Last night I had what was probably the most disgusting dream of my life, I woke up genuinely distraught and couldn't stop brushing my teeth. I was in a house which was a combination between the one in Plymouth, my old house in Wivenhoe, and my current one. I was taking a bath when suddenly I shat myself in the water. There was a thick stool in addition to the smaller flakes that dispersed in the water. As I lay amongst the shit, deciding whether I could still get clean in this water, the large stool floated towards the side of the tub and inexplicably, began to crawl up it. It reached the top, and flopped over the edge onto the floor.
I jumped out of the water and grabbed a towel, watching as it slid along the tiles, twitching back and forth, with jellied globs of white showing through. At first I thought it was just some peculiar chemical reaction taking place, and was about to pick it up with a tissue and drop it in the toilet. But the closer I looked, the more I began to see. What resembled a serrated fin poked through, and also what seemed to be spines unfurling, like those found on a stickleback. Was it a fish? Overcome with revulsion, I tried to remember what I had eaten. The whole thing was now moving, definitely alive. Then a spider crawled past it, and the stool made a lunge, as though to attack it. A lump raised itself from the rest of the mass, and broke into a round mouth, which let off a scream.
At this point, I could take the horror no more, and I ran from the bathroom, shouting for my wife. I closed the door to stop whatever it was from escaping. When my wife eventually arriving, finding me cowering on the stairs, she opened the bathroom door and my dog ran in. I saw the creature try to bite him, a grotesque mewling mouth on the end of a tube, six stumpy little legs, wings or fins plastered with shit. The thing looked like an insect, a germ, and a fish all in one. My dog ran away and the thing scuttled out of the bathroom and onto the hallway wall, leaving a trail of shit wherever it went. I began crying and bawling, berrating my wife for letting it out and ruining the house. "Why would you do that?!" I screamed.
I cried and whimpered on the staircase, watching in horror as my wife battled the creature with a shoe. She scraped it off the wall and began beating it over and over as I screamed at her to kill it. With each blow of the shoe, the creature let out a shriek. Eventually it was dead, but I could not stop crying and shaking, and the house was covered in shit. My wife carried the dead creature to the living room and laid out its body to take a look at it. She unravelled all its body parts, which turned out to be expansive. I watched from a safe distance. It had masses of spaghetti-like jellyfish tentacles that reached all the way across the floor, a carapace that fanned open into fleshy, lung-like wings, or fins, and a whole dangling spillage of pale helices.
Li identified the animal as a 'yabby worm', which takes up residence as a parasite in a human host by crawling into the mouth and lodging in the bowels, stealing food. Mine had obviously been displaced whilst I soaked in the bath. I was disgusted, and could not get the taste of shit out of my mouth. When I awoke, I immediately Googled 'yabby worm' and found that crayfish are called yabbies in Australia. My skin has been crawling since having this dream.
