I just woke up from the most bizarre dream…

Most of it was this kind of twisted Willy Wonka thing–some guy running this creepy place that was supposed to be paradise for kids and…well…wasn’t. Except in the dream I was a boy (maybe twelve or thirteen) and couldn’t see that, but somewhere else in my brain, I was going “THIS IS FRICKIN’ CREEPY!”

There was an old women riding a fish. In order to walk on land, the fish was wearing this kind of walking harness of some sort of black material, like stiffened leather or wrought iron or something, which fitted tightly around the body, and in a weird pronged waldo sort of arrangement over the feet, allowing it to walk on land. It was a very tall, somewhat flat fish, with dinner-plate sized eyes and thick gasping lips. It did not look happy. It was kind’ve like a Christiansen painting gone all creepy and bondagey.

I followed this weird Willy Wonka guy around for a bit. He offered me a free buffet, then tried to turn me (and two friends) into geese. We kept honking. At the time we thought this was hilarious, until we realized we couldn’t actually talk anymore. Then it was less amusing. I’m not sure how we got out of that situation, but we evidentally did, because there was a peculiar segue into finding this guy dumping some kind of yellow chunky slimy substance–like watery hummus–down a hillside with a boarded up cave entrance at the the bottom. I thought it was toxic waste–he treated it like something worse, and was horrified when he got some on him. He had barrels of the stuff. I was trying to skid up this slick hummusy hillside to the guy, where he was dumping it (and my mother was up there, for some reason) and he was yelling “It can’t hatch! The egg has to be stopped, do you hear me?! This is important!” Then he’d dump another barrel of Evil Hummus on me.

I kept trying to spit in the dream, quite vividly, every few seconds, but I had this thick choking slime in my mouth and it was really nasty. I’m gonna chalk that up to probably snoring, my mouth open, and my tongue drying out.

Anyway, I get up to the top of the hill, fight the guy off–he stabs me in the arm with a screwdriver repeatedly, but fortunately, I’d taken the precaution of wearing a fake third arm!* I chased him down the hillside, and my mother and I went skidding back down, every few steps, to where the cars where parked, where upon we were set upon by the crazy old woman (sans fish) who was screaming about the yellow stuff again. My two fellow geese-boys turned up at that point and drove her off. Finally defeated, the Willy-Wonka guy’s whole attitude changed. He grabbed my shoulder–he had glasses, and the sunlight glinted off them, and it was late evening somehow–and he said “You have to listen. The dragon doesn’t matter. The egg is important. The egg can’t hatch.” He pulled out a key and handed it to me. “You’ll need this. The dragon should be released. It needs to be released, so it can (something? Kill? avoid? somehow let die?) its indigenous legend.” (I remember that the phrase ended with “its indigenous legend” very clearly, but I’ve lost the word before.) “It needs to be allowed to live out its natural lifespan–but that is a very different thing for a man and a dragon. Do you understand?”

And I realized he meant I had to KILL the dragon, like a knight, because that was the natural lifespan of dragons, to be killed by knights, and I croaked “Yes,” through my dry mouth full of god knows what slime.

“Good,” he said. “You’ll need to meet it on horseback.”

“I have a plowhorse,” I said. (Where the hell did I get a plowhorse?)

And then it started sort of fading out the way it does, and a phrase showed up, really clearly, as if I was reading it on a page inside my head (this happens occasionally)

The man met the dragon on horseback at sunset.
The man met the dragon on horseback at sunset.
The man met the dragon on horseback at sunset.

Then I woke up all the way, with my tongue sticking out and completely dried out and went “grrhghhhluk!” and staggered into the kitchen for water.

And, as Groucho Marx would say, “How the dragon got on horseback, we’ll never know!”

Phew, that was a WEIRD dream. Had some good plot bits, but strung together…

*My dreams think the stupidest ideas will work…