THE ELECTRONUKE

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The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of My Dreams

I’m assuming not a lot of eight-year-olds dream about their own self-castration…

CONTENT WARNING!

This post contains sensitive material that may not be suitable for all readers. The material in question includes:

- Bad language
- Mental health topics (suicide, addiction, etc.)
- Frightening imagery
- Graphic violence
- Sexual and suggestive content
- Political topics
- Religious topics

Table of Contents

A Whole Lotta Baggage
Dream #1: Not the Bees!
Dream #2: The Mystery of the Red Carter
Dream #3: The Exton Door Anomaly
Dream #4: Em's Experimental Hot-Air Balloon Film
Dream #5: Wook-E and the Great Relocation
Dream #6: "Fanny", The Super-Lost SpongeBob Episode
Dream #7: Honey, I Ate the Kids: Getting Eaten by My Parents
Dream #8: The Haunting Nickelodeon Game Over Screen
Dream #9: The Confusing Terror of Staying in School
Dream #10: This is Gettin' Nuts: The One We Don't Talk About
Dream #11: The Kyu Nightmare Series
Dream #12: The School, the Cult, and the Prison Camp
Dream #13: The Forgotten Sonic Adventure AutoDemo Footage
Dream #14: Sleep Paralysis??????????
Dream #15: The Stadium, the Store, and the Animatronic
Dream #16: A Warning in the Woods: A Nostalgic Dr. Seuss Mystery
Dream #17: Sam Trek IV: The Search for Dad
Dream #18: The Great Best Buy Conspiracy
Dream #19: The Twilight Strip Mall
Dream #20: Oh, and All the Other Recent Ones

A Whole Lotta Baggage

Welcome to a bright and sunny time for America! Lately, when I’m not attending a day program or forcing myself into relationships I’ll never be comfortable in, I take umbrage in using videos on this blog to showcase mine and other people’s video game mods because fuck YouTube. Now, sure, it’s been nice to indulge in Sonic World, now one of four Sonic games that don’t irritate the hell out of me, but the last thing I’d want is to totally disconnect myself from conventional reality. I mean, what, do you think I have a therapist as an excuse to ramble on about Shadow the Hedgehog and Harley Quinn to someone? No, see, today’s topic has been an ongoing subject in therapy for me, mainly due to the staggering amount of dreams I’ve been having as of late, none of which I can recall a single detail of despite almost missing my day program multiple times thanks to them. Of course, some of this topic is inherently nostalgic for me—almost none of them don’t involve my old hometown in Pennsylvania in some capacity—but even those I grew up having are a point of contention, as they’ve been brewing like a tropical storm in my subconscious for nigh on twenty years now. Trust me when I say that, once you know what happened in them, you’ll be asking so many questions about my mental state as a child, and not in any lighthearted sense, either. Some of them could only have derived from a truly disturbed mind.

Moreover, this post will be a fantastic source of catharsis, seeing as I’ll be describing the most noteworthy of my past dreams in detail alongside my own illustrations. This is to give you the best possible understanding of what happened in them, how they were framed, how strange they came out, how I felt after each of them, and most importantly in a couple cases, what they may have been trying to tell me. After all, as you’re likely aware, dreams tend to carry a very unique and powerful energy, and for me growing up, it could get unspeakably off-putting and, in some very telling examples, graphic.

Dream #1: Not the Bees!

Thus, we start at the beginning, back when my dreams seemed normal. There’s not much to say about this one due to its length, its contents, and how old I was when I had it. Having been the earliest dream I can recollect, it only lasted two or three seconds before I snapped awake, and all it entailed was my mom and I on the stone tile steps from my former Pennsylvania home’s front door to the driveway. We were being attacked by a swarm of bees, which we handled very wisely by swatting them away like they were flies. Considering I recall being four when I had this dream, I doubt it was my first dream, but the fact that I woke up as fast as I did at least implies that it was one of, if not the first nightmare I ever had. Of course, they do get much stranger from here.

I never got the chance to draw this as a kid until now… wait, what?

Dream #2: The Mystery of the Red Carter

If that title sounds like utter nonsense, that sums up the dream itself rather well until you understand where the details came from. Again, it involved my mom and I (this was the case with the first few dreams), and it lasted much longer than the first, although the last few details are the only ones I’ve been able to remember. It took place around my old neighborhood, Whiteland Ridge in Exton, and Mom was taking me to greet some of our neighbors. One family lived diagonal to the Greiners, who famously had a gigantic grassy pit behind their house that everyone would sled down in the winter. Although the family who lived in that house was known to be weird and reclusive, they were the only one I remember us talking to in the dream. While Mom was chit-chatting, I heard the faint sound of an airplane, albeit distorted and with a higher pitch. I looked up to the sky and found the faint glimmer of a UFO, one tinted red and flashing several lights along its length. The off-putting fuzziness of this anomaly kept me too distracted to follow the discussion going on, but I did overhear Mom bring up something she referred to as “the Red Carter” to the family. Nonsensical? Yes, but only without context. See, not that I was ever a Power Rangers fan, but I had watched a couple movies with my sisters at the time, and the Red Ranger’s name was Carter in at least one of them. In that case, my brain was probably just fusing together that movie with an airplane I saw fly over the neighborhood once.

Dream #3: The Exton Door Anomaly

This one was closer to the length of the first dream but nine times as weird, and to know just how little sense it made, you need some context as to the layout of our old house. See, I was outside my parents’ master bedroom at the end of the upstairs balcony—my sister Liv’s room was just to my left—and I watched on as Mom entered my other sister Em’s room. This was on the opposite end and across from my room, beside which was the staircase leading downstairs. So, I headed downstairs and ended up on the front side of the family room—basically our wide-open living room with a widescreen TV and lots of headroom—where I saw her walk out of the door to the toy room where my sisters’ computer and all the toy bins were. Considering that door was more or less directly below Em’s room, the strangeness of this occurrence is undeniable.

Dream #4: Em’s Experimental Hot-Air Balloon Film

Okay, in all honesty, this is a fun one to recall. The context relies entirely on a framing device I can just barely recall, which was Em showing the neighborhood a school project she made… or, I guess, just a passion project. She never told us why she made it or why we’d be interested. The film only contained two shots, each of which showed a hot-air balloon rising before randomly falling back to the ground. The first one was tiny, likely no taller than Dad, and right above our backyard where the trampoline was (this was also in front of where we buried Max, one of our first cats.) It toppled over, and the scene cut abruptly to a second balloon hovering above the clouds before popping, losing its air, and slithering back down. It’s the raw presentation of the events that made them so… unnerving.

Remember how, in my anime post here, I tried to vocalize how the way it cuts out one of every couple frames makes it feel disjointed and off-putting? Well, that’s mainly because anime usually runs at fifteen frames per second instead of the usual twenty-four, which I have to assume is to save money, but there’s a certain effect that doubling the framerate can introduce, too. Have you ever watched an old VHS tape, or even an old sitcom like The Golden Girls, and noticed how fast it moved compared to other shows and formats? Well, this balloon film was clearly shot on VHS, and it ran at a similar framerate in a way that, looking at it now, reminds me of V/H/S 94 as that movie had the same framerate and quality degradation. Moreover, the first shot had a recording of “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star” playing veeeeeerrrrrry quietly over it, and when the balloon just awkwardly toppled over and fell, the music cut so hard with the rest of the shot that it noticeably clipped with a harsh SHEEERRRK! sound. It also helps to know that I often filmed the unremarkable goings-on around my house with an old video camera at the time, so I was very familiar with the way camcorder footage looked and moved.

Dream #5: Wook-E and the Great Relocation

Is it possible for a dream to get both all too bonkers and all too real at the same time? Oh, you better believe it. The gist of this dream was Dad and I finding ourselves stuck in a land in the clouds constructed out of white quartz and brutalist architecture. Funny enough, I’d go on to compare this setting to that of Bioshock Infinite, as the resemblance is legitimately uncanny. No, the game was not out at the time, and it wouldn’t be for many years, as I was only seven or eight when I had the dream. At a certain point, we came to this large circular well in the town square and leaned over the railing. Dad took his thumb and index finger, rubbed them together, and exclaimed a word that came out as… please bear with me here… “Wook-EEEEEE!” What emerged from the well was quite literally Black Bull, a boss from Shadow the Hedgehog, but with matted brown fur. This, in essence, fused the boss together with wookiees like Chewbacca, given I was a Star Wars fan at the time. We rode on its back out of the city and down from the clouds—I made sure this part was clear, as I literally shouted, “We’re gonna see Mom and the girls!”—and we reunited with the rest of the family on a grassy cliff. Sounding as tired and cynical as Mom always did, she said, “We’ve gotta move away.” So, then, the dream ended with us moving out of our old house, the walls and furniture torn up and disheveled as the sun peered in through the window. The end!

Now, although that ending came out of nowhere and had absolutely no bearing on anything else, the mere suggestion that we’d ever move away had me in tears as soon as I woke up. Mom comforted me, reiterating that we wouldn’t be moving anytime soon, but… well… you know how much truth there was behind that promise. Funny how things work out, ain’t it?

Dream #6: “Fanny”, The Super-Lost SpongeBob Episode

I suppose lost media has had a longer history in my life than I knew. I was between the ages of seven and ten when I had this dream, and that’s clear partly based on who was in it. It chronicled my attempts to describe to others an unknown early SpongeBob episode that only I had seen, the contents of which followed absolutely zero logic or story structure. A clear sign of my age at the time was when I told my best friend in elementary school, Michael Ridgeway, about a random animation cel of a Krabby Patty, which the episode held on and accompanied with suspenseful music for no discernible reason. In response, I watched in realtime as his smile faded into an expression of utter confusion. One obscure detail was a bus-load of human kids with their heads cut out from photos, á la Angela Anaconda, convincing SpongeBob to try a Krabby Patty that was literally just a bottom bun with a slice of cheese on it. Tasting it caused his face to scrunch up, but nothing in his critique was legible.

The big moment, though, was the episode’s ending. After whatever the plot of the episode was, the whole town of Bikini Bottom cheered—incidental fish characters included—amidst which SpongeBob’s face lightened up at a thought or memory. A wavy dream transition switched the scene to that thought, which turned out to be a live-action shot of a chimpanzee in a harbor full of sailboats. Over the upbeat production music (I recall it being a track associated with the Krusty Krab like “Drunken Sailor”), the chimp began cackling like a lunatic, during which a quick fade-out marked the end of the episode. For good reason, that chimp’s laughter haunted me for the rest of the week, and to this day, it remains one of the most vivid examples before things got really disturbing.

Dream #7: Honey, I Ate the Kids: Getting Eaten by My Parents

Yeah, that title paints a nice portrait, doesn’t it? Granted, don’t expect any realistic depictions of cannibalism or Rick Moranis movies, as what occurred in this dream was closer to Goya’s Black Painting of Saturn eating his son minus any blood or gore. Overall, it consisted of three shots, the first and third in first-person and the second in third-person. It began with Mom and I in the family room where, in an angle facing the TV, Mom’s mouth spread out into a gaping, asymmetrical orifice that proceeded to inhale me like a vacuum. At the time, I recognized the shape as having been identical to Mr. Krabs’s screaming face from the SpongeBob episode “Squeaky Boots” (yes, the one before he yells, “I took the boots! They’re here, under the floorboards!”, then deep-fries and devours them), but today, I’m able to make a less kid-friendly comparison to the grunts from Amnesia: The Dark Descent. All went black before being restored, at which point it switched to Dad and I in the same room, but at an angle that faced the kitchen. See, before I cared enough to make sense, I’d encourage Dad to do the ridiculous things he was known for, whether that be throwing grapes onto the trampoline while my sisters and I were on it or to hit me in the head with a pillow (not hard, of course). So, naturally, when I jokingly asked him to “eat me” in this second shot, he quite literally devoured me whole just like Mr. Krabs with the boots. End scene.

The third and final shot was a continuation of the first. Mom’s mouth was shaped the same way as before, only this time, she was latching onto the bottom corners with both hands. During this, she shrieked with random shifts in frequency, but she was always making a consistent “E” sound. I tried to run away, but upon turning around, I instantly ran into a wall of spikes and died. End scene.

We’re just getting started with these, by the way!

Dream #8: The Haunting Nickelodeon Game Over Screen

Oh, no! The dreams are starting to blend together! Kind of. In this instance, there are a few different nightmares that, for the longest time, I’ve been unable to discern if they were all separate or happened in the same night. The three others included one of me being knocked to the ground, then stomped in the face by my kindergarten teacher; a second of me getting pounced at and slashed up by a tiny feral kitten; and a third that, at this point, I’m ninety-percent sure was part of this dream in particular. It began with SpongeBob, of course, who was swallowed by a man with a friar cut, a neatly trimmed mustache, and a black tuxedo in a polished wood office. The music stopped, and he switched his chin to the side as though in response to tasting something tart. Next thing I knew, I was playing a SpongeBob game like one of the Nickelodeon games for the GameCube I discussed in my childhood games post here. I recall it being a high-angle shot like Nick Party Blast, but other than it taking place in the man’s digestive tract like a cartoony remake of Interspace, SpongeBob was quickly overwhelmed by enemies and the screen faded to black, hopefully so I could restart the match.

Instead, what happened gave me an ongoing fear of dying in video games. After a few seconds, it took its time fading to a low-angle shot of SpongeBob, who was sitting on some fleshy surface in a lightless void. The angle, the composition, and even his current state were identical to the “I NEED IT!” moment from the episode “Tea at the Treedome”, but only a soft droning noise went off, and his dried-up, suffocating expression was gradually being zoomed into. Then, a flood of water swept him toward the camera from behind, and leading up to the camera going black inside his mouth, his scream was not his typical slapstick reaction. No, this sounded like Tom Kenny screaming in genuine agony. The sequence also seemed to be running at a slower framerate, which sure as hell didn’t do the atmosphere any favors. Soon, it fades back in, that is to a steadily beating heart within its chest cavity. The horrific conclusion? Well, the cavity exploded with light, and upbeat hip-hop music started blasting as Nickelodeon characters like the cast of Rugrats bounced around the space as it was showered in rainbow confetti. Bam. End scene. Wakeup to a new day.

Dream #9: The Confusing Terror of Staying in School

This one actually follows a common dream formula, but that sure as hell doesn’t nullify what made it so miserable. You’ve probably had a dream at least once in which people you care about are out to crucify you without an ounce of logic behind it, or even do anything within their power to make your life hell. Well, it’s more than likely that getting yelled at and punished for issues related to my autism throughout all of elementary school brought it about, but this dream depicts what should’ve been a normal lunchtime at the cafeteria that descended into what can be best described as sheer, overwhelming madness. While in the lunch line, the lunch lady lost her temper over nothing I said or did—I literally hadn’t said a word by the time she blew up—and she, in her words, now had to call extra staff over to deal with me. As the day started to end, I begged to leave the cafeteria as everyone in my grade headed for the buses (the way out for fourth and fifth graders was through the cafeteria), but I was chewed out into sitting at one of the tables and shutting up. Most of the details after this are a total blur at this point, but what I can say with full conviction is that it ended with Ms. P, one of the special ed teachers, telling me to call my parents and let them know I wouldn’t be going home that day. Exhibit A, your honor!

What a perfect analogy for the autism experience, ain’t it, folks?

Dream #10: This is Gettin’ Nuts: The One We Don’t Talk About

So, uh… you might remember me admitting on this blog that I was exposed to stuff like Family Guy, The Daily Show, Law & Order: SVU, Bill Maher’s Religulous, and other content that might not work wonders on the mind of an eight-year-old with severe anger management issues. Well, couple this with me waking up every morning from third grade and onwards to my parents screaming bloody murder for Liv to get out of bed, and… um… you get here. The subheading of this post wasn’t joking. No, I don’t suppose losing your scrotum is as simple as tearing it off like a ream of tissue paper, but that’s sadly what I imagined in very, very graphic detail one night between the ages of eight and ten.

We can end the whole post here.

Dream #11: The Kyu Nightmare Series

Fun fact: a song I often associate with Exton, “Suedehead” by Morrissey, is about the guilt following an affair, apologizing to your ex, and telling the person you screwed her over with to get lost… and yet, they never stay away. Well, I can apologize to literally everyone I knew before I started playing HuniePop as a teenager, because even in REM (the stage of sleep, not the band), the Pink Demon just can’t seem to stay away. I used to make YouTube videos of Batman snapping her neck and Dr. House blowing her to kingdom come, by the way, but that sure didn’t stop them from making her game a franchise!

Believe me, though, this is still radically different from dreaming of becoming a eunuch. Rather, I’d wake up from these dreams exclaiming things like, “Oh, son of a bitch!” because it all comes down to just being really, really annoying. The first of these I can recall was a fictional episode of Previously Recorded, that gaming channel Rich and Jack from RedLetterMedia ran until Rich was forced to cower under a blanket in shame playing Panty Party (yes, I know that wasn’t really the end of the channel, Rich is just my patron saint for doing that.) It featured them playing what looked like a combination of a classic DOS shooter like Doom or Wolfenstein, a special stage from a classic Sonic game, and that comedic “horror” maze game included with Excel 95 called Hall of Tortured Souls (spoilers: the “tortured souls” are just the Office 95 devs smiling on the walls at the end.) Even the position and keyed-out background of their webcam footage was on-point, but it more or less ended with Jack making some pervy comment about HuniePop so I could wake up in a flop sweat. Now, sure, the dream was all fake, but if there’s anyone from RLM who could possibly say something dumb like that, it’d sure as hell be Jack.

While it’s more than likely that at least one or two other fever dreams sprinkled with racist pixie dust have occurred around the same time, the one other example I recall seemed to prey on the same fear: the possibility of something you despise getting mixed up in something you like. You know, like when your favorite YouTuber goes full “anti-woke” and you just can’t watch them anymore. Essentially, all that remains of this one is that my family and I (it actually took place at my current home, as we pulled the game out from the closet at the top of the stairs) decided, on a whim, to play a Jeopardy board game. Yes, that Jeopardy. All you really need to know is that one of the categories just, in bad luck, happened to be “best fairies”. I don’t have to tell you what happened next because, much like logical stories written with a clear mind, dreams really can write themselves sometimes.

Dream #12: The School, the Cult, and the Prison Camp

Ever wanted to feel normal as a scientologist? Well, bad news: you still aren’t normal. Yet, this dream did show the dichotomy of living in relative comfort within a first-world country and suffering through the harsher realities of some third-world countries. It began with me attending a new school (no, I’d long since graduated high school at that point) that resembled a cross between my elementary school in Pennsylvania and the high school I graduated from, only the staff began saying some incredibly bizarre things that got me thinking, “Oh, god. This place is run by a cult.” For reference, this is coming from someone who, having been an outspoken atheist by age eight, was given some incredibly inappropriate religious messages by his schools’ staff growing up that a future post I plan to write will highlight. Of course, one thing that never happened was, when I refused to renounce my secular beliefs, I was quickly threatened with death and public humiliation. After the very congregation-esque middle-aged staff dragged me to… I guess the administrative council for capital punishments, I was able to postpone my execution by asking for a lecture on the school’s tenants, and…

…oh, yeah. Next thing I knew, I found myself involved in an escape attempt from a filthy, disgusting, gulag-style prisoner-of-war camp, but only to then have to watch and listen as my fellow escapees were violently executed and left to bleed out while marinating in a muddy trench. See? You don’t need PTSD to feel like you just left a war zone!

Dream #13: The Forgotten Sonic Adventure AutoDemo Footage

Phew! Before you ask, let this spot on the list stand as a reminder that not every one of my dreams since my early childhood have been concerning byproducts of mental illness! If the last couple spots didn’t insinuate this enough, we’re officially knee-deep in the relatively smooth waters of my dreams during my young adulthood. This is a noteworthy phase as far as my dreams go as, while not totally free of nightmares, they have long since started making a lot more sense, and that seems to come down to the fact that… well… I now make a lot more sense. In fact, I love making sense now! That’s one of the reasons drugs and alcohol just don’t appeal to me—because I find it integral lately (arguably too much as far as my social life goes) to think with a clear mind, as not doing so has gotten me into some deeply troubling situations in the past.

Regardless, you can treat this as a crossover of sorts with my beta content post here, as this is an instance of my brain coming up with its own original unused material for a favorite childhood game of mine while capturing the same homey feel as the real stuff! In that post, I discussed some of the most intriguing examples of scrapped assets from the Sonic Adventure AutoDemo, one of its earliest known prototypes after the project switched from the SEGA Saturn to the SEGA Dreamcast. In fact, if you know anything about the game’s development process, then you must be familiar with the ancient Mesoamerican inspiration it took from Sonic Team’s expedition to sites like Chichén Itzá and Machu Picchu. Well, the dream in question was rife with footage of the Mystic Ruins jungle—the same caliber of pyramid from which I visited during my latest trip to Mexico, namely a site called Coba in the Yucatán—and it depicted the region as having been speckled with only a few dead trees and composed of the same deep orange rock from the stage Red Mountain. Enemies like the spinners were also present, seemingly a way to cross the jungle given the absence of the ladder from the mine cart to the jungle floor. Of course, the part that stuck with me for the rest of that week in the best possible way was when the game was being tested with Knuckles, during which he climbed up the top of the jungle’s outer wall and found a flat plateau variation of the Red Mountain region stretching out for vast distances while populated with more trees and enemies.

Then again, much like that uncanny hot-air balloon shit-fest, a major factor in the atmosphere and emotional resonance it carried has to do with the authenticity of its ’90s VHS aesthetic. See, in the real world, there was a UK advert for Sonic Adventure that featured a sea green info bar at the bottom of the screen alongside a price tag, and for what I can only guess is the amount of footage it offered of the AutoDemo version of Windy Valley, this nonexistent demo my half-asleep brain concocted had the exact same graphic, down to the orange “BUY” button on the right side. That’s even discounting the fact that the fuzzy, low-res quality it showed just made it feel that much more, uh… “comfortingly liminal”, for lack of a better term.

Dream #14: Sleep Paralysis??????????

Trust me, those question marks are warranted. See… I don’t think I’ve ever dealt with sleep paralysis, for which I’m enormously grateful, but this one dream was so reminiscent of everything I’ve heard regarding it that I can’t, in good conscience, ignore the possibility that it did indeed count. From what I remember, this was after I ate something described by dietitians as being beneficial before you go to bed, like a banana or oatmeal, yet everything that happened until the part I remember was just a jumbled, unsettling blur. After fading out from everything that came before, I opened my eyes (yes, I did feel somewhat lucid, yet I couldn’t move) to find a stick figure constructed out of black polygons reaching over me from the right side of my bed. Yes, I bet that sounds like a sleep paralysis demon to anyone who’s experienced it without a reasonable doubt, but I was still somehow able to scream, and the shadow jolted up as though startled. When it moved, it did so in a stilted manner, and in the end, it more or less just locked in place. This is all that I saw in a still frame of sorts until I blinked, after which I was seeing the same view of my bedroom, only I was fully conscious and the shadow was gone. That’s it! That’s all I can tell you, and unless my therapist can help fill in the blanks, I have a feeling this might be just another curiosity ’til the end of time.

Pretend the shadow was startled because it knew I shouldn’t have been able to react, however, and it becomes oddly satisfying!

Dream #15: The Stadium, the Store, and the Animatronic

I suppose this should go without saying, but not all recent dreams of mine are created equal. Some make a surprising amount of sense, as the last major dream in this post will exemplify. Meanwhile, others, like this, uh… curious example… make considerably less sense.

It began in a version of America where my family and I had to go to a Republican high school sporting event, so it was definitely a nightmare. The bleachers were filled with so many Trumpers, I struggled to find my family members and even faced hecklers along the way. After I somehow managed locate Mom among them, one such heckler announced over the intercom, “It seems we have some leftists in the crowd!” I also heard someone from my day program bring up anime because of course I did. After getting the fuck out of there, I wound up in a dim hallway with lockers where the one on the end to my right was covered floor to ceiling in morbid black artwork that either looked like tattoo designs or (say it with me!) anime. Soon after, I was… uh… on a swing attached to one of the lockers while a goth girl cried and journaled from the next one over because… fuck her, I guess? For some reason, I thought I was a fraud who pretended those drawings were mine (not that I’d ever wish to take credit for them); something happened and my… head was on the ground, I called myself a huckster, and the goth girl consoled me with absolute nonsense, so I naturally assumed she had serious issues. I figured the artist behind the drawings was a student who’d passed away, so they kept them all there to memorialize him.

Outside at the front of the school, there was a twisted funhouse that turned out to have been crafted by the deceased student responsible the drawings, thus confirming my theory. Although Liv went through the maze and seemed unfazed, most of the artwork on every turn of the poster board funhouse was pornographic, including lots of… ahem… what we call Rem Lezar on this blog. After getting trapped at the end, I was attacked by emaciated strangers lathered in white paint, but I guess it turned out to be a prank, and I think I got greeted jovially by a country music star and emerged inside a department store like Target. I got lost in a clothing aisle where girls’ clothes stamped with obnoxious human-animal hybrid anime characters were blocking my vision, leaving me with no other option than to push my way through like the worst Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure nightmare sequence conceivable. Once finally free, I just went ahead and started whacking random Shrek merchandise with a baseball bat to let off some steam (very understandable), for which I was called a cruel, insensitive monster by passersby.

So, naturally, I passed by a Zoltar machine with a horrifying Heath Ledger animatronic inside, which waited for my back to turn before mocking me with his Joker laugh. A Heath Ledger grocery store robot with, uh… what I can only assume was either cocaine or vanilla icing around its mouth rolled over nearby, and the blank poster board in front of it swiveled horizontally, so I got on my knees to avoid it… but then, it lowered to my level, pushed me away, and who the fuck knows how it all ended? Hey, if you needed any additional proof that my own brain hates my guts, that’s a whole week’s worth of therapy to discuss right there!

Dream #16: A Warning in the Woods: A Nostalgic Dr. Seuss Mystery

I understand you haven’t heard a great many examples taking place where I live now, so for reference, this one started on a street Mom and I pass on the way to get groceries that looks exactly like where you’d find a cemetery, which paints an eloquent portrait of just how lively this town is. Mom seemed to be losing her mind somewhere while Em, Liv, and I were fitted into a suitcase for some reason. This has no bearing on the rest of the dream other than to say my current hometown kinda sucks.

The next road I ended up on was wide-open and sunny, giving it a far stronger resemblance to Exton, and one library was just up the road from another. Granted, in truth, that second library was actually a high school that no longer seemed to operate as a high school, but it did have a working library. Anywho, I entered the one further up, which started out as the one at my elementary school, only with arcade racing games and eventually becoming a gigantic book museum the deeper I went. Somewhere inside, I attended an interactive exhibit about an obscure Dr. Seuss book I remembered reading, the premise having been an anthropologist who found an indigenous race identical to the Wickersham Brothers from Horton Hears a Who! He attempted to exploit numerous aspects of their culture, but that unsurprisingly got him driven out when they expressed their displeasure beyond mere words. Later visuals included mini Wickersham Brothers marching out of a bendy tube and a lake creature’s head ambushing him. Said creature can be best described as “Incidental 201” from the Rock Bottom episode of SpongeBob, only disfigured and seemingly appearing as either claymation or CGI. It was only mildly disturbing.

Once the exhibit was over, the staff in charge identified themselves as psychologists. They went on to reveal that the entire book was recreated from children’s memories because it never actually existed, instead confirmed as having been a collective false memory.

EGAD!

At first, I refused to believe this as, on my way out, I ran into my first-grade teacher, who had a read-along version of the same book. After I’d left, Mom reintroduced me to a pair of tutors I knew in my early childhood outside the high school, although I should note that both tutors were entirely fictional. Ultimately, the dream concluded with me joining the high school’s baseball team despite it no longer being in operation. There’s an obvious connection there that I can’t elaborate on because it doesn’t exist.

Ummmmmm… at least the tone was positive. You know… after that pointless opening.

Dream #17: Sam Trek IV: The Search for Dad

Now, for starters, in spite of the title I’ve given it, this dream has nil related to Star Trek. It began in what first amounted to Exton Elementary with a front staircase like that green screen mansion from Neil Breen’s Fateful Findings, the top of which led to an oversized version of my high school cafeteria. Outside was a canopy-topped outdoor dining area in a field, like a less dressed-up version of where Em’s wedding reception was held.

Then, from an outdoor train station nearby, Dad, Liv, and I took a ride through what looked like the parts of town outside Playa Del Carmen in Mexico, which we’d visited previously on vacation. The destination looked like Downtown Plymouth and Town Wharf in Plymouth, MA, but it soon transitioned into an inner-city district with nasty old storefronts and tenement buildings. In this five-star bonafide shithole, to quote Max Payne, there were petty crimes, break-ins, and kidnappings happening every minute, so when Liv and I got back to the train and realized Dad was missing, we instantly feared the worst. We searched town up and down (rhyming just on timing!), just about losing hope until we decided to follow a man with nerdy glasses and a creepy smile who happened to be watching us. This led us down a set of stairs into a crappy… uh, apartment complex? Maybe? With lemon yellow walls, in which we heard Dad’s voice inside a sleeping bag the size of a toddler. Although we probably should’ve gelded the bastard who took him, I guess we decided to forgive him for no discernible reason.

Then, as we discovered upon returning to the initial location with Dad, the indoor cafeteria and outdoor dining area were packed, and off to the side of the latter location were what looked like a buffet and fundraiser run by fancy men in tuxes with spindly mustaches. I believe they said they were whipping up an exquisite dinner or an unforgettable luncheon.

Ummmmmm……… what?

Dream #18: The Great Best Buy Conspiracy

Okay, so, just to clear the air before going any further, it’s important to note that, by the end of this dream, it will have gone in, compared to other recent dreams of mine, incredibly graphic directions that pretty much rival the castration dream. This is rare for me nowadays and, for the record, is a reflection of the types of imagery I never, ever want to witness as opposed to what my mental health might lead me to do like that other dream offered. In other words, this dream thankfully is not the warning sign of a future mass shooter, but it’s still disturbing nonetheless.

Fittingly, it began by hitting a little too close to home and ended by making me feel literally nauseous. I trudged through a dreadful morning in which I was so distracted by my thoughts that the GATRA, a public transportation system for the handicapped in Massachusetts, had arrived before I had anything ready. I essentially had to cram my Macbook and three lunch items into my backpack and rush out the door, but the driver made the odd move of calling out from outside, which only served to further stress me out. Along the way, I had ten pages of a story formatted like a chapter book ready—table of contents included—only to realize on the GATRA that three of those pages were missing. Near the rotary outside my current neighborhood, large-scale used products like cars were being sold, which occurred shortly after I found black unmarked cars stopping in front of the units in the neighborhood before speeding off. Cut to Dad and I stopping at Best Buy for… some reason, although the white frame interior and even the paint-like smell reminded me far more of Home Depot, which is a nostalgic location on its own. In a curious move, this tech store happened to be selling… cars? I don’t know why, but these were being sold with a ton of other used items, and what else would I find on the tall shelf of paperwork nearby but the missing pages from my story?

EGAD!

Dad and I approached a crew member, but I made sure we acted like we just had a general customer service question before cutting right to the chase. Upon being quizzed on and shown the missing pages, the crew member snapped, and the police showed up on the scene to bust the apparent repo operation. I tried shouting to the rest of the store not to shop where the stolen items were being resold, but I was painfully stumbling through it, not even bothering to string the correct words together (I called it a “stolen, uh… stolen auto theft ring,” even though it clearly wasn’t just stolen cars and “stolen theft ring” is super redundant.) Then, the whole scenario took a rather disheartening turn when people still flocked to the store, oblivious to what had happened; all the while, Best Buy started carrying out actual assassinations to silence those trying to expose them, often taking them to a small warehouse-like enclosure for a specific product and murdering them in secrecy. A strange mention was a heavyweight but flexible fourteen-wheeler military tank like the Batmobile from The Dark Knight Returns and Arkham Knight (although, in the dream, I incorrectly called it a sixteen-wheeler for having eight wheels on each side when it only had seven), which was totally torched by Best Buy while its driver was killed separately.

In the seedy conclusion, the dream went as far as to lay out the store’s system of assassinations in all its unsettling complexity. See, two crew members would scan their own sections of the parking lot, one who’d welcome approved customers and one who’d take out suspicious ones. The approved customers happened to be mostly white and affluent while most of those killed were lower-class and multiracial, which, subtext-wise, makes total sense despite obviously being evil. Of course, this is when we get to the horrifying final scene, which revealed approved customers having sex in the parking lot, which was ignored despite being against company policy. The “cleanup crew” would masturbate to it and then carry out assassinations by PELTING UNAPPROVED CUSTOMERS IN THE HEAD WITH THEIR BLOODY GODDAMN KIDNEY STONES. Amidst YouTuber Space Ice narrating over this for some reason, I subconsciously forced myself to wake up as soon as it happened, an ability I wish I possessed more often growing up.

Dream #19: The Twilight Strip Mall

“I’d been shot more times than I could remember, but this felt different. Maybe, fate was sending me a message, trying to tell me my luck was finally about to run out.”

– Max Payne, Max Payne 3.

Now, sure, I’m not exactly ending on one of the most positive dreams I’ve had, but I knew the moment I started planning out this post that this was the big one. Never have I had a dream in which the meaning behind it was so abundantly clear, and neither have I had a dream filled to the brim with so many past reminders. Fortunately, though, it was relatively recent, so said reminders were more sad yet necessary to face than anything I would call disturbing. In fact, you know what? I’m coupling this spot with not one, but two Max Payne lines to set the tone.

“The past is a gaping hole. You try to run from it, but the more you run, the deeper, more terrible it grows behind you, its edges yawning at your heels. Your only chance is to turn around and face it.”

– Max Payne, Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne.

Sadly, it’s almost hard not to see where it was going in hindsight, as the first thing that happened? I received a surprise text message from Hannah, an old friend I may have mentioned once or twice here before (yes, that is somewhat sarcastic, as she’s someone I’ve long since forgiven but never quite forgotten.) Regardless, it was an invite to a hangout, which turned out to be at a half-arcade, half-bar like Dave & Buster’s. We joked about two building signs being way too close together, although they were both inside for some reason. It didn’t take us long to lose sight of one another, and I stepped outside to find myself someplace… familiar. See, across the street from Miller Park in Exton is the strip mall where I’d always get my hair cut growing up, as well as the one that had the closest McDonald’s because I used to eat that crap. Other than matching the layout with chef’s kiss perfection, there was also a red and blue neon sign I recognized like second nature after waking up as being for Leslie’s Pool Supplies—the only difference here was that a “2” was added at the end of the name, implying that it was a sequel to the real store. Hell, if you really wanna rub in the familiarity, the Dave & Buster’s I walked out of was where the Big League Haircuts was supposed to be.

Anyway, the unsettling thing was, it was pitch-black in the dead of night, and the streetlights failed to illuminate the humanlike shadows scattered across the parking lot. I checked next door, which, in this realm, looked like a barren gym with no lights but a swirling laser tag-style light globe beaming down in the center, which was populated with low-functioning autistic adults. Upon stepping out, more lost than I could put into words if I tried, I turned my phone’s flashlight on, revealing the shadows to all be random people my age. From the crowd came a guy I actually knew as Ethan at the abusive boarding school I’ve discussed on this blog. I told him I was missing a friend and he agreed to help look for her, and where we ended up was a light pink hotel with curly white borders straight out of Oranjestad, Aruba. Yes, my family and I used to go there all the time in the summer. We tried following a couple of girls but realized neither of them were Hannah, during which I ended up losing track of him a couple floors up. Lost and overwhelmed, I peeked over the balcony to find Mom standing by her car, offering to take me home.

Of course, just in case the purpose behind all this imagery is still lost on you, we passed by a deep mountain valley on our way home, and as the light of morning flooded in, I spotted a train chugging along a suspension bridge between the mountainsides. Mom told me in a wistful manner, “I think the ghost train’s still following you” as the dream ended. Should it come as any surprise that I ended up quoting Edgar Allen Poe and the A Dream Within a Dream soliloquy the morning after?

Dream #20: Oh, and All the Other Recent Ones

Well, it sure looks like we’ve reached the end of the dreamscape—for now, anyway. The bullet points below will provide you with everything you need to know about the last of my more recent dreams, which I likely would’ve forgotten if I didn’t remember to jot them down right after waking up.

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