윤

This story was in the news when we were up there last week, and the angle on that particular program was the social implication of the immersed interactive gamer and the failure of parents to recognize it when removed. Not that I’d lay any guilt on them, of course; children were being grounded long before Xbox Live for bad grades and kept from their bonding activities, and our numbers haven’t suffered from too many of them freezing to death in the woods. Maybe a better solution for kids like these, if it’s so god-damned difficult to raise them with stronger ties to the real world in the first place, is to restrict the form of their online presence and kill the Call of Duty (by say, just swiping the disc) while allowing contact with their clans or what-not. Either way, human development’s making a profound transition here, what with the Internet and all, and it’s best that both passing and progressing generations be prepared.

Why the REM category then? Because I dreamed last night 老婆 and I had to refuel her dad’s truck, and to save on costs, went way out to the boonies. So far out there that, not only had we crossed the border, but the markedly Pacific Northwestern two-lane highway was littered with dinosaur carcasses. One roadside animal we saw prone was a green-furred saber-toothed tiger, which didn’t strike me until I woke later to exist anywhere in the recesses of my mind except in the form of He-Man’s sidekick.

Thanks to the cliff-hanging driving in Indiana Jones 4 (which, alas, like the rest of the movie, was spectacularly tepid—they managed to follow the formula well enough, suspension-of-belief escapes, swarming insects, bad guys vaporizing at the end, but maybe all that proved is that formula just doesn’t work anymore) I dreamed of getting onto an on-ramp high above the water, then, as so often happens, the perspective changed to outside the car, like in a videogame whose critics complain about stiff camera angles, and I lost control and ran off a portion without guard railing. I watched from my overhead perch and saw it dive into the ocean, then flew to another side of the bridge where a school of dolphins had gathered. Swooping down to join them, I found myself in an underwater station that teleports its passengers to Alpha Centauri. A bright light shimmered around me, and I soon stepped out onto the deck of a vessel near the alien city. The plain but densely-packed buildings didn’t particularly impress as other-worldly, so I looked up to the night sky for passing star-liners.

After landing I was ushered into a crowded theater lobby, accompanied by many visitors from Earth. My old buddy Reynold was there, asking someone about an engineering problem he was having with a surging circuit, but the response was a snicker, because, as everyone apparently knew, you shouldn’t expect any benefits from advanced civilizations. Another rule in effect was that everything of value had none and vice versa, so when I went to a nearby shop to have rips and creases in a poster I was carrying repaired (which was possible with their technology, by first marking the damaged areas with stitching), and the one I thought was from the Shining turned out to be a B-movie called “Shining Monsters” instead, I offered it to the proprietor for another I’d rather have. Might as well barter my credit away, since there’s no use in keeping currency.

There were corn-shaped egg sacs burst open on the walls, an embarrassing overlook of sanitation. Bright yellow stains surrounded them, and I could only imagine what sprang forth.

Then I swore my eyes were open, but I could alternate with those in my mind; in the dream they beheld, I held a small ironing board, maybe the counter-top kind, in my left arm, and from my lying position I had to raise it into view. My waking hand would be clenched but empty, yet I could see its contents “inside”. Had I dreamed this whole experiment, too?

I dreamed we were staying in a spacious, home-sized hotel when the back doorbell rang. This wasn’t the best of areas, so I suspected trouble when I looked through the peep-hole and saw it covered by a Black man’s face who claimed to be with FedEx. Somehow my view changed camera angles and I could see him from outdoors, not in uniform nor carrying any package I was expecting and accompanied by two cohorts preparing a break-in. A garbage truck backed up to the door. I went to the other room and called the front desk, thinking twice, then pressed the “3” button labeled security. Butterfingers that I was, I first hit 5 by mistake. As I described the situation to the operator, sitting on a stairway to the second floor, they must have gained entry because at least one appeared, dressed in all Black, gesticulating wildly like a gorilla, and I reported the intrusion. I awoke thinking what a terrible blow it would be to the Obama campaign, let alone to race relations, were the other side to air a spot featuring a victim of such a crime sharing his or her grievance.

In the 45 minutes or so I had left this morning I spotted Steve Carrell at a kid’s store, and he had a terrible bowl cut from behind. I followed him to where they were filming The Office in the indoor mall outside, and discovered that in my absence, 老婆 had been selected as an extra for the shoot, and was being dressed (out of her pajamas) and prepped for the part. She flubbed her lines the first time around, but they were giving her a second chance.

Danny Glover was still in familiar form as Officer Murtaugh, with Riggs nowhere in sight, this time pursuing a vicious killer played by none other than Tom Cruise, who revealed his violent insanity in an early scene with his protégé, Seann William Scott from American Pie. Scott smashed a mirror in anger and Cruise stared lovingly at his own increasingly bloody reflection in the glass as it was broken in slow-motion. Murtaugh in dirty undershirt cornered them in an office building, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson appeared at his side as (disposable) backup, and I got the impression their climactic shootout was the stuff of better cinema. Reminds me, I want to watch Hard Boiled again.

What did Lovecraft say? “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents… some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age.” Now it’s no big secret I’ve been fascinated with my dreams most of my life, maybe because they’ll fill in the gaps with crazy-awesome shit when my memory of the latter gets hazy (I might even brave the Jenga-like boxes in storage and transcribe my doozies from the paper notebooks I kept in high school and college), and sometimes my dedication pays off:

From ???@??? Mon Jun 03 11:51:25 1996
To: Brother Barreiro
From: yun@netvoyage.net (J.)
Subject: Invasion!
Cc: Brother Gantela,Brother Lai,Brother Liao,Brother Su,Chen Dynasty,Chen Yuang-Ping,Chi-Sa Gang,Crisostomo Clan,Sister Christina,Sister Susan
Bcc:
X-Attachments:

Last night I dreamt I was sitting outside on a stone railing surrounding a building on a college campus. There was a denim-clad couple standing beside me, and the girl asked me if I feared invasion by space aliens. I replied no, but she announced that she did and seemed quite serious about it. Suddenly, one just happened to appear from the sky and landed about fifteen yards directly in front of us. It looked like a man dressed in a gorilla costume. He grabbed a nearby student and broke his neck. Another person tried throwing something at the alien from behind, but it turned around and sprayed him from a distance with a deadly clear liquid. I keeled over and played dead. The girl who had predicted all this earlier was still there, alone now; her boyfriend had been killed, too. She told me that the creature was “history,” which somehow meant it had gone to the south. Seeing that the coast was clear and it was further away than I could see, I took her by the hand and made a run for it–towards the north, of course. We stopped at a lagoon when we looked to the sky and saw a number of helicopter-turned-rocketships landing in different places all around the school and beyond. I turned to the girl, a short blonde with an English accent, and called her by name: “Tessa,” I said, “I think you’re the prettiest–” She cut me off: “It’s too early.”

[The world’s being taken over, and I’m still horny. Oh, God. I actually had two or three follow-up dreams after waking up from this one: the next episode, which is the only one I clearly remember, detailed our flight from the aliens on a flying scooter of some kind, towards the safety of the ocean; I discovered that their weakness was water. We had a run-in with a vicious street gang, you know, the last vestiges of humanity and all. Funny, but the same girl’s name was now Rita…]

—Granted I was naming characters like her all the time, but still!

Sounds like a Terry Nation Doctor Who story title, I know, but this is what came to mind when I woke up in the middle of the night. Aliens had invaded my immediate world, which consisted of a short train trip: they appeared, in the form of an electrically-charged gaseous cloud, in a car further up and made their way towards us. Somehow I managed to survive the experience, but was forced to relive it—luckily, however, I was placed at the station ahead of the attack and felt safe as long as I could last the next ten or so minutes. But strange rolling creatures littered the landscape, moving in repetitive patterns that resembled traditional videogame obstacles. They were easy enough to avoid, but my body wasn’t responding, as if unnatural weight were placed on my shoulders. I doubled back, but in my strain to move I became careless and didn’t notice that there was a second familiar character in my view, a fake that grabbed me when I got close. The thing held me tightly around the torso from behind like the Japanese ex-girlfriend in Shutter and squeezed, and this pain remained even after I opened my eyes. It was then I imagined how they might continue to torture us in our dreams (not too original an idea, as all the Freddy Krueger movies will attest), and actually worried about falling asleep again.

Last night the world as I knew it had been upset by some cataclysm of Thundarr the Barbarian proportions, and the oceans actually folded over onto the landscape, with the carcasses of huge tankers jutting out of the sides of newly-formed cliffs. I’m not sure if I could fly, but managed to leap from one precarious perch on one such formation to another, seemingly miles away, and landed in the brush near a tree-lined sidewalk. Behind me was a precipice, but I stayed put, because marching along the street was an army of evil Korean-looking women. (Must’ve been 老婆’s derision last night of 김선아’s lack of glamour in her first appearance since 내 이름은 김삼순.) They spotted me so I pushed off into the abyss, hoping to escape by veering towards one of many branches that flew by at 9.8m/s², but they followed. During our screeching descent, they tried hooking onto my limbs with whip-like ribbons, but the regular technique for preventing them was to spin my own weighted cords from both hands like helicopter blades.