The .Gif Quest Of Unknown Kadath

A Conversation Between Myself And Two Small Children At A Fourth Of July BBQ

Small Child # 1: "What are you drinking?"

Me: "Campari and Orange Juice."

Small Child # 1: "Is Campari alcohol?"

Me: "It is; it's a kind of Italian bitters."

Small Child # 1: "Is the orange juice because it tastes bad without it?"

Me: "I wouldn't say bad, but it's kind of bitter and the orange juice is kinda sweet, and it's, like a lot of things, kind of an acquired taste, so."

Small Child # 2: "My dad eats bad dreams!"

Me: "Your dad eats bad dreams? what is he, some kind of psychic vampire? that's terrifying."

Small Child # 2: "He eats bad dreams and then he eats alcohol!"

Small Child # 1: "You can't eat alcohol, not unless you freeze it or something."

Me: "Or make it into jello, I guess."

Small Child # 1: "And anyway, nobody drinks just alcohol."

Me: "Sure they do. I do."

Small Child # 1: "But I heard alcohol is poison."

Me: "Well, yeah, it is. That's sorta how it works, actually."

Small Child # 1 (with incredulous look on his face): "So it's a poison? That makes you feel happy."

Me: " . . . That's . . . well, actually that's exactly what it is, yes."

Small Child # 2: "My dad eats bad dreams and alcohol and then he turns it into jello and puts it in his hair and then he eats his hair!"

Me: "Your dad may have an eating disorder called 'Pica'"

Small Child # 2: "And he's SO STINKY!!"

Me: "It's hardly surprising, considering his diet."

Six Degrees Of (Creepy) Terror

In bed, Chiara relates to me the content of one of her many nightmares, this one from last night:

"I was in a strange old hospital; one of those creepy ones where bad things happen. Keven Bacon was there.

We were in this room and a creepy old man came in, a cripple of some kind. He made us uncomfortable, so we went to my room in the hospital. Kevin Bacon said he had to give me an injection, but he was acting very strange. He didn't really look like himself and he was creepy.

I told him that I didn't know if I could trust him and he just smiled. He stuck me with a needle in the side and it hurt, but it wasn't too bad. I told Kevin Bacon that it hadn't been so bad.

Then he stuck me with a bigger, longer needle and it HURT.

Then I woke up."

"Kevin Bacon was in your nightmare hospital?" I asked, laughing.

"Weird, huh?"

"I don't know. Not really. That guy is in everything."

That Looks Like A Difficult Bed

Sometimes A Neckbeard Is Just A Neckbeard

Dreamt last night that I had accidentally shaved my beard off.

The razor just sort of slipped and then one side of the beard was lower than the other, so, to make it even, I had to shave a bit more on the other side, went too far again, etc. Eventually, I just shaved off the whole damned thing.

Well, technically, I dreamt that I shaved off everything save for the mustache and the part on the underside of my jaw, leaving me with a hideous and bushy neckbeard that I, for some reason, didn't remove.

I was forlorn.

When I woke up, it took me a while to realize it hadn't really happened.

Through the Gates of Ivory

In my dream, I was the camera, floating just in front of Ziggy-Era David Bowie while he sang (and played guitar) during some concert that never happened. His teeth were still the ragged lizard teeth of the early seventies, his hair the blond mop. He wore an electric blue one piece that clung to him without being painted on. The neckline plunged nearly to his navel.

And he is singing this SONG; a song that does not exist, but really ought to. It was a big glam ballad like those found on his earlier albums, full of melodic changes and that trick of his where his voice can suddenly swoop down into the baritone after yelping up in that higher register for half the song.

It was like 'The Bewlay Brothers', but crossed with 'Five Years' and even 'Moonage Daydream.'

I lamented not long ago that I never dreamt anything useful, that I never dreamt a plot for a novel or a pop song. This was my moment. Imagine if I could have carried that song through the Gates of Horn and it had turned out to be actually as great as it seemed in my dream.

Instead, during the bridge of the song, I was awoken with a shock as my phone rang; a telemarketer.

I didn't answer it even, but, by the time the ringing stopped I was too far in the world to get back to sleep and, worse yet, the song was gone. I lay in bed a long while this morning, trying desperately to summon the melody or the words of the song I'd seen and heard David Bowie sing to me in my dream, to no avail.

This is an inauspicious beginning to the day.

Through the Gates of Horn

I've never had a useful dream before.
Or, anyway, I've never had a practical dream.
Robert Louis Stevenson dreamed the entire plot of The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. Elias Howe dreamt the invention of the mechanical sewing machine. Prince woke up and was able to write out the entirety of "Little Red Corvette". Samuel Taylor Coleridge dreamed the poem Kubla Khan and, when he was transcribing it, was disturbed by a knock at the door which caused him to forget the rest of it.
Paul McCartney and "Yesterday," Dmitri Mendeleyev and the Periodic Table of Elements, Salvador Dali's Persistence of Memory.
Me? "Don't forget your dongle!"
I had a pile of things prepared to take in to work today but I had neglected to put my USB flashdrive onto that pile and will absolutely need it. I woke with a start at four in the morning having just had an insistent nightmare in which I was made to feel like an idiot for forgetting a USB flashdrive. When I woke with a start, I got up and put the damned thing on the pile of stuff I need for work today.
You ask me, Morpheus is phoning it in. Where's my THIS?

Other People's Dreams of Teeth

Everyone loathes to hear another person's dreams related to them.

So I'll make it brief.

Dreamt last night that two of my teeth fell out. they had two small metal prongs by which they were meant to attach to my gums via insertion of these prongs into very small holes. I spent the whole dream frantically trying to simultaneously direct the prongs into their apertures and still hold on to the tooth. No matter how hard I tried I could not replace the teeth in my head. It seemed terribly important and caused me horrible stress that i could not put everything aright.

I've read somewhere that to dream of one's teeth falling out is common, but I've never before experienced it. Supposedly, if you're the sort who believes in the unconscious mind and the interpretation of dreams, such a dream reflects a feeling of not having control in one's life.

It certainly seems plausible in my case. When I awoke, I didn't feel any relief to discover that all of my teeth were in place. Instead I just replaced one nightmarish fear-stress continuum with another.

The Giant Bee

This would have been sometime in 1999 or 2000. I was living in a little apartment in and going to school. I didn't take drugs.

The sound was as clear as could be: scrabbling, as of insect legs on the pillow, next to one's ear.

I was awake and on the other side of the room almost instantaneously, with no intermediate steps between. I flipped on the lightswitch.

On the pillow was a monstrous bee.

It was the size of a nerf football, hairy, its chitinous body glistening. It moved back and forth and up the pillow in the herky-jerky manner of bees and, cresting the top, crawled behind into the space between pillow and headboard.

I knew I was hallucinating. Of course I knew it. But I didn't only see the gigantic bee; I could hear it. When it moved its segmented legs on the fabric I could hear the rustling and when it agitated its wings now and again, as it did absentmindedly, I could hear the sound of its buzz emanating from its vibrating thorax.

I stood there, on the far side of the room, my hands on my head, for a long moment, breathing raggedly. I was panicking.

What did I eat today? Did anyone give me anything? What was the year? Who was the president? What is the fourteenth letter of the alphabet?

Had I been drugged? Was I having some kind of seizure?

I went into the kitchen and paced furiously. I knew there was no bee. But why didn't my eyes and ears know it? I poured myself a glass of lemonade and tried to calm down. I looked at the clock on the microwave. It was past four in the morning.

I went cautiously back to my bed. Did I check behind the pillow?

I did.

I have never seen the bee or any other nocturnal vision again.

I have wiled away hours on the internet trying to explain the experience. I often wonder if I had hallucinated another kind of animal if the whole episode would have qualified as a religious experience. Would the giant bee be my spirit animal? What if, god help me, I had hallucinated a person? What would I have thought, then?

The only thing I ever came up with was that, apparently, it is quite common for people to have audio-visual hallucinations just before falling asleep, all the while knowing full well that they are hallucinating. These are called hypnogogic hallucinations and are related to another strange nighttime phenomenon, the feeling of being paralyzed while asleep.

However, what I seem to have experienced is an even rarer form of the same sort of thing. Called hypnopompic hallucinations, they occur upon waking up and are basically the artifact of a brain still caught in a dream even after it has woken up.

Nowhere, however, have I read of anyone seeing giant bees.

Italian Night Terrors

So Chiara has a lot of nightmares. Incubi, in Italian.

The fun part about her nightmares is that she’s also one of those hilarious people who talk in their sleep occasionally; a somniloquist.

If you are the other person in the bed, it is a little like an old radio program, dimly received and tuned into in the middle of the plot. I often lie awake, propped on an elbow, debating whether to wake her and soothe her, or to wait it out and see if anything funny happens.

I usually wait it out. Funny things often do happen.

Once, I awoke to her mewling and twitching beside me and was about to wake her with comforting words, when she began speaking.

“Dracula!” she cried in what seemed to be real terror, “Dracula!”

She often has nightmares about Dracula. How adorable is that? It is like having nightmares about Frankenstein’s monster or the Creature from the Black Lagoon. It’s ridiculous. What could be less genuinely frightening than Dracula? Bigfoot, maybe?

I let that dream run on until she just fell back into a calmer sleep of her own accord.

Another time, I came to bed much later than her and my final preparations for sleep must have stirred her up somehow. She sat up like a bolt and began berating me in Italian. She wagged her finger and furrowed her brows and yelled and prattled in a rush of vowels and consonants that I was completely unable to translate at that speed.

Her eyes were open. I assumed she was awake. I asked her repeatedly to slow down. I reminded her that I don’t speak Italian well enough for this and that I couldn’t understand her.

Eventually, after it ran its course, she just flopped back down onto the bed and slept.

That was the first moment at which I realized she had never been awake. In the morning she had no recollection of any of this. I still have no idea what she was so mad about.

Usually her nightmares only manifest themselves as a kind of faint whining sound and the occasional full body spasm. She frequently has dreams where shadowy figures (often Dracula) are suspended directly above her or are following her through dark spaces and drawing ever closer to her. She tries to scream and finds she is paralyzed or rendered mute. The noises I hear are the sounds of her trying so hard to scream inside her head that it leaks out a bit.

It sounds horrible, I know. But the things she wants to scream about!

Lately she is managing to actually cry out - loudly - in the middle of a nightmare. The other day it was because she was in her childhood home and there were people in it that she didn’t recognize.

Alright. That's creepy I suppose. But last night the topper:

I wake up with a start; Chiara is shrilly screaming. I hold her and softly repeat to her that everything is okay, that it is only a dream, that I am here - the usual ameliorative things one says in these circumstances.

I ask her, after a long moment of peace, what her dream was about. She tells me she’ll talk about it in the morning. So this morning I ask.

Here, in her own words, in its entirety, is Chiara’s description of her terrifying dream:

“There was thees table . . . and behind eet . . . I saw the top of a bald head!”

The Heavy Head

Two nights ago I dreamed of Steve and his wife Nichole. They had a baby, a girl. She had an enormous head - far too big for her tiny body - and it was heavy like a bowling ball.

I remember distinctly from the dream that the baby’s head was difficult to hold or support with only one hand because of its great weight and one was fearful of allowing the poor thing to slip from your arms and go crashing through the floor and into a lower room.

The baby spent most of her time in bed, propped up against multiple pillows carefully arranged to prevent lateral movement, watching television.

The giant watermelon-sized head itself was remarkable because, although it was perfectly formed, the baby’s face occupied only a small area in the center of the thing. The face was normal, more or less, though tiny in the extreme and the right eyelid drooped lazily.

In this dream, I conversed with the baby, sat with her on the bed, and found her to be in every way a delightful child. Her intelligence was undimmed by her condition and she was well behaved. I was fondly disposed towards the girl - the heavy head - in the dream.

But, my god, the weight of that head.

It left an imprint on me like the imprint of a shotput on a pile of freshly folded underwear.