Heads and Isopods

Some weeks back I was having dreams of a grotesque nature involving severed human heads. The first one I tried to ignore by not writing it down, but then the second one took place and forced me to take notice. My dreams can be vital clues as to what's going on in my life, and they have often proven to be downright prophetic. I ignore them at my peril. In the first dream, I was at Heartbreak Hotel in the dining room and kitchen area, being forced to look after the severed head of a man. It was a ghastly green in colour, and sat on a plate in the fridge, wrapped with clingfilm. Because I pushed the dream out of my mind, I don't remember too well the specifics of what happened, other than that the head may have been somewhat alive, and it had unpleasant appendages trailing off from it. If memory serves, the dogs were trying to eat it.

I have a clearer recollection of the second dream, which took place about a week or two later. This time the head in question was female, and she was most certainly dead, long dead if the state of her flesh was anything to go by. Emaciated and sickly green, her face was warped into a tortured scream, not unlike the skeletal corpse maquettes used in Spielberg films such as Poltergeist and Indiana Jones. Again, I was in possession of this head, and I was simultaneously attracted and repulsed by it. I may have purchased it from eBay. I placed the head between two large slices of bread to make a macabre sandwich, pressing them tightly together. The brittle skull cracked with the pressure, and green putrescence oozed out forming an unholy butter. Horrified by what I had done, I withdrew the head and placed it in a plastic jiffy bag. The sandwich had been intended for my dog, but the green gunk looked so nauseating and unwholesome, I threw them away.

I was then consumed by the fear, and I wanted to dispose of the head as soon as possible. I enlisted the help of a gang of teenagers, instructing them to bury it at the local cemetery, in such a way that it could never be traced back to me by police. After their briefing, which formed the longest section of the dream, they headed out into the night with torches and the offending head in a bag. However, they proved to be a bumbling, inept lot, and the operation was unsuccessful. That same night, a vagrant's dog dug up the head from its shallow grave, and the next day, the graveyard was swarming with police. I woke up before anything could be linked back to me, and I must confess that these severed heads have had me puzzled. I can't make head or tail of it. Were severed heads ever covered in Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams?

More recently, a few nights ago, I had another dream that revulsed me. There were no decapitated heads this time, but rather an appalling marine creature that will most certainly be making a future appearance in my novel's gallery of horrors. I was at a rundown zoo, as I usually am in dreams, making my way through an indoor aquarium. As I approached the exit, my face was almost brushed by a long spiny feeler extending over the top of an open tank. I flinched away and noticed a crowd of people gathered around the owner of the offending appendage. It was a giant isopod Bathynomus giganteus, a bottom-dwelling creature that exists in real life, but with some noticeable differences. The isopod resembles a giant woodlouse, complete with segmented carapace. In the dream, whilst retaining its vital anatomy, it also had long spiny antennae like a lobster, with coarse bristle pads at the ends of them.

I watched with mounting revulsion as a woman in a dark fur coat approached the isopod, which was hanging over the top of the tank, and embraced it. The isopod wrapped its feelers around the woman's head and began tenderly stroking her with the bristles. The woman brought her face up to the creature's complicated maw and kissed it, her lips pushing passionately against its chittering mandibles, her tongue thrusting deep into its mouth parts. As its many pointed limbs and feelers convulsed in sexual excitement, I could only stand and observe in horror. The kiss grew more passionate, the woman's hands roving over the isopod's carapace. People filmed the occasion on their mobile phones, as my stomach flip-flopped in sheer disgust. When the deed was done, and the woman was forced to move on by the crowd of visitors, I saw that she was crying.

"It was such a spiritual experience," she sobbed, wiping her eyes, as her friends consoled her. "Did you manage to film it? I need to put it on my Instagram." I caught a strong whiff of musky perfume as she passed, and guessed by her accent that she was foreign, possibly Eastern European or Russian. Whenever I think about the dream, I feel the bile rising in my chest. 

Potholing and Hotdogs

A couple of weeks ago, before contracting Covid, I dreamt that I was caving at Heartbreak Hotel. On the top floor is a crawlspace in the wall, a sort of sideways loft, and it was in here that we used to dump all our unwanted belongings. As a result, the loft was filled with all manner of paraphernalia: books, soft toys, PC games, college coursework, bags of clothes, etc. Whenever someone went in there, Daddy would hear the door opening and shout "You'd better not be dumping!" This time we were not dumping, we were excavating and caving. 

Similar to the phantom hallway in Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, a strange hole had appeared amongst all the clutter. After some time spent tentatively probing it, I decided to launch a full scale expedition down there alone, with a rope tied around my waist. Li and my sisters watched as I cleared away armfuls of junk from the opening and lowered myself down. Each time the wooden beams supporting the crawlspace creaked from our movements, Daddy would shout up, "Get out of the loft!" I ignored him and lowered myself into the hole, confident he would never find me.

I shone a torch down the twisting shaft, but was unable to see too far down on account of all the clutter. It was necessary to excavate lots of it by throwing it up through the opening above me. At each turn in the descent, more rubbish needed to be cleared away, and as the bags of toys and clothes piled up above me, a real sense of claustrophobia started to kick in. I remembered John Jones trapped down in the Nutty Putty Cave, the same thing could easily happen to me, suffocating under heaps of accumulated household stuff. The minimalist in me was also deeply distressed, but it was too late to turn back, the hole must be conquered.

Sadly, I never got to finish the potholing, for the dream transitioned to something new. I was with Sir David Attenborough in a large warehouse, along with a worker conducting us on a tour. Tall metal shelves towered above us, and suspended on metal rods from the ceiling were cylindrical shaped packages resembling nuclear warheads or torpedoes. "Are those... sausages?" David asked, chuckling at the very idea. "Technically hotdogs," the tour guide told us, "this is a hotdog factory."

"My goodness," David laughed, exceedingly tickled by this revelation. Indeed, the weiners above us were of an immensity that would impress even the staunchest of vegans. I noticed then that the unwrapped ones were skewered on huge rotisseries, slowly rotating as they cooked. On the walls were stacks of grills, where smaller variants, but still gigantic by sausage standards, were being cooked. These would then roll off the trays and be tightly wrapped ready for shipment. They still looked more like sausages than hotdogs.

"Would you like to borrow one?" the tour guide asked us. "Oh yes please," said David, "my wife would be very interested in seeing such a giant sausage." I wasn't sure that I could return one of these monster hotdogs in a pristine state, so I asked if I could buy one instead. "This would feed my family for a week," I explained. The guide was unsure, they usually only loaned them out, but he went to fetch some giant boxes and to ask his supervisor. Whilst I waited, I wondered what use these things would be if we weren't allowed to eat them.