Show of hands if you were dominated in street dance offs by a rival mascot.

If you were like most kids, getting your haircut was like going to the whiskey-breath’d dentist. Not me. In my town, there used to be a glorious kids’ hair salon called Tickety-Do’s.

Yes, at Tickety-Do’s there was Nintendo while-you-wait, loaded with Super Mario 3, Paperboy and that Bart Simpson game. Each hair cutting station had a small TV built into the counter that you could request play any Disney movie you wanted, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or (always my choice) Tim Burton’s Batman. When you left, you could choose from a rainbow of high octane sugar suckers that were one chemical element away from glass with all the flavour of liquefied Sunday morning TV.

Tickety-Do’s was the bomb (to use lingo of the time). My mom worked there; part-receptionist, part-buzz cutter – the only times they trusted her with clippers, the only times she could indulge in her destructive tendencies. Not that she was violent or psycho, she just loved making kids a fraction closer to bald.

In the summer after grade 7, I had attempted my first

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why can't I dream of Playdoh instead?

Last post: The dreams I’ve been having make LSD users jealous.
Today: The continuing story of my recent onslaught of dream-mares. Private stuff, but I know I’m not the only one who simultaneously enjoys and suffers from dreams.

3. Who Needs Superheroes?

I’m some building. On the ground floor, it’s just a second hand shop of glass ashtrays and brass pots. Above that is really sketchy. Have you ever seen the old couple’s house in Dave Chappelle’s Block Party? Each floor is in shambles and an old wooden ladder placed at an odd angle leads to each upper floor. It’s like a barn with floors that get increasingly demented as you go up. So, I’m a superhero; something I deduce by the fact that I can see my cape flapping when I turn quickly and I have red tights. On the landing of one of the stairs is a picture frame of some woman with frizzy hair. My dream personality thinks the world of her and is creepily obsessed. A little sock and twine doll version of her lies against the frame. Then I hear something and hustle up the ladders to the roof – the Matrix roof, but in Victoria. A fat guy that looks like Dom DeLuise on Hawaiian vacation has the doll and is sticking big pins in her. I start to cry and burst into a sprint, charging at him and I send him flying off the edge. Splat.

I take the doll I assume I grabbed from him and replace it back to the frame (I know, there should be two dolls at this point. It’s a dream, get with it.) Now I hear some woman’s voice yelling from the roof. I run up. It’s the woman, but she’s wearing a superhero costume, the same as mine. She’s laughing saying

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nightmares for some, dreams for others.

Special thanks go out to my recent graduation, reiki session, and my David Lynch-a-Thon for turning my brain to the Spin and Tumble cycles. I haven’t had a memorable dream in at least four months let alone a nightmare. I don’t even know what a nightmare is anymore; one of the perks of becoming a typical desensitized adult. The scariest dream I can recall occurred during the middle of a long work week. I came home from my home décor store job, conked out and dreamed that I was working. Nothing different at all, just working a full 9-5. Then I woke up and had to go to work again.

pardonmyfrenchbut…FUCK.

So, last week, I finally I get a dream I remember. And it’s haunting. And then I dream another. I had FIVE FRICKIN’ SCARY DREAMS IN A ROW. And I remembered all of them, all totally lucid, cinematic 3D style dream-mares. It’s not often you remember this many in a row.

Just for fun, let’s look at them. I tried to analyze them. The only thing I learned is that I have issues. Nothing new there.

1. All-You-Can-Eat Slaughterhouse

I’m sitting at a restaurant table with some blurred out (like on Cops) friend. We look at the menu. It’s a ribs type eatery. A chain smoking waitress comes by and I point to an item. Everything sounds 50-feet underwater. I’m ushered to the backroom: a slaughterhouse floor with a broiling fire pit that looks like an open elevator. The pig I picked slides towards me on a hook. I slide it through the flame until golden. I’m told to slide it along and the waitress hands me a carving saw. Apparently this restaurant is a You-Cook-You-Eat sort of place. So, I slice the thing up. The guts weren’t taken out first, so they’re splattering on the floor or splashing off as I saw through them. An eyeball hits the ground and rolls into the blood trough. A fat guy with no shirt slaps the cuttings all on a plate, weighs it on a scale, cling wraps it, and gives it to me to take home.

I wake up.

2. The Bad Student

This one stems from my panic that my final grade wasn’t entered into the school’s database. For background, I had an assignment where I was to devise a program for a certain local anti-poverty group and actually submit the proposal to them. More background, I am incredibly self-conscious about things I’ve written for people’s approval.

I’m at home. A knock on the door. I answer. It’s people from the anti-poverty group. They’re super nice and I invite them in. We have tea and biscuits. How nice. Then they open up a briefcase, laptop, screen and Powerpoint slide presentation. They proceed to absolutely rip my proposal apart. Showing how idiotic it would be for them to start a website (something I proposed) or even use social marketing (another proposal). Then they started showing me why I’m the worst person to come up with ideas because I’m totally out of touch with society and I totally overshoot my target and I totally can’t even type a sentence without some kind of grammatical error. They tell me I should never have been born. They actually prove it to me. Then they slide me something to allow me to put myself out of the world’s misery; a taser. Not even a gun.

I wake up.

Dreams 3 through 5 next post…