dream on

By Todd Stadler · Tuesday, July 16, 2002 9:37am

I recently had a weird dream. Lacking any other stories to tell you, I will regale you with tales from my somnambulant synapses.

I found myself in a crowded park near a travelling carnival. Hundreds of children were milling about without any parental supervision.

I should probably mention that the whole dream seems to have been "filmed" by a member of the 70s psychadelic school. Colors were odd, often washed out, and the whole dream had a grainy feel to it. The camera was somewhat unsteady, with unexplained quick zooms or pans to draw attention to various points.

Man, I'm glad I mentioned that. Maybe I dreamed I was watching a bad movie.

Anyhow, all the children were gorging themselves on meat, apparently given to them for free by the carnival people. They were making an absolute mess of the rotary barbeque, onto which they kept throwing huge slabs of meat.

I knew that something sinister was afoot, because nobody feeds that many children that much meat without some ulterior motive. It's a scientific fact. But I played it cool so I could get to the bottom of the plot.

Suddenly, I saw a white tiger on a chain. He roared at the children, which was obviously tiger-speak for "I want to eat them now", but he was led away by a man who I think was sporting a top hat and a curly moustache - which is evil no matter how you slice it. The man didn't want the children to see the tiger and thus realize they were being fattened so they could be eaten. But I knew better.

Somehow my Oregon world seeped into this dreamscape and I found myself talking to a couple of vegetarian children, who were not gorging themselves on meat. No, they were eating from yellow bags that contained "vegetarian snacks". When I read the ingredients list, it said "peas, a carrot, and 98% meat". Even the vegetarians had been duped!

I was then escorted into a school cafeteria (or was it a cafetorium?) adjacent to the circus grounds, which was being used by the circus folk as a giant feeding area.

And then I had dream deja vu. I knew that I had been here before, or maybe even had this dream before. Mind you, I'm not sure I had actually had this dream before, but in the dream, I had dreamed something like this before. Or something. Dreams can be like that.

I became very paranoid. I stopped talking around the carnival people. When I did talk, I didn't move my lips, so they couldn't be read by unseen sinister types. All very clever, but I still entered the building and ate the food they gave me, which wasn't meat, but pancakes.

You might think that it would be stupid to eat food from obviously evil carnival folk, but, much as I would in real life, I said to myself, "hey, free meal."

They were playing very loud music in the cafeteria to keep us kids from talking to each other. After all, talking is not eating.

And here is the part that made me chuckle when I woke up from this dream: the song that they were playing was Duran Duran's "Skin Trade" (RealAudio format).

I mean, talk about telegraphing your punches.