Flesh with skin like pork scratchings

Again, I feel a lot of blue cheese before my bed time may  not be a good thing… Reading comics and eating a lot of blue cheese has disastrous consequences for my dreaming life…

There’s a man who lives on a remote island. He came there many years ago accidentally diverted by bad weather. Much as did his fictional predecessors in Lost, the Island of Dr.Moreua, Huxley’s Island and so, he found himself becoming more a part of the arcane life he encountered there. Little outposts of madness that could not be tolerated on the mainlands. He falls in love and is eventually married to a woman who was raised there by her mad scientist father. He is a tinkerer; a mad mechanic. He is wheelchair-bound and partially mechanical himself; one wide crazy metal eye and a claw like chromed hand.

But, lingering concerns about in-laws aside, the man loves her and so they marry. Time passes and, as is often the case with these strange fantasy romances, the man must eventually return to the world.

Word reaches him in the following years however. His wife bore a child. Her father continued his experiments. The island sunk further into absolute madness. He resolves to return. He finds a Bosch painting waiting him.

His father-in-law has busied himself ‘improving’ his own form. He is gleeful with metal parts. A jaw, an eye, legs, an arm: all now flashing LED’s and weird clockwork parts.

But his experiments have not been limited to his own flesh. The man’s wife has been reduced to a mound of flesh with skin like pork scratchings

The man’s son… he is told that there were complications. His  son lies on a platform to one side… looking like a football with rough leathery skin. For his health, he is placed inside a mechanical mobile appartus that looks like a small remote controlled tank.

The man feels compelled to stay. He cannot leave them like this. He cannot overpower the cackling scientist so he will stay and care for them. But, as years pass, he suspects that the son has no control over this small metal cage. That it is controlled directly by the father. He plays games with the little tank, but the father always looks on. Smirking, adjusting controls on his own exposed wiring.

He doesn’t know what to do.

…

No more late night cheese feasts for Waxy.

The Terror

Okay; so weird dreams are one thing… And dreaming that Josh Lyman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Lyman) is responsible for unleashing a rapidly evolving terrifying alien horde upon the people of Nevada is definitely one thing.

But waking up with a start from sand-burrowing aliens attacking your legs to a bolt-upright position in bed. Looking warily around the room and seeing your partner standing stock still in the dark is another thing entirely.

For her to turn slowly toward you and start to wave her arms in a weird calisthenics routine whiles shouting to you all the while completely noiseless is quite another.

To turn slowly, trying to keep one eye on her at all times, to the sleeping form beside you and seeing that she is fact fast asleep and not doing a Blair Witch in the corner of the room is taking another thing to new extremes.

To feel a bit relieved and turn back to witness in sheer horror that the apparation is still there; wholly apparent, is a whole legion of new things.

… and definitely enough to keep you awake for a while wishing you hadn’t had that half block of Danish Blue (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_blue) before bedtime.

Freaky Dream of Aliens and Suspicious Parents

I found myself with a small crowd in a car-hire dealership when the aliens started to change things. My mother and her friends were there also. The extraterrestrials had been involved in Earth for a good long time and we were familiar with the two races. In fact, standing outside the door on the clinched Californian road, wide and dusty flanked by low buildings with large garish signs, I could see an example of each race in the sky. Vast pictures like holograms from old sci-fi movies. My mother joined me outside to watch. People inside were panicking. Things were changing faster; the skies were troubled swirling clouds of red, blue and green. The two figures in the sky were similar; people had often debated as to whether or not they were related. A popular theory was that the seemingly benign figure on the right actually grew to become the more shadowy malign other. That their presence on Earth was actually a complex cultural battle with their future selves.

The pilot on the plane was in my face. His neat uniform was opened and drenched in sweat. He had an air of panic but was holding himself together in a quiet restrained fashion as he calmly asked me to get him a drink. The crowd from the dealership were there also. Perhaps some time had passed or perhaps things were changing so fast that there really wasn’t that much of a difference between a little-used car hire firm in California and a large passenger plane somewhere over an ocean now. The crowd had begun to distrust me. They’d heard that the aliens could assume human form; that some of them didn’t even know they were aliens. I seemed too calm in all of this; and that wasn’t to be trusted. The pilot recognised it as resignation though; he trusted me. He trusted me to to go the kitchen and get a whiskey with ice. But only if they had cloves. No problem.

It didn’t seem an issue that no one was flying the plane. It seemed almost as if the plane was perfectly still and it was reality outside that was flying around us. I heard my mother and her friends chat about psychologists over coffee back in their seats. I searched through cupboards and fridges for cloves. “You won’t find anything but flavourings for pasta”; my mother had joined me in the kitchen. She was right; all I could find was cupboards full of oregano. She was worried about the pilot; I thought however that if he was stable enough to want cloves in a small whiskey instead of the whole bottle, then things weren’t too bad.

But she was wondering about me as well… And, to be honest, so was I.