Attack of the shit mutants
Odd, perhaps, considering the recent post about Charlie's street-cleaning job in City Lights, but I had a dream the other night about what happens without street cleaning.
The world had gone to hell--streets were flooded, fires were raging, society was falling apart. I was, for reasons known only to dream logic, shepherding a small group of elderly academics through the chaos a city. At one point three of us were standing on a small ledge on the side of a tall building that seemed to be swaying back and forth. I worried that the oldest of us would not be able to keep standing there much longer. He looked down and remarked at all the cockroaches crazily running around down there. "Those aren't cockroaches," I said, "those are people."
Later we were crossing the rooftop of another building, hopping from roof to roof to avoid the streets. It smelled terrible. There were piles of shit everywhere. "What is that?", asked companion who had apparently not been paying attention as society crumbled. "That is literally piles of shit," I said. I don't remember if it was spoken in the dream or just understood that the piles of shit in the streets were both a sign and a cause of society's decay. Obviously, in a well-run city, people would not be defecating on the streets. Things had clearly gone pretty far wrong if they were. If seeing this were not enough to cause panic among the people who had not already panicked, the smell from the shit was driving people crazy.
Some of these shit mutants--a term that did not appear in the dream, but was the best way to describe them later--had formed into tribes, painted their faces, and preyed on the tribe-less. At one point I avoided fighting the champion of one tribe through a clever stratagem that I no longer remember. But as the small group of academics I was leading crossed the rooftop, the same champion was blocking the way to a fire escape we needed to use to get to the next building.
She was a stocky white woman with her hair pulled into three stiff ponytails sticking out of the top and sides of her head. She fought with a long pole. Luckily, I too had a long pole, tipped with a taser device. I surprised her by attacking first, and managed to stun her with a blow to the chest. After I did so, the dream helpfully cut away to an infomercial about the taser-tipped pole, explaining how it shocked once on the first hit, twice on the second, and so on. Then I woke up, and the dream never continued.
The world had gone to hell--streets were flooded, fires were raging, society was falling apart. I was, for reasons known only to dream logic, shepherding a small group of elderly academics through the chaos a city. At one point three of us were standing on a small ledge on the side of a tall building that seemed to be swaying back and forth. I worried that the oldest of us would not be able to keep standing there much longer. He looked down and remarked at all the cockroaches crazily running around down there. "Those aren't cockroaches," I said, "those are people."
Later we were crossing the rooftop of another building, hopping from roof to roof to avoid the streets. It smelled terrible. There were piles of shit everywhere. "What is that?", asked companion who had apparently not been paying attention as society crumbled. "That is literally piles of shit," I said. I don't remember if it was spoken in the dream or just understood that the piles of shit in the streets were both a sign and a cause of society's decay. Obviously, in a well-run city, people would not be defecating on the streets. Things had clearly gone pretty far wrong if they were. If seeing this were not enough to cause panic among the people who had not already panicked, the smell from the shit was driving people crazy.
Some of these shit mutants--a term that did not appear in the dream, but was the best way to describe them later--had formed into tribes, painted their faces, and preyed on the tribe-less. At one point I avoided fighting the champion of one tribe through a clever stratagem that I no longer remember. But as the small group of academics I was leading crossed the rooftop, the same champion was blocking the way to a fire escape we needed to use to get to the next building.
She was a stocky white woman with her hair pulled into three stiff ponytails sticking out of the top and sides of her head. She fought with a long pole. Luckily, I too had a long pole, tipped with a taser device. I surprised her by attacking first, and managed to stun her with a blow to the chest. After I did so, the dream helpfully cut away to an infomercial about the taser-tipped pole, explaining how it shocked once on the first hit, twice on the second, and so on. Then I woke up, and the dream never continued.
posted by Ambivalent_Maybe at 3:50 AM
1 Comments:
this is what I've been waiting for, a shitty dream; if only I could have one. the fact that it did not continue does not surprise me. Dreams are shitty in that respect. I have vague recollections that from time to time I've woken, and then returned to a dream, but that recollection is as vague as the dreams I was dreaming those long ago nights, so, I say it's probably never really happened; waking/returning. I know I've had the same dream... I was a tourist in Guatemala, but, mainly I was impressed by the houses, the boats. They were very clean. Not shitty at all.
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