This Had Better Not Be Freudian

Yeah, well... I had this dream the other night.

I was walking along an empty sidewalk that was beside an empty street. The wind was pretty strong, although I had no trouble moving against its direction. A few grains of sand and a bunch of leaves blew past me, but nothing else.

Then I heard this distant rumbling sound, and I looked up into the sky. The buildings above me started curving and stretching as though they were made of rubber. The windows and cornices on a few of them shattered, and I suddenly heard this scream. I turned my attention back to the sidewalk and the street to find that there were now a lot of people around me, and that all of them were staring, open-mouthed, at something that was directly above us.

So I turned my attention skywards once again, and I was aghast to see a gigantic piece of suman pushing a couple of buildings aside. It made a booming sound as it walked, as though the asphalt could barely take the weight of its banana-leaf-wrapped feet. Its massive form loomed over the many people below it, and immediately everybody began to scatter.

Everybody, that is, except for me. I just continued to stare up at the enormous suman, and when it noticed that I wasn't running away, it suddenly reared back to give a soundless, deafening roar.

That, incidentally, was the last clue I needed. I ran towards the nearest building, which just happened to be a tall, thirtysomething-story hotel. It had a large revolving door taking up much of the entrance, but there was a sign on it that said "Out of Order", so I pushed open a glass door and found myself in the establishment's front lobby.

Just inside the entrance, a midget wearing a black beret tugged at my shirt and offered me a glass of red wine. I shook my head no, and he shrugged, pointing me towards a wide lounge area with polished wooden tables and soft, upholstered armchairs.

I could see a group of three people gathered around one of the tables, so I approached them. I first planned to ask them why they were just idling around in a hotel lounge area when a giant suman was tearing up the business district. However, I realized that I was in the very same hotel and lounge area to begin with, so I kept quiet.

One of the three was a thin man who was sitting in a relaxed position. I got the impression that he was an artist, and when he saw me, he straightened up and told me that he loved women but had horrible luck with them.

"This is a dream, right?" I asked him.

He smiled, showing me a grin that held more teeth that was humanly possible. "I have dreams, too," he said. "I like telling people about my dreams."

The second person was a young woman wearing a fur coat, and she was draped across one of the hotel's couches as though it were her own private boudoir. "You're fat," she told me, and I immediately poked at my own stomach. When I did, however, the waistline receded and I was forced to tighten my belt to keep my pants up. In the distance, I saw the midget hold up a tambourine and slap it, once, against the side of his head.

I heard another roar from the suman outside at that point, and suddenly I noticed the third person glancing at the glass windows. He looked like Professor Plum, from the Clue board game, except that he was trying to smoke an iPod Nano instead of a pipe. He mumbled something that I didn't understand, and I approached him to get a better idea of what he was talking about.

"How much did you get that for?" I asked, pointing at the iPod Nano.

He tapped a few ashes out of the device and said, "The pen is mightier than the parachute. Do you think it will rain?"

I was about to tell him that I didn't think it was going to rain, when I remembered the gigantic suman coming in our direction and wondered exactly what an oncoming downpour could possibly do to it. Then there was a ripping noise, and suddenly the entire roof of the hotel lobby area caved away. The massive piece of suman stretched over the gaping hole and roared into the lounge.

The artist gave a shrill scream and jumped onto the couch, where he suddenly melded form with the woman in the fur coat and became a duck-billed platypus. The platypus honked once at me, just before the midget grabbed it and stuffed it inside a convenient black top hat.

Professor Plum threw his iPod nano into the air, where it changed and became a butterfly. Suddenly a particular tenet of philosophy came to mind, and while I was standing there deep in spontaneous thought, the giant suman wrapped one banana-leaf tendril around my waist and hoisted me into the air.

I felt the polished hardwood floor of the hotel receding behind me, and I glanced back just in time to see the midget doing jumping jacks. The suman roared again, and deposited me on top of what I assumed was its head. I turned eastwards, and caught the sun rising just over the horizon of curved and bent buildings.

And when I realized that the stabbing pain in my eyes was because of the sunlight streaming through my bedroom window, I woke up.




Id