ZapX wrote:In all seriousness, I'm pretty amazed at your ability to delineate your dreams in this thread. I only ever remember bits and pieces of mine most of the time, if at all. That's impressive.
Well, thank you. It was something I had to practice. I kept a dream journal, wrote down whatever fragments I could recall, and after a while I started remembering more and more. Truth is though, there's still tons of holes and things that I forget, but they're not very noticeable, as I kind of gloss over them. Other parts, meanwhile, are so damn long when written because I dwell on describing all these weird things and have to get them out perfectly.
It's cool, though, because dreams are endlessly fascinating and I frequently find stuff I can use in my writing. In fact, I'm thinking of making a single narrative out of a bunch of dream fragments. It will be a trip, should be fun.
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I'm walking off the football field and into the grimy red halls of the locker room; this sort of bloody rust-colored scrap metal held together by steel frames, giving the whole thing the appearance of fraying musculature held together by braces. The air is hot and stagnant with sweat, the floors sticky, and the faint echoes of impassioned howls drift down the corridors to the beat of a leaky pipe. I turn corner after corner until I come to a large steel grate the looks like it would be the entrance to a giant furnace, but I see the guys sitting just beyond, all decked out in full football regalia, sitting huddled around the cinema screen. I unclasp the sticky metal lock and slip into the back row unnoticed despite the heavy squeal of the door.
It's half time of a big game, maybe not
the big game, but an important one. The coach swaggers down the aisle--yes, there are aisles, for this is not just an old boiler side class room with a projector, they've managed to squeeze an entire movie theater back here--she is a thick-bodied beastly woman with shortly cropped blond hair with a deep, powerful voice. She calls out that the absent players--myself excluded, for she either did notice I was late, or did not care--are as good as excommunicated. It is far too late in the season to tolerate stragglers.
Someone sitting beside me nudges a golden plate and a scalpel into my lap. When I ask him what it’s for, he tells me that if I was listening to the speech, we have to cut off part of our flesh and offer it to the coach as a gift. A lazy looking blond boy is chewing on the edges of his nails and spitting them onto the plate. I ask him If we could do that, and he says that’s it’s probably okay, I don’t know, and shrugs. The coach walks by with a large silver canister about the size of a trash can, and there’s a leg and several feet of intestines dangling from its edge. I couldn’t possibly cut that much off, but I’m not so lazy and crass as to only chew my fingernails. I set down the scalpel and pull a pair of long pointed scissors from my bag. I press them firmly into my palm until they slide underneath the top layers of my skin. I do this four times until I have a square of skin from my palm. When I peel it away, the skin underneath bleeds slightly from the edges, but there’s still skin covering the muscles of my palm. It’s bright pink and stings from the exposed air, but it’s still there.
There is some kind of fat nerd sitting next to me, and I don’t know why he’s here. He’s clearly not on the team and is contributing nothing to anything. He reaches into bag and starts playing my Game Boy, although I was sure that I lost it, and I’m not even sure if it’s even mine. I remember my Game Boy Color was Kiwi Green, and this one is bright white, and the Pokemon cartridge inside isn’t in my name. I have a plastic rectangular bowl of potato sticks, and I munch on them intermittently while twisting and folding the square of skin into a bowl to hold as many nails as I can chew off my fingers. The potato sticks keep getting in the skin bowl with the nails, and I need to eat them out of it, until grease and salt cover my hands.
I remember walking off the field, away from the eyes of a crowd, and I still hear the screams and trumpets blasting through the thick concrete walls. A game is still going on and we should be out there playing, but the coach is keeping us in here for no reason that I can seem to deduce. She turns on the projection screen and a film starts playing. It’s about a group of adolescent abortions with no redeeming qualities having indiscriminate sex, and I don’t want to stay and sit through it. I leave the bowl of my skin on the seat in the theater and walk slowly out of the room. When I do, I’m not only sitting on the other side of the room, but I seem to be in a completely different theater all together. Grey felt lines the seats and the walls are clean and white, the floors freshly carpeted. When I walked out, I’m in a sprawling, waxed lobby, with wide open arches to let in the sights and smells of the lush trees growing outside.
This is a college and I walk with no clear aim or purpose down its halls until I come to a desk, where a pretty woman of color asks me to show her my. I reached down for my pockets, but I’m wearing shorts and tell the woman I don’t have my wallet, because I was just at the gym, which is not a lie, but an over implication to stop me from having to explain anything to her. She says I can’t go in without an ID and I call her a bitch and a nigger and she drags me into an elevator to see the man in charge. All of a sudden, this is my clever plan to get the sadistic coach fired, by being dragged straight to the top of the heap under false pretensions, because these people are very busy… This is despite having no such plan mere seconds ago.
We walk into a brass elevator and when we get out, the woman is half dog. As in, she has the body of a woman, but the hands and feet of a dog. I ask her if she prefers to have sex with people or dogs, but then I instantly regret it, because it might be seen as insensitive, like asking a transgender person their gender, or asking a homosexual if they’re a top or a bottom. When I look back at the woman, she is entirely dog and the answer is obvious. We follow a white hallway into moss and mucus covered swamp with a desk and a series of desk chairs. The man in charge sits at the head of the desk in a blue suit, looking very official and condescending. The dog woman explains what I did, but he says very fastidiously that he is dismissing all cases for today, and that I should not do it again and
certainly not try to pull what I was actually thinking. I blink and he smiles smugly and knowingly at me. I apologize to the dog woman and say that I won’t.
I walk down the swamp until I’m in a nature trail leading back down to the campus. I run into a guy from the team with black hair, a boyish face and angular scars around his eyes. He asks me why I wasn’t at the game yesterday and I said it was because I wasn’t feel so well. He says I should go talk to the coach and I cringe. We walk down the hill, throwing the ball around, and he looks at me with casual disappointment, the scars around the folds of his eyes twisting into themselves. I climb down a ladder in a stone garden and walk across the campus.
It’s almost nightfall when I find the coach and the team packing up to the go to
the big game, not a one, but the one. She looks at me with only the most casual knowingness and asks if I’m going. I say of course I am, and ask if she got my skin bowl. She ask where I left it, and I say in the seat I was sitting at. She shakes her head. Then she tells me that just giving skin isn’t enough. Other guys on this team have given so much more and are better off for it. One man pulled out his stomach and rewired his intestines into something functional. Another man carved his pectorals into roasts. Another pulled out all his teeth with pliers. Could I possibly do any of that? …Well, I was thinking I could pull out a few wisdom teeth, but I was afraid. Nobody has a problem with her but me and I need to grow up and start trying harder if I want to be taken seriously. I look down at my hand. It’s already completely healed, and I didn’t even feel a thing cutting into it. I tell her that I will try harder, weakly, under my voice. She says I’d better.
I walk away then, and look around. There are men in grass skirts hula dancing under the orange and violet dawn skies, torches lit up under the great ivory arch where the bus is stationed, and everyone is packing bags and gear into it. I know I’m a disappointment. I don’t know why these man, these real men, put up with me. Even now, I don’t help. I wander and wait, and go into long spells of meaningless and masturbatory introspection that leads nowhere. I know they’ll abandon me. I think they might leave, and run after them, but it’s only a white van with a few guys, not the bus. They must laugh. They always do. When I get on the bus, I don’t make eye contact. I sit in the back, in a seat facing the window, and when I turn to look back, there is one perfect being, my best friend, with eyes that glow with all the warmth of love, and even he sits at the front, because he earned the right and I have not.
Thus the bus drives away and as the epilogue plays, a narrator fills my head with the lie that I never need to change, for great writers are thinkers not doers, and that my solitude is an eternal blessing because only an outside perspective can innovate. He says this as if one can not both do and think.
Did you get that impression from one of the dreams or both of them? And what brought it on the strongest? 
), however what is surprising is that this time both the dead and living KOed each other. They meet on this huge open plain and just have at it until nothing is left but a gaint slag heap a few miles across. Total destruction of all those involved, and I spy all the gory action from the safety of a nearby hill. The perfect front row seat to the end of it all and I don't even have to pay. And thanks to my added alleviation I can see for miles. Only thing that would make it even better would be some snacks and a drink. Can't have it all, I guess. 
