Tag Archives: dreams

Non-fiction

Fettucine Worms

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uncooked pasta placed on table with scattered flour
Photo by Klaus Nielsen on Pexels.com

I wouldn’t quite call it an infestation yet, more of an issue, of these creepy white worms in my apartment. They’re about an inch long, sometimes white, other times blood red. I don’t know if they feast off blood and their bodies are diaphanous, but they’re definitely worms.

Close-up of a light-colored worm on a concrete surface, surrounded by small plant debris.

I saw the first one a month ago in my apartment squirming on the floor, and I panicked. It resembled a maggot. And if I see a maggot, and if evidence proves that it’s a maggot, then I’m leaving for Nevada.

Even if it’s just a worm, it still freaks me the hell out. But I would rather it be a worm any day than a maggot.

Despite that, I don’t trust any legless organisms. Worms may crawl like snakes, but they don’t slither. They wiggle like a human body in a zipped-up sleeping bag, which adds to the creepy element tenfold. It makes me wonder why some kids who have worm farms. Their parents need to take them to a behavioral specialist, perhaps a neurologist.

This brings me to the dream I had last night. In the dream, I was taking a medication with its share of side effects. One of great alarm was that it made noodles grow out of my right hand. Not just any noodle. Fettucine noodles. Boiled too. But not hot. Closer to room temperature. Yes, they were precooked like the ones in the frozen food aisle, and they were oozing out of the center of my right palm. I kept pulling each noodle, one by one, in absolute horror. There was no end to the noodles in my hand. It was like a box of tissues, in which I tore out one tissue after the next. I just kept pulling them out, and not once did I think about making Fettucine Alfredo.

But then came the point when I pulled out the final noodle, or so it seemed. What remained was a painless hole in the center of my right palm, smaller than an eye socket, wider than an ear piercing.

I knew it wouldn’t be the last. They would grow back, those noodles: they were a side effect of the medication. I definitely had to bring it up to my doctor at my next appointment. Either that or drive to emergency and sit all day to see a doctor. Unless I were burning alive, I would have to wait after all the ones who’d come before me despite how bizarrely horrific this condition was. If I’d read the list of possible side effects, I would’ve seen: pasta infection of the extremities.

Regardless of my decision, the best practice for any doctor would be to tell me, upon prescribing said medication, “Now, this is rare, but a side effect can be fettucine noodles growing out of your hand. Don’t be alarmed. Just call me immediately if you experience this.”

Sure, doctor.

Or “My god, why the hell is she making me take this if it could infect my hand with pasta?”

And then I woke up. Yet another dream in which I told myself, “See? It was just another psychotic dream. Why’re you so credulous to everything?”

In fact, only a few times in my life have I stopped in the middle of one and realized, “Wait a second. This is just another absurd dream.” Once the dream is revealed, it dissipates like my muse almost every time I sit down to write. Except this dream towered so high above the stratosphere of absurdity that it remained floating in my memory. Some dreams stick around for years.

The first thing I did in the bathroom was check my hand. No holes. I smelled it. No garlic.

However, when I opened the fridge to grab my chocolate milk for a prebiotic collagen protein breakfast shake, I found this on the floor:

I don’t need to read Carl Jung to figure out the cause of my dream/nightmare. Apparently these “things” have infested not only my apartment complex but also my unconscious.

My phone, with AI technology, can scan a photo and identify the subject. It said it was a pink caterpillar. I’m sorry, but caterpillars, in a way, are charming. This ain’t charm.

I was desperate for an answer, any answer. When I was leaving my apartment this morning, a neighbor walked by, and I asked him, “Excuse me, I know we haven’t met before, but do you see these worms crawling around everywhere?”

He smiled at me and said, “Oh yeah. Those are just moths in their larval stage.” He pointed at a palm tree high above us. “They fall from the palm trees when the gardeners cut the fronds down. Aren’t they the most adorable things?”

Yeah, uh, no.

Non-fiction

A Dream About English Class

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I struggled to get out of bed this morning. The bed felt feathery, and I was at the right level of sleepy. I didn’t want to get out, but I was forced. It was after five, and I would’ve stayed if I’d given myself permission, and I would’ve overslept. But who cares? I don’t even feel like writing. I don’t feel like doing anything. My job has me handcuffed. I’ve lost interest in everything.

I had a dream where I was taking a night class in a classroom with the best quarterback in the world: Mr. Patrick Mahomes. The English teacher assigned us a poetry assignment and elected Patrick to give us the subject.

He said he wanted the poem to be about 1960s women’s fashion in Norway and how it affected women’s culture. What a tough assignment, Mr. Mahomes. Poetry is difficult enough. Why must you make it harder with the subject you’re giving us now? I would have to research women’s fashion in 1960s Norway and find its impact on women’s culture in the decade.

I raised my hand and asked the teacher, “Why must we write about such a difficult subject, let alone have it be poetry?”

Mr. Mahomes turned around at his desk to face me and said, “There are two types of people in the world. You’re a ‘me’ person and I’m not.”

He turned back around in his desk to face forward and everyone applauded his statement except me. After all, he’s Patrick Mahomes. He would be applauded of course. Whatever he says is like a quote from Gandhi.

So everyone began the assignment, but not me. I was lost for words. I couldn’t come up with any in the context of women’s fashion culture in the 1960s in Norway.

Patrick turned around once more and smirked at me after his light jab at my personality. He bothered me to the point where I couldn’t start the assignment. Good thing I brought my smartphone, and I could look up the subject on Google. Lucky for us all, Norwegian women’s fashion reflected the American fashion of the decade. Women wore like late sixties Bohemian floral and paisley prints, mini skirts, turtlenecks, headbands, large sunglasses, knee-length dresses, bodices, beaded necklaces, wool coats in the winter with scarves and gloves, low heels or gogo boots, and shirt designs of checks and polka dots. It added enough flair to my free verse poem. I forgot what it was, but of course Mr. Mahomes wrote the most popular poem out of all. He’s the best quarterback in the world.

I woke up and never got back to sleep. The morning was still dark, the fan blowing against my tired body. Now it’s Wednesday. It’s going to be another struggle full of mistakes and pressure with my job. I want to quit today, but I can’t. I’m not a salesperson. I don’t wish to sell products, so when am I going to write to human resources? Should I wait until next week or do it before the week is over? Maybe I’ll spend eternity wishing I was alive. Death will suck as much as life. Somewhat of a humorous take on both.

Non-fiction

Cheat Day

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I have the proclivity to wake up and not want to get out of bed at five in the morning, but I also don’t want to stay in bed either. It’s a tug-of-war with myself on a Monday, but I made it to the coffee shop. Everything is well and good. The baristas are loading boxes of materials onto a dolly and carrying them back as I sit by the window and watch the sun rise.

I ate a lot yesterday. I started in the morning with a bacon, egg, and gouda sandwich and an iced espresso with cream and olive oil. It’s my favorite drink. Then I went for a two-hour walk after I finished reading and writing. It was 116 degrees, and I traveled by foot for almost six miles, sweating all over. When I got back to my apartment, I saw in the mirror that my shorts were drenched from heat. It looked like I had pissed myself when in reality the sweat was on the backside. I had to wash them in the evening. I drank a Big Gulp of Coca-Cola through the walk, and then I went back to the coffee shop to continue writing. I drank a berry juice to hydrate myself and another iced espresso with cream and olive oil.

I walked back home and ordered Five Guys to be delivered. Five Guys might be the best fast food burger out there, although I can’t overlook In-N-Out Burger. It has been so long since I’ve eaten a Double-Double. Their menu is so simple: a hamburger, cheeseburger, French fries, milkshake, and soda. They have a secret menu as well, and sometimes I have ordered from it. It includes animal-style fries and an animal-style burger that I believe is made with Thousand Island dressing and grilled onions, but don’t quote me on that. I’ll still go with Five Guys because of recency bias.

Anyway, I ended the night with a treat of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Sundays are my cheat day. Everyone needs to have one before they continue their week on a strict diet of limiting carbohydrates as much as they can because carbs are what make them gain weight, and no one wants that.

Today, I have to walk to the dentist to have a filling replaced, and I believe that’s it. I could spend several hours there like I did last time. I had to wait for ninety minutes just to see her. It was a nightmare, sitting in the waiting room. I had to watch daytime television, which is torture with low-budget soap operas and depressing commercials about smoking and lung cancer. They do that on purpose so people will desperately look for jobs because no one wants to see that.

But anyway, I hope the appointment goes well and hope the heat doesn’t bring me down to hell. I’ll have to finish editing my manuscript before I send it off to my editor. It’s not altogether perfect. I keep coming across loose ends in the stories because it’s a collection of shorts that all take place in the same town, and I’m just looking for inconsistencies. It helps when I’ve been editing and rewriting a gazillion times. I’m getting sick of it. Whenever a writer asks me when their stories are ready for an editor or publication, I say it’s when they’re sick of it. That always seems to ring true.

Anyway, I’m waiting for the summer to end, so it can get cool again. I keep having dreams like the one last night, where my aunt laid the ground rules for throwing a party: no alcohol, no smoking, no ESPN either. I had an argument with her about it until I woke up and was thankful it was just a dream. I run across that situation a lot after a dream. I guess that makes it a nightmare because I’m glad it was over or that it wasn’t real, but I don’t know if I should label it a nightmare, just a bad dream because Frankenstein’s monster wasn’t chasing me with scissors like he has in the past.

Non-fiction

Dreams Are For Goats

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I’ve met people who remember their dreams, but I’m not one of them. I wake up early and think, “Wow, that was a wild dream,” but ten minutes later, I forget what the dream was about.

But last night was different. I dreamt that my father was being carted away on a stretcher to a Ralph’s grocery store. The medics were zombies. A zombie surgeon waited inside to perform open heart surgery. My father was unconscious with his shirt open, with those suction cups attached to his chest with the EKG monitor by his side.

I begged the medics not to take him in there, but zombies wouldn’t listen.

I’ll never know what happened to my father once he was inside the Ralph’s. Sometimes dreams have sequels. Maybe I’ll go to bed tonight and have the same dream. Only this time, it’ll continue where the first dream left off.

I don’t believe I have control over my dreams. I seem to be passive in them. Some people practice lucid dreaming. There are certain rituals before bedtime to activate lucidity. One of them is to keep a dream journal. That’s all fine and dandy if one can remember what the hell they’d dreamt about. I cannot. I’m better off not dreaming at all, which is fine by me. Far too many times have I awakened from a bad dream and thought, “Holy hell, that felt real.” I can’t afford bad dreams. Life is a bad dream already. Who needs a double dose?

The only difference is life isn’t bizarre enough to where surrealism plays a factor. Except Trump was president. That was surreal in its own fashion.

A friend of mine said he once had a dream where his keys were made out of salami.

Some people claim to be dream interpreters. My old psychiatrist said he could analyze them, any of them. I dreamt that I threw up in a car in front of an Auto Zone. I was in the passenger seat, and a jerk whom I used to work with was manning the steering wheel drunk.

My psychiatrist asked me what the color of the vomit was to make sense out of the dream.

I made up the color because I didn’t remember. ”It was yellow,” I said.

”It means you fear you’ll lose control.”

I thought I could’ve figured that out on my own. But I said, “Wonderful insight, doctor.”

Anyway, my dreams have never enhanced my life. They’re just disturbances in my sleep. I wouldn’t mind if I never dreamt again.