The Somnambulists' Diary

Dream: 4/14/10, while napping in the early afternoon

I am having dinner with Apu and his wife from the Simpsons. I am not animated but they are. While their home is also not animated it is painted in blocks of color making everything look distorted and unreal. I have been eating a yellow curry dish served over rice.

Apu’s wife has been stirring the communal bowl with a wooden spoon over and over and buried in the curry I can see a glint of gold, for some reason the glimpses fill me with dread. She rolls up her sleeve and reaches into the pot which has suddenly become much deeper. Glutinous yellow curry oozes over the edges of the pot to join crusty dried refuse from previous meals.

Her hand emerges unscathed and she is holding a simple golden band: a wedding ring. She hands it to her husband then turns to me saying “There’s shit in this curry. You’ve been eating shit.”

A wave of nausea rushes over me and I bolt down the hall to the bathroom where I start drinking copiously from the sink faucet, trying to wash the excrement from my mouth. That’s when I start noticing grit in my mouth. I spit out what looks like grainy carbon grit and my mouth feels as though its been lined with sand.

My mouth feels like its starting to fill up with the stuff and I realize that its actually growing inside it. I begin to chew to try and break it down. I notice that there are small insect like creatures, black and mermecolic. Hundreds of them are falling out of the sink, drowning in the frothy, white water. Whatever they are, they’re in my mouth.

I spit the ground up insect into the bathtub next to me. One of them has escaped my teeth intact. I lean in to examine it. It curls up its legs and its scorpion-like stinger tail. Then it pulses, shivers and grows slightly larger. This happens several times and the insect is now the size of a lap dog, I keep having to chew, grind the infant beings into grit, horrified now that my lack of vigilance will result in one of these monsters in mouth.

Suddenly I am in my home, watching a tv report. A man who appears to be Jeff Bridges, dressed in faded, weathered khakis, like a great white hunter, is giving a report. His gray hair is drawn into a long ponytail and his face is powdered and he’s wearing big circular spots of rouge on his cheeks. He’s talking about how the city has been overrun by giant insects. The only way to kill them is to stab them through an eye with a flaming spear.

I open my door and the outside world is in tatters. Prim suburban neighborhood, SUVs in the driveway, on fire, overturned. Everywhere are giant insectoid creatures. Armored beetles mostly, massive like rhinos. Jeff Bridges voice continues, describing species as I drive around in a jeep.

At last I recognize the beast that was pouring out of my mouth from earlier. It looks nothing like it did in the bathtub. Now it’s a towering, elephantine creature with four trunk like legs, an iridescent scarab’s shell and a bony crest worthy of a brontotherium. It glances at me with one of its six eyes, which rolls back in its head with lazy annoyance. It snaps its parrot beak at me, bored.

And it dawns on me. I did this.