bug jar dream.
© 1995 Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>

I really do think that lack of sleep makes your dreams more interesting. Want better dreams? Stay awake! During those times in my life when I have the luxury of sleeping nightly, I tend not to remember my dreams, or to not dream about anything particularly interesting or surreal. But the motion-hallucinations can be a real pain, like that time, driving home at around 4am, that I was certain that the tree outside my house was not a tree, but was, in fact, a pale, naked, christ-like homeless guy, gesturing wildly. Here's another good one:

It was an early morning in a large, wooden kitchen, the light streaming in at a steep angle. Over in the corner by the toaster sat a large, clear jug -- two gallons or so, made of thick, bulbous glass, like old Coke bottles. The jug was nearly filled with coffee beans.

Crossing the room, I detected motion in the jug.

``Oh, yes,'' a voice explained, ``I think we have roaches again.''

At this point the streams of ants criscrossing the floor became apparent. They kept to the gutters between the tiles in the floor, passing completely under my bare feet.

My attention returned to the jug of coffee beans and the motion therein. As I got closer, I started imagining the sight I would see -- dozens of inch-long beetle-like bugs, shuffling and sliding through the similarly colored beans. But in actuality, there was only one cockroach in the jar, and it was nearly ten inches long.

``This is just like the bug in Cronenberg's version of Naked Lunch,'' I thought. ``I wonder if it can talk.''

It had human eyes. Shockingly blue.

I touched it, and part of its carpace began to peel away, revealing a sticky, sludge-like interior. Before I had time to really investigate this, I found I needed to leave -- my name was being called, although I hadn't actually heard anything said.

Time and space fogged as they do in dreams, and I was outside, walking quickly along a wooded hillside. It was fall, somewhere back east, and the trees were dying. The ground was covered with crumpled leaves, a uniform brownish grey. I was in a great hurry, and getting very tired, when I noticed a change it the woods around me - the trees were more bare, and the further I walked, the more densely covered their higher reaches were with cobwebs. The crumpled leaves on the ground became more of a fine powder. In the dream, I understood what this meant, and it worried me slightly, but I can't remember its meaning now.

It was getting colder, quickly. I shivered in the wind, and woke up.

Are you detecting a ``nature is disgusting'' theme here, or is it just me?