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.
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