Author: The Grim Gnome

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #65 – Daylight Ghosts?

At this point, I’m hoping this was a dream. I was laying down for a nap the other day in a relatively bright bedroom. I’d pulled the window shades but there was still plenty of sunlight coming through. But I saw a shadow — or something — walk in front of a window. I didn’t think much of it. I figured it was a cloud in front of the sun or something.

But then I lied down for my nap, stretched out and tried to sleep. Just as I was falling asleep, it felt like someone had sat down on the edge of the bed where my feet were. The mattress compressed underneath my feet, like it was sitting on my feet. I tried moving my feet and I couldn’t.

And yes of course I’m familiar with the whole waking dream phenomenon, where there’s dream paralysis and everything. But I wasn’t entirely paralyzed, just my feet. And I wasn’t really scared; I just didn’t think that I was alone.

And the kicker was when I woke up. I would have swore I heard someone in the next room so I called out. No one replied but I distinctly heard the sound of papers shuffling. I don’t believe in ghosts so I’m ready to chalk all this stuff up as dream-related. They weren’t really scary so I hesitate to call them nightmares. Maybe just ghost dreams. Very indistinct.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #63 – Flame-thrower and the Zombie Parade

(Male, 40’s) There were zombies everywhere but they seemed to be relatively fragile and explosive. One good hit with my flame thrower and they popped like a balloon filled with hydrogen. Imagine human sized Zeppelins. They didn’t seem to have a very good sense of direction either, that is, they didn’t know where I was, so I waited for one floor of the warehouse to fill up with zombies, then I pulled myself up through a hatch to the second floor and ignited the zombies I could see. The flames spread through the whole first floor. But the flames also attracted more zombies. I lured them up floor by floor and then I ran down the fire escape and burned the whole building. This was very strange, especially because my flame-thrower looked like a vacuum cleaner. The handle was a hollow tube and the bag was filled with some kind of combustible gas or liquid. I would compress the bag, like a bag-pipe, I guess and flames would shoot out of the tube.

So now I was down on the ground floor of this grimy, bombed out city, one infested with zombies. And this parade of other survivors starts making its way down the street. We all have weapons that are about as insane as my vacuum-cleaner-flame-thrower. We carefully walk down a few blocks and we gain a few folks with every building we pass. But then it occurs to me that some of the folks who are joining our parade don’t look much like survivors. They look more like zombies. In fact, once I start tallying up the number of zombies to survivors, even in our parade, they’ve got us outnumbered. And they’ve got us surrounded. The other survivors were starting to realize this as well and just as the zombies got ready to attack us, I woke up.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #62 – The Stalker

(Male, middle-aged) I kept dreaming this dream all night though I woke up a half dozen times. The sense of outrage, of powerlessness still stick with me.

My sister in law came to stay with us for a little while because she was being stalked by one of her customers. The police knew everything about this guy including where he lived, what he did. My sister in law even was shown pictures of him. The stalker had been placed under house arrest and was given one of those electronic tethers, but he had escaped from them before. Furthermore, the stalker had even killed a couple other people — his previous stalking targets — but for the most part everyone was treating him like he was relatively harmless. Not entirely harmless — my sister in law was encouraged to leave town until he lost interest in her — but the stalker also had some kind of special skill or profession that made people overlook his “faults.” He was a surgeon or something, though I shudder to think of him operating on someone I love.

I felt pretty sure that I could protect her, even though I’m not strong or skilled with a weapon. I resolved that as soon as I saw the stalker, I would just have to kill him before he could take advantage of the situation. Somehow, just having that attitude was going to keep everyone safe. I figured I could kill him in a fight and no one would care.

One afternoon, my wife and her sister actually were gone shopping and I was at home with several people — our plan was to have lots of people awake and paying attention at all times so we wouldn’t be caught off guard. A couple of young children knocked on the door I went to the door but I knew it was him. I went out on the porch and closed the door behind me. I recognized him from his photos. He was very tall and very muscular and had short blond hair. When he turned to face me, he flicked a lit cigarette at my face.

“You’re a little jumpy,” He said.

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

“So she’s here”

“You’re not supposed to be out of your house. Your cage.”

I yelled in the screen window for the others to call 911. We started to fight, to grapple, to wrestle. He was much stronger than me, much taller than me. I kept calling for 911. I don’t know if anyone did. My plan now was to keep him busy until the police arrived. He wrapped one arm around me, pinning my arms to my sides. With the thumb of his other hand, he started pushing on my teeth like he was trying to crack them off into my throat.

I awoke face down in my pillow.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #61 – Spiked Refreshments

I had been working outside side in sort of a garden. The plants seemed to have square leaves. The soil was very dry and dusty. There was this weird spider that I had been coming across all day, that had eight legs but otherwise looked more like a lizard. The lizard-spider was probably the size of my hand. It had orange skin with a large cream colored spot on its back. It moved around under the leaves. I had brought a strangely shaped glass bottle filled with something to drink as well as a glass cup that looked like it was from a punchbowl set. I poured myself a glass of whatever kind of liquid was in this bottle. But as I brought it up to my lips, I realized too late that the lizard-spider was in the glass. I swallowed part of the spider yet part of it still dangled outside of my mouth. I could feel its legs on my face and I was scared it was a poisonous spider that would bite me inside my own mouth.

Categories
Nightmares Poetry

Nightmare # 60 – Basement

A dusty basement room.

tables, chairs on their side.

alone, you climb confused stairs

getting nowhere

a song humming but not by you.

a sudden unseen touch.

Categories
Fears & Phobias

Phobia #3 – Looking Backward

(Male, middle aged) You know that song “Stuck in a Moment” by U2? I feel like they’re singing that right to me. I have what you could call a fear of regret. It’s almost paralyzing. Looking back on my life I have kept myself from trying so many things entirely because I’m afraid — terrified, actually — that I’ll regret it later. I’ve taken the bland, safe alternative at almost every opportunity, though it’s even hard to say that I’ve been active in choosing those alternatives. It’s more like I’ll stay in the status quo long enough until the opportunity closes. What’s weird is that I’ll often have very strong, very passionate ideas like for business endeavors but I’ll either smother them before I can act or if I can manage to act on them, I’ll let the projects wither before they can really disrupt my “normal” life. What’s up with that?

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #59 – Horrible Words Through the Slit of an Eye

(Female, middle aged) This wasn’t a dream as much as a really powerful image. I mean, of course it was a dream; I just don’t remember a lot of other details from it. But it lasted a while, in dream time.

The frightening image was a slit of light along the horizon. The light was very far away, but it was coming closer all the time. It reminded me a little of that– what is it?– that flaming eye in Lord of the Rings that represents the rising evil presence, that all-knowing, all-seeing eye. This light was like that, coming closer slowly.

As it approached, I could see that there was something in it, something blurry, a dark line of some sort. As the light came nearer, I could see that the dark blur was actually text, like when you are having your eyes examined and the doctor shows you blocks of light with letters in them and wants you to read them aloud. In the light was writing. Except that this was longer, not just single letters, but probably words. There was something written there, a long sentence maybe from the amount of letters.

I squinted my eyes, trying to decipher the text, trying to make sense of it as the scary light came closer. Figuring it out was my only hope, but the text was too blurry. I couldn’t read it and the light was going to get me soon.

I’m not sure if the scariest part was the approaching light itself– I mean, after all, what was the light going to do to me? More frightening, I think, was the not-being-able-to-read part of the dream. I don’t know if my eyes were failing or what. Just that something important wasn’t working right.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #58 – Dangerous Surgery

(Male) This was a dream that had a whole world attached to it, all these things I just knew about this world which makes it rather hard to tell as a straight story.

The whole dream was set in the future, a time when it rained all the time and people seemed to live inside all the time under this really flat, gray light. The world was like a honeycomb of hallways, very institutional-feeling. Everybody wore these very drab gray jumpsuits that seemed to be very fragile, easily torn but then again very easily replaced. What’s coming to mind is that they must have been made out of recycled paper fibres but no one in the dream actually said that.

We were at war with this other society but what was strange was that both societies lived in the same hallways. The only way the different armies could be discerned was by their weapons. Get this: the weapons looked like water balloons but they had a tough enough skin that they could be stacked. There was one hallway that was stacked floor to ceiling with these water balloons. But the other army had their own water balloons, the only difference is that one army had balloons that were red while the other army had balloons that were blue. The weapons had the only bright colors in the whole place.

Since both societies basically looked like each other, we were suspicious of basically everyone all the time. The only way to really tell what side someone was on is if they were carrying a weapon. Through a passing conversation with a friend I knew and trusted, I learned that I had had some surgery as part of a very old military program, something that implanted a weapon inside me. I didn’t like the sound of that, though I thought it would be good to know once and for all which side I was on, which society I really belonged to. He mentioned an “address” which of course was a room number because no one went outside anymore.

I tried to get to the address. I didn’t know what to expect. Would the doctors remove the weapon? Would they program me to explode like a water balloon? Would I find the room empty and abandoned? While I was getting there, I must have made certain army officials suspicious of me. I had to run away from them, down the unfamiliar, indistinct corridors, turning here and there. Finally I got to the room and explained my situation to the doctors. They beat me up and kicked me when I collapsed on the floor. I tried to ask if they weren’t afraid that the weapon would detonate but all they said was “Ungrateful.”

Finally they dragged me over to an operating table. “We’ll take out the weapon. Then we’ll ship you off-world to a mining colony. How do you like that?”

The next thing I knew I was outside, running through the rain. It sizzled, stung a little, as it hit my skin. It was very dark. I ducked into an alley. There was another man there with a long black beard and a woman with snarled blond hair. They had had money once but had wasted it all and so now, they were escaping.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #57 – Deformed Mermaid

(Male) This isn’t so much a dream because I can’t remember the whole dream but just one image:

Everything was deep blue and grey, like a foggy day on the ocean. There were long swirls of kelp that were a dark blue-green. And swimming among the waves and the kelp was a mermaid, a half fish – half woman with long flowing black hair that glistened from the water. She pulled herself out of the water to rest for a moment. The Mermaid didn’t seem to know I was there or perhaps she didn’t care. I was so close I could reach out and touch her shoulder but I didn’t want to startle her so I called out to her gently. She turned her head and I could see that she had no face. Literally, everything between her chin and her forehead was gone, even the bone was missing. It looked like a shark or something had taken a bite out of the front of her head. The front of her teeth were missing, revealing a gaping throat; there were empty socket that might have been where her eyes were or perhaps they were the sinus cavities behind her eyes. The Mermaid wasn’t bleeding or in any obvious pain but I couldn’t imagine how she could still be alive after such trauma.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #56 – Zombies Last Stand

(Male) The dream took place in a cottage that friends of mine used to have when we were kids. But instead of being on a lake, the cottage was just in a normal, old neighborhood. One night, zombies attacked. Nothing too unique or special about the zombies, just old-fashioned, slow-moving, brain-eating zombies. They were more or less easy to keep out despite the long rows of windows at the front. We had retreated upstairs.

But we survived til dawn. For some reason these zombies couldn’t be out in daylight, which made things rather convenient for us. I went downstairs and found a friend of mine on the couch. I thought he was a zombie but he was just hung over. I went outside and talked with my neighbors who were all very angry. I learned that many people had tried to escape the city so there was a huge traffic jam and then when nightfall came, the zombies just ate people in their cars, one by one, like a buffet table.

Though our neighborhood had been attacked it didn’t look like anyone had been hurt. We knew we wouldn’t be so lucky tonight.

When night fell, the folks in our house retreated to the second story of the cottage, plugged in our gas generator — which we knew wouldn’t last forever — and then used the electricity to power our guitar amps. We played this really weird psychedelic music all night long. We had destroyed the staircase so we were sort of luring all the zombies to our first floor for some reason, like a big roach motel. We could hear them moving downstairs, moaning like they were singing along with the music.

When I woke up from this dream it was still dark and I was even scared to move.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #55 – Escape from Cloud Mountain

(Male) This was an epic scale dream, one that felt like it went on for hours and hours and covered a huge amount of narrative. The dream took place on this cloud that was more or less solid. People had landed on this cloud and dug out huge passages and tunnels inside it. All the walls were translucent so sunlight made them all glowing white.

The cloud was some kind of secret military installation and I wasn’t supposed to be there. But I was there with my best friend and with an old friend I haven’t seen in probably 10 years.

It was scary because we had to avoid the military who were shooting at us. And also because the whole cloud was dissolving. The builders had carved too much into the cloud and so it had started to turn back into merely water vapor. Aircraft and vehicles were starting to sink through the floor and presumably then fall to earth. We were running around, trying not to be killed while trying to find some way off the cloud.

By the end of the dream we still hadn’t escaped. As we ran, our feet sank into the floor like it was melting underneath us. It became harder and harder to run.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #53 – Stalked… by Bigfoot

(Male, 30’s) I remember one nightmare I had as a kid. It was a fever dream and fever dreams are especially vivid and realistic so it almost feels like a memory. I had noticed a large paw print in the dust on top of my dresser — though this was of course impossible because I would have been so short at the time that I couldn’t even SEE the top of my dresser. Then I had the feeling I was being watched. I looked over at the window of my bedroom and there was this huge hairy creature looking in at me. I wouldn’t have known the word for it then but clearly it was Bigfoot! I didn’t want him to get me. So I ran out of my bedroom and into the hallway. There was window at the end of the hall that usually had a curtain in front of it but in the dream there was no curtain. This allowed Bigfoot to look right in at me again. Then I ran into my sister’s room. She was disturbed by my running around but she was disturbed even more by Bigfoot staring in her window too. Finally both of us ran and hid in the closet which was the only place it seemed like we’d be save. To this day, I think we did hide in the closet!

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #52 – A Little Violence among Friends

(Male, mid 20’s) The wife of one of my wife’s friends shows up at our door. She says she has just left her husband and that she needs a place to hide. She’s afraid her husband might be violent. We let her in.

..She’s afraid her husband might be violent…

Before long her husband appears and he is angry. He tries to attack his wife but she runs away from him. Then he is angry at my wife and I for letting his wife hide in our house. He takes a poker from the fireplace and chases us around in a homicidal frenzy. Then he threatens my infant daughter — and without a thought I rip the weapon away from him and beat him over and over with it. Before I know it, this longtime friend of ours, someone who would eat dinner at our table, lies dead at my feet, bloody, broken, crushed by my hand. It was terrifying how easy it was.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #51 – In Death, Face to Face

(Male) This part really happened: A teacher I had maybe ten years ago had a daughter a couple years younger than me. I don’t remember ever having a conversation with her. The difference between our ages always seemed so big at the time. Last month, his daughter died after a lengthy illness.

But after she’d died, I had a dream where she and I were both in this dark room. Just outside the door in a lighted space there were people who we both knew. We stood very close to each other for quite awhile, wordlessly standing, not exactly waiting, just sort of “being.” Finally I spoke, “I never really knew you.” Then she said entirely without inflection “Now I’m dead.” I nodded but since we were in the dark, she wouldn’t have been able to see. I didn’t know if her words supposed to mean that I was dead too, or that since she was dead that therefore we’d be able to get to know each other or whether, perhaps, her words really weren’t replying to me at all. I could hear a commotion coming from the people in the lighted space but none of their words were distinct enough to make out. We stood there, in the dark, face to face, until I woke up.

His daughter who

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #50 – Weiner Dog Attacks

(Male) Massively strange dream. I was walking down a row of shops and all of them seemed to sell relatively strange things. Like one of the shops sold exclusively cartoon art. Not comic books but large canvases and boards with single panel cartoons on them. There was someone in the crowd who resembled one of the figures in the cartoons and he found that funny.

Down the street a little way was a window box / display case. The frame to this case looked like an extremely thin, young fawn. It was extremely odd. I walked up close to it to see if it had been in fact made from a fawn – actually it was made from very small twigs nailed on their side. A dog started barking at me. The dog apparently belonged to a Japanese couple who didn’t speak very much English at all. I tried to indicate that I wasn’t afraid of dogs. The dog, a dachshund, kept barking at me angrily. The couple laughed like they were embarrassed by the poor behavior of their dog. I stretched my palms out to show the dog I had no ill will toward it. It ran toward me, jumped up about two feet and bit the pinky of my left hand. It didn’t bit hard enough to break the skin but it bit hard enough to hold on. I shook the dog off. I shook my finger at the dog and said “No!” in this deep growling voice. The dog’s owner told me “good voice” but did nothing to discipline or restrain the dog that continued to bark furiously at me. I thought maybe this is how they treat dogs in Japan, maybe they do what they want.

Then amazingly from a dead stop this tiny little dog jumped up five feet all the way to my face and bit me on my eyebrow above my left eye. Again, it did not break the skin but it held on tightly enough to hand there. I was terrified. I had this dog – albeit a tiny one – biting my face and growling. I had no idea what to do, nor did anyone around me.

That’s when I woke up.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #49 – Lost on Narrow Streets

(Female, mid 40’s) It was dark evening in this dream and I was riding my bike back to my car, which is not something I do in real life. My car was parked in a huge parking lot, like at a football stadium or the airport, and I couldn’t quite remember where I’d left it. I was biking up and down the aisles of the parking lot, watching as car upon car drove off. Soon the parking lot was nearly empty and that made it easier to find my little blue Honda, the car I really drive.

I put my bike into the trunk of the car, where it really wouldn’t fit in real life. Then I got in the car and started driving. I thought I knew which way I was going, but the streets didn’t look familiar at all. Still I kept driving, turning down different streets and trying to find my way. I turned down one street, but it turned out to be an alley running behind the backs of a row of buildings, rather than a street. I thought I would go around and come back out on the street, but the alley turned at odd angles. I turned down another alley, a narrower alley, that I thought would bring me back to the main road, but it didn’t. My only way to go was a narrower alley still, either right or left. There wasn’t room to turn around. Now the fences and doors and garages were even narrower. But I kept driving, slowly inching along. The sides of the alley were nearly touching my car on both sides, so I decided I’d better go back. I put the car in reverse and started backing up. It was so narrow that I had a hard time moving without scraping the sides of the car. Then I saw a door that looked really familiar– like it actually was the place I was going. I backed up the car far enough that I could open the door and I got out.

…”Finally!” she yelled, “finally you come but it’s too late! You are too late!”…

I opened the door to find this sort of hippie-gypsy looking room. There was draped cloth decorating the room, and incense, and lava lamps (!) I knew this place: it belonged to my step-mother! (I don’t have a step-mother in real life!) She was there, very angry, dressed like a hippie gypsy herself. “Finally!” she said, “finally you come but it’s too late! You are too late!” She was holding a baby, who was supposed to be my step-sister too. “You are too late to save her!” Then the step-mother knocked over a lava lamp, smashing it and making a little spark of fire catch on one of the shimmery draped cloths. In real-life, I know that the fire would have spread much faster than it did in this dream. She put down the baby to start more fires; she began to light matches from the incense and started dropping them around the room, laughing hysterically, like she was out-of-control crazy. I picked up the baby and carried her to the car and strapped her into her carseat in the back. Then I went back in for baby supplies. The crazy step-mother was still laughing and lighting fires. I knew I couldn’t do anything to stop her, so I left, closing the door behind me. Then I got back in the car and began to back out of the alley very slowly.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #48 – Video Corpse

(Male, early 20’s) I dreamed I was inside of a video game, which I guess isn’t really that strange because I play a lot of video games. It was a first-person-shooter / capture-the-flag style game which means you run around a lot shooting at people and trying to get the other team’s flag. So in the dream, I get shot and I “die” which means I have to restart at a certain place and run back into where the action is.

The first weird thing that happens is that when I passed the place where I “died” I can see that there is a body there and that it’s me. My corpse is lying on the ground right where it must have fallen when I was shot. I thought that was weird because usually you just disappear when you’re shot. But I still was able to move around and play the game so I continued running around, shooting at people, trying to capture the other team’s flag.

Then I run past the place where I died a second time and my corpse is STILL there. But what’s really strange is that there are these other figures – figures who aren’t players in the game – who are picking up my body and are carrying it away. I look around and all over the battle field there are more of these figures who are carrying away the other player’s corpses. This made me feel really strange and right then, I woke up.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #47 – Illegal Entry

(Male, middle aged) This isn’t exactly a nightmare but it was sure thrilling, maybe less like a horror movie and more like an action adventure.

…When we were nearly through the store, we noticed that we had triggered the burglar alarm…

My wife and I were taking our grand daughter for a ride in a stroller. It was one of those huge, old-fashioned strollers with ruffles and big tires. It was a Sunday. We had walked around town all after noon and by the time we started back it was getting dark and we were getting tired. For some reason, we thought it would be easier if we took a short cut THROUGH an antique shop. The first trouble was that the antique shop was closed since it was late on a Sunday. We tried the door anyway and found that it had been left unlocked so we opened it and pushed the carriage inside. We discovered immediately another trouble with this plan which was the aisles of the shop were crammed too tightly with merchandise. My wife and I had to move things from the front of the stroller to the back in order to have enough room to inch it along. The process seemed to take hours – what a short cut! It was dark outside. We were so tired. When we were nearly through the store, we noticed that we had triggered the burglar alarm. We tried to work fast to get through the store. Just as the stroller was nearly out, however, we started hearing police sirens. We pushed the stroller the last bit of the way and an antique ceramic plate got caught in the ruffles. I caught it just before it would have shattered on the cement. My heart was pounding in my chest. My feet and back ached. I just wanted to get home. Just wanted to put my feet up. As we got the stroller out of the door and onto the sidewalk, this huge armored (!) police car screamed around the corner. It pulled up beside us and a couple very young policemen rushed out and started running around the building. My wife and I smiled and started pushing the carriage toward home.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #46 – Vampire Dolls

(Male) I was supposed to water a plant a church that was closed for vacation but I didn’t have anything to carry the water in and also the door to the area where the water was seemed to be locked. I poured out my pop and filled it with water from a fish pond and started carrying it toward the church door. I’d made sure to leave the church door open so I could get back in. Just then this extremely small woman came out of the church – I mean she was probably 18″ tall. (Now I think about it, she resembled my grandmother a little bit. Then again she also resembled that psychic woman from the movie Poltergeist the one who says “this house is clean.” Only smaller. Maybe a third that actress’ height.) She deliberately lets the church door slam closed even though it’s obvious that I’m rushing to get in. Though I know that she’s a church lady, we still have some pretty harsh words. At the end of our argument, though she says “Well, come along now” then she starts to walk away. Then she turns and says “You’re supposed to follow me.” So I followed her. The woman is a little bit lame so she holds onto me a bit to walk. As we’re walking, she indicates when we should walk a little faster or when we should slow down or stop. We are able to cross at all the green lights and we avoid getting hit when someone bursts through a door. It’s like she can very precisely see into the future which was really rather creepy. We get to this hotel, climb up to the second floor and pause in front of a particular room. There are lights shining from underneath the door. She indicates that we should wait. When the lights turn off, the woman says “Now.” I didn’t know what she meant. She said “You’ll know what to do.”

I entered the hotel room which was extremely plain, more like a movie set from the 40’s than a contemporary hotel. There were a couple twin sized beds with metal frames and on the beds there were what appeared to be lifeless human forms. When I looked closer, I realized they were made of wood. They were like those featureless wooden models that artists use – only 5′ tall! And they were vampires. Wooden vampires. There was blood smeared on their faces. The old lady said I’d know what to do. I figured I was supposed to kill them while they weren’t moving. Beside the vampires, there were wooden knitting needles like they had been knitting just before bed. I tried stabbing one of the needles into their wooden chests but the tip of the needle just shattered away.

I awoke surrounded by sleeping monsters wondering how exactly I was supposed to kill wooden vampires.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #45 – The Deformed DVD

(Male, 40’s) I was watching a DVD of a television show. Actually I was trying to watch a DVD of a television show, some kind of situation comedy or something, but the disc kept skipping. In real life my DVD player often skips or stops playing all together but this DVD kept skipping from this brightly lit sit-com stage to this really dark footage that was clearly out of place with the TV show. The TV isn’t hooked up to cable so it’s not coming from there. It must be somewhere hidden on the disc. The footage is a medium shot of a human form wrapped head to toe in dark grey burlap and then bound with thick ropes. The person is still alive because they’re flailing, slapping the concrete floor like a dolphin on dry land. And another thing is that the burlap is soaking wet. It’s shiny and it makes a slapping sound as the figure moves. For some reason, I know enough of the story line to know that this person has just been pulled out of a torpedo tube, “rescued” into the submarine… but then again no one seems in much of a hurry to undo the ropes and unwind the burlap. Some rescue. There’s no one in the footage though, just this figure struggling alone. The image will fuzz in and out to the sit com with a lot of static. This footage interrupts the sit-com so much it’s really starting to disturb me so I get up and I take the disc out so I can clean it, maybe make it go away. The disc itself is deformed, like it had been melted and then smeared down a plate or something. I don’t even know how it could have fit in the DVD tray.