the saddest dream I’ve ever had, and I think it should count as a nightmare.

It was the end of the world. Everyone knew it– everything was shutting down. The government had fallen apart. There were no utilities– no lights or heat or water. There was chaos in the streets. There would soon be no food. It was like a war zone.

I was in my home with my husband and our two kids, our son and daughter– they were all a little younger than they are now. Somehow, earlier, for this situation, I had obtained from a pharmacy 4 suicide kits, and I had kept them until the last moment because we could either die together now or soon all die horrible deaths. We were all together in our living room, sitting on the floor, and I was busy doing what I always do– making sure everyone had what they needed, a drink of water, whatever. So I missed following the directions– there was a liquid to drink and then about 20 pills to swallow. My family members were already through the process when I was just starting. And I was confused– what do to first? But they were falling asleep in front of me, losing consciousness. They looked like they were peacefully asleep, but I knew they were each dead. And I wasn’t– not yet. It was so sad that they had all died without me.

I swallowed the liquid and the pills in some random order and waited. They were taking effect, but very slowly. I felt myself getting tired, and my arms and legs getting heavy. Some neighbors came in the house, looking for food. I told them, “Take whatever you want. We don’t need it. You can even have our house, if you want.” One of my neighbors had had cancer, I knew, and I thought how odd it was that she had outlived my healthy children. My veins felt tingly and I felt cold. I knew I just had to be patient and soon the drugs would take effect. I could hear people running and guns outside. I kept telling myself to relax. I just had to wait.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #222 – Water Bugs

(Male, 30’s) This dream was going fine until the very end when something happened that continues to creep me out now I’m awake.

“…some kind of insect has attached itself to me…”

I was at some kind of cottage, maybe even a campground with a bunch of other people my age. I think we were all grownups, that is, I don’t think this was a youth summer camp but they were folks I recognized from high school, just all grown up, folks I don’t normally see. A group of us had been swimming in the lake which wasn’t the greatest place to swim. There were lots of leaves floating in it and it didn’t really feel like it had a sandy bottom, more like little bits of rotten leaves and things. Still it was the lake we had. It was a co-ed camp, men and women so we were splashing each other and I think we were all carrying drinks in glass stemware, like martini glasses.

We all got out of the lake and went into the shower room which was one big room with many individual showers each separated off with a curtain. I went in and started a shower and as I washed I could hear other people talking. For the most part, they were all talking about the wild sexual experiences they’d had. These were the people I’d gone to high school with, who’d lived their whole lives in the suburbs and they were talking about some pretty crazy stuff. I was by far the most innocent one there.

I get out of the shower and start to dry off and I realize that I am still wearing my bathing suit which is so stupid. Who showers with a bathing suit? And as I notice that fact, I also notice that some kind of insect has attached itself to me. It’s body is probably two inches across and it’s got sharp, beetle like claws. It was attached to my belly roughly four inches to the left hand side of my belly button. I touched it and it squirmed, still very much alive. It didn’t hurt, in fact, I couldn’t even feel it. On impulse, I grab it and yank it. It snaps apart leaving its head still buried in my skin. I’m thinking, “with all the scummy lake water, it’s sure to get infected.” The body of the bug that I held in my hand was still alive, its legs still twitching.

Categories
Other Haunts This Just In

Other Haunts – Morbid Gnomes

HungGnomejpg
What else could the Grim Gnome do but grin when confronted with these statues of self-destructive garden gnomes? They depict scenes of grievous bodily harm, like an arrow skewering the head, a sword impaling the heart, swallowing the barrel of a handgun, all depicted with the maniacal glee one expects of a garden gnome. Collect ’em all!

Morbid Gnomes

( Or http://www.amazon.co.uk/s?ie=UTF8&x=0&ref_=nb_ss_lp&y=0&field-keywords=dead%20gnome&url=search-alias%3Doutdoor )

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #221 – Well Armed Vacation

“…every adult who came into the county had a loaded hand gun with them at all times…”

(Male, 30’s) I was taking my family on vacation, a good old-fashioned pack-up-the-station-wagon, let’s-go-camping kind of family vacation. We drove to this wooded, semi-rural area and when we stopped at the tourist station / ranger post, a man in a uniform warned us that there was a known serial killer operating in this county. He’d killed at least 26 people and stolen at least 13,000 dollars. In fact, the authorities knew exactly who it was but they didn’t want to proceed on the case until they were certain they could have a case that would stand up in court. It was too important a case to have the guy just walk free on a technicality. In the meantime, the authorities were making sure that every adult who came into the county had a loaded hand gun with them at all times. My wife had never shot a hand gun, at least she hadn’t in the dream, and I was a little uncomfortable carrying around an unfamiliar firearm, especially not off into the wilds of this rural county. Anyway, off we go. We stopped in a store for supplies and the woman behind the counter was a little concerned. At first I thought it was because I was carrying a gun in her store, but actually it was because she’d been warned that the serial killer was headed in the direction of the store. Just then the door opened and she yelled “That’s him!” So I guess I shot at him. So did the store woman and I think my wife even got a few rounds off. Then we realized that it was just Bill, an old friend of mine who I haven’t seen in years. Thankfully, none of our bullets had landed anywhere near their mark.
Now I’m awake though, I wonder if we were supposed to think that my friend Bill actually WAS the serial killer. Anyway, it was one of those dreams where it seemed pretty clear that I was going to get killed one way or another, either by the serial killer or by some jackass shooting at me. Both funny and scary at the same time.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #220 – Keys but No Resolution

(Female, 40’s) I had two strange dreams involving keys within the same week.

“…If I didn’t know how to use the key, how as I ever going to drive that bizarre car?…”

In the first dream, I somehow got stuck proctoring the SAT exam at the new local high school. It was the dream equivalent of sitting in a room for 5 hours. After the test was over, a friend who was also giving the SAT invited my husband and I to a cook-out at her and her husband’s new home. She offered me a ride and my husband would meet us at her house. They had just gotten a new car too. She and I went out to the parking lot, and I saw a car unlike any I’ve ever seen before. It was a two-seater, but the seats were arranged like the cockpit of a bi-plane with the driver in front and the passenger sitting behind her. It was build something like a bobsled with a glass bubble cover. We got in the car and we drove along. When we got to her house, my friend instantly got busy with making a charcoal fire in the grill and starting to cook these huge filleted chunks of fish. Then I remembered that I’d left my purse at the high school. “Here, go back and get your purse,” my friend said and she handed me something unrecognizable, which was the key to her new car. It was about the size of a credit card and made of plastic, but it was cut into a very odd shape. “How do I use it?” I asked. My friend was exasperated with me. “Just snap off the protectors and enter the code. I already used one set up so it doesn’t matter.” I looked down at the key in my hand, still totally puzzled. If I didn’t know how to use the key, how as I ever going to drive that bizarre car?

I don’t remember all the details of the other dream, but only the image of holding the key to the station wagon in my hand. I was feeling worried. I was holding the plastic end of the key in my hand and I was rubbing my thumb over the metal part of the key. As if from metal fatigue, the prong of the key started to crumble and fall apart into pieces in my hand. Would I be able to put the bits into the ignition and start the car? I had no idea what to do.

Someone I work with said keys are really important symbols in dreams. If either of these keys represent some aspect of me, well, that seems like a bad thing.

Categories
Other Haunts

Other Haunts – Coffin Couch

CoffinCouch

If you’re re-modeling your living room to be something a little less “living” you might consider this posh, hand-made “Coffin Couch.” It folds up completely too when not in use.

Coffin Couch

( http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=26259374 )

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #219 – Lost in the City

(Female, 40’s) I had spent the weekend with my good friend in the Big City, and now it was time to go home. I had to catch a train in 2 hours and she was leaving on a plane in 3. I guess I went to check out of the hotel. I rode down in the elevator to the lobby, which also connected to a large shopping mall. The lobby and mall were really crowded with shoppers and I had to dodge my way across the concourse. When I turned about to head back up to our room, I had no idea which way to go. All the possible paths looked the same, with shiny walkways and store windows and doorways.

“… I kept walking around, conscious of the passing time and no closer to finding my way…”

I started to wander, but I was lost. I didn’t know which way to go. I kept walking around, conscious of the passing time and no closer to finding my way. I was feeling more worried and panicky all the time. Then I found myself at an exit, and I decided I should go outside, because I’d be able to look at the building and see where the hotel tower (it was very tall– we were staying on the 18th floor) was in relation to where I was.

Outside was even more disorienting. The facade of the mall was so tall that I couldn’t see any other buildings behind it. I was surrounded by tall skyscrapers; I was standing in their shadows and I felt cold. I decided to cross the street so I could see better. I turned about to see that there were 8 lanes of traffic on the street. The corners were far away, so I just started running across, dodging traffic as I went. I still couldn’t locate the hotel. I asked someone walking by where the hotel was, and he asked which hotel. I couldn’t for the life of me remember the name of our hotel. I said, “I think it’s the Constitution.” “There’s no hotel named that.”

Then I got a text message from my friend: “Where are you?” and I wrote back, “I am lost.” She texted me again and said to come back inside. I went into a subway station and she was sitting on a bench waiting for me. She had my suitcase with her. She had packed it up for me. I sat down to double-check that all my stuff was there, but when I opened the suitcase, nothing inside looked familiar.

Categories
Art Other Haunts This Just In

This Just In – Lycanthropic Footwear

I saw these shoes a few days ago and they have haunted my imagination, literally, ever since.

clawshoes

They appear to be a pair of standard, somewhat boring men’s shoes that are caught in the middle of transforming into werewolf feet.

Check out Bob Basset’s other work

Categories
James Frederick Leach

“Bent” Now at AlienSkin

(James Frederick Leach writes:) “My extremely short story Bent appears in the Summer Issue of Alien Skin Magazine. It’s a touching tale of young love that is also seriously twisted. Literally twisted. Oh, and it’s also exactly 150 words long.”

CORRECTED AUGUST 2009 – Summer’s over, evidently because the new issue of AlienSkin is live and my story is no longer on-line. I’ll see about posting it soon.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #218 – Elevator Attack

(Male, 40’s) This was just a quick little nightmare I had after pushing the snooze alarm today. Got my heart racing.

“…The blond guy with the spiky hair grinned like he was going to take pleasure in killing me…”

I was in an unfamiliar city and I had just gotten on an elevator. I was alone and I counted the money in my wallet. Four ones and a five which I figured was enough for lunch. At the next floor a young man gets on. He’s a lot younger than I am and he has spiky blond hair. Instead of facing the door of the elevator, he just stares at me, right in my face. At the next floor another young man gets on, one with black hair and a black t-shirt as I remember. The blond guy pulls out a knife. It’s a stubby triangular shaped blade, easy to conceal, one that could do a lot of damage easily. “We’ll take your money,” he said. I sized them up and figured these punks were like half my age.

“All I’ve got is nine bucks”

“That won’t be anywhere near enough.” The blond guy with the spiky hair grinned like he was going to take pleasure in killing me. And then before I really knew what I was doing, I punched the blond guy as hard as I could in his Adam’s apple. He collapsed to his knees, suffocating. Then I grabbed the guy in the black t-shirt and pushed his chest onto the triangular knife. There was blood everywhere. At the next floor, I got off the elevator. The two guys weren’t dead yet but they were definitely in their death throes. I was still lost in a strange city and I had just murdered two men.