Part 4
Then a thought entered my head, as in most of my thoughts, it had to duck down, remove its shoes and socks (my brain is carpeted), and squeeze itself in. Maybe we are all part of someone else's dream! Perhaps even God's Dream (or the Devil's, if not him, any powerful Republican will do). A dream that no one can escape from -- a never-ending nightmare—that is our life! Or worse yet! (At least for you.) Maybe… just maybe, you’re part of my dream!
Then another thought squeezed past the previous thought, giving me a splitting headache; there’s only room for one thought at a time in my brain. As it turns out, that wasn't entirely true. It didn’t matter because that splitting headache gave me the answer.
I found myself in my living room, so I blasted my half stereo, turned on my TV, ran into the kitchen, and started banging pots, making as much noise as I could. I didn't wake myself up, but that wasn't the plan. The plan was to get all the crazy people from my dream back.
A minute or so later, stumbling through my door was the original big guy not awake enough to slug me. Before he could muster up the needed testosterone, he was pushed inside by a hostile gang of people from the dream. Of course, the last person to enter was the smoldering sexpot; her glowing hair flowered on a pillow that somehow managed to stay behind her head. Whatever she was wearing was hidden well by her body.
“What the hell is going on? Can't a nymphomaniac get a few minutes of shut-eye between men?"
“I should have put you to sleep permanently,” the big guy said as they stepped towards me and tripped over the Chinese guy who had folded himself into a footstool.
"Watch where you are going,” the footstool said as it changed to a folding bullhorn chair.
The big guy asked as he kicked the hybrid piece of furniture. “What the hell are you?”
“Hey, that hurts,” the Chinese guy/chair/bullhorn squawked while folding himself in a furniture fetal position.
"Anything's possible; we're in a dream. So let's have a little fun," one of the other big guys stated as he joined in on kicking the Chinese guy/chair/bullhorn in the ribs/wooden slats/speaker.
“Stop it! Stop kicking him or it or whatever! I know how to get out of this dream! I know how to get out!” I shouted.
No one said a thing; even my stereo and TV turned itself off to listen. It was so quiet you could hear my self-esteem drop. The Chinese guy even turned back into a person, although one leg was still part chair and had a rubber cap on the bottom.
I had their attention, but I knew I wouldn’t last long. Ms. Gina Lola Body started to involuntarily swivel her hips; I could sense a moan rising up from her throat.
So I went into my pitch, my lips shuffling words out faster than a drug dealer's bill counter. To everyone's surprise, they bought into my plan; even my dream girl slowed down her pheromone production.
They had all agreed to leave and return with their alarm clocks, so it was only a matter of seconds before they were back in my living room with an assortment of clocks. The Chinese put an old windup clock on his head and then turned himself into a nightstand.
“Okay, let's synchronize at 3:22 a.m." I waited as they all quickly set their clocks. Now, everyone, set your alarms for 3:24." Again, they did as they were told. We had two minutes to wait to see if we could escape the dream and find out whose dream we were all in.
The seconds ticked off slowly, everyone tense, and the Chinamen/night table even squeaked as it nervously slid on the floor. Ms. Sexpot swayed, undulated, and even started grinding against the Chinaman/night table, his drawers open and closing against her body. Each one of the people wanted the dream to be theirs so they wouldn’t disappear into someone's unconscious and probably never return. I was hoping my theory was correct; if not, I would probably be beaten for however long this nightmare last
ed.
I could barely breathe when all our alarms went off at once, bells, music, chimes, whistles, and a few public service announcements.
The alarms startled the vixen, that tried to stop the swing of her hips, lost her balance, and fell on the nightstand crushing the Chinaman. The atmosphere was packed with a collision of eardrum-rupturing sounds like someone had twisted, compressed the noise of New Year's Eve, and run it through a hyena's voice box. Then, a few alarms went silent, and then more and more. Finally, the crowd turned to me, and I thought I would be a dead figment of someone's imagination.
Just before the last alarm shut off, everything started spinning, fracturing, slicing, breaking apart, and then separating—all of us in our own slivers of the dream. I felt myself spinning around like I was being sucked into a drain.
When I burst free from a funnel of time and space, I dispersed in a vapor, reformed, and found myself in my apartment, less defined but smelled just as bad. My living space was surrounded by images gliding around and through the mold spots on my walls.
Random thoughts of inadequacy, impotence, and fear of cardboard cutouts floated in and then scattered, only to be replaced by other negative thoughts and phobias I’d yet to experience. Despite the disconcerting chaos surrounding me, or maybe because of it, a theory of what had occurred started taking shape. I felt the presence of the people from the dream; the Chinamen slid beneath me and became a wall-to-wall carpet. I could feel his bones crack as they pressed up against my feet. Then the rug climbed up my legs, and two skinny hands reached up, one tossing a fortune cookie up to me before pulling me further into the carpet. As I sunk down into the carpet, I cracked open the cookie. The message read, “Next time, wipe your feet on the mat." I laughed and heard the others laugh, so I kept laughing because then I realized that we all realized simultaneously that it was not only my dream. It was our dream, and that we'd probably see each other again. You see, we were all players in another’s dream—a schizophrenic dreamer with multiple personalities, and I was only one in a plethora of personalities, all hoping to someday be the person who wakes up.
The End?