I dreamed that I was in a large house, and some kind of multidimensional alien monster lived in the walls. It started out creepy–it would leave these claws marks and handprints in the walls, and it kept talking to my mother from inside the walls, tring to convince her it was a small child trapped in the crawlspace. Somewhere between “Poltergeist” and “People Under the Stairs,” I’d say.

Then at last, it emerged from the walls and it was…quite possibly the LEAST scary monster I’ve ever seen. I mean, on the terror scale, it registered significantly below an incontinent mime. It resembled a giant scoop of bright yellow coleslaw, with a fringe of sallow yellow, bony hands for feet, and on top was a spring, embedded in the coleslaw, with a horned skull bobbing up and down on the end. The skull’s horns were bright red. I was not impressed. Even in the dream, even as I knew these creature was a menace and was trying to kill me, I was like “Dude. No. What the heck is this supposed to be? Try harder!”

So I fought it off and I think I probably killed it, and then there was a complex series of mostly incomprehensible vignettes where hornets infested the deck and had to be cleaned off, I hung out in a Sumerian coffin, packed with a kind of jade clay, while people performed this solemn quasi-viking ritual for the death of a demigod (I wasn’t the demigod, evidentally having a chick in a coffin was just part of the rite) I was briefly a grad student trying to finish my Classics degree, and my friend Carlota remodelled her bathroom twice, a fact I kept discovering as I had to keep going over there and use the bathroom to soak hornet stings or wash off the remains of a lot of jade clay, or whatever.

But the coleslaw-scoop monster was just too silly to let pass.