I was drinking beer last night from about 10 until 3. When the bar closed, I felt like I wasn’t really ready to drive home, so I sat in the comfortable backseat of my SAAB 9-3 and played Tetris on my cell phone until I felt I was sober enough to drive home. I made it home without incident. When home, I ate three pieces of pizza pie I had purchased across the street from the saloon, and then fell asleep immediately.
While sleeping, I had a strange dream. I had gotten myself a small pet snake. It was about the size of a worm, and banded yellow and red. Then I got myself another pet snake, which was turquoise and purple. The second snake was small at first but grew rapidly to the point where it was about the size of a large, fat cobra. Somewhere between a cobra and a small python, I guess. At this point, I had lost the first snake; whilst looking for it, I discovered its corpse, flattened and about the size of a dead worm, in the doorway threshold between the hallway and the bathroom.
Then I had gotten two pet frogs; both very large, fat, and colored bright turquoise, the same as the snake. I brought them to my room. They hopped around and hid under my bed.
Now the time had come to feed the snake, so I went to the pet store and I bought a bunch of mice and a rabbit. The rabbit was very small, only a little larger than all the mice. All of them had plastic tags that were somehow affixed to them. The tags had an Israeli flag and Hebrew lettering on them.
The snake’s terrarium enclosure was inside my closet. I grabbed four or five of the mice and put them in the closet with the serpent, which promptly struck one mouse, swallowed it immediately, then began to do the same to all the others, which had joined their tails together in a long chain, presumably to try to survive the attack by bracing together. It was unsuccessful, and the snake devoured all of the mice until there was a long succession of bumps under his skin where he was digesting them.
Now, somehow, I had gotten more pets: an alligator, a bobcat, and a badger. I also had two more rabbits or guinea pigs which were intended as food for the other animals. And on top of all this there was also my cat, which is the only one of these creatures that I genuinely possess in real life. I have a fairly large apartment, but I had decided to confine all of these creatures to my bedroom, with the exception of the food animals which I had kept in the closet of a room across the hall which I use as a study. In any case, I was now faced with the task of sorting out the animals so that none of them attack each other. I felt that the two fat frogs which were still in my room, somewhere under the bed, might be preyed on by either the snake, the alligator, the bobcat, or the cat; that the badger might be eaten by one of the first set of animals; or that my cat might even be eaten up by the bobcat. (This, fortunately, did not happen - I saw the bobcat and the cat together under my bed, and while the bobcat was playfully biting the cat and licking it, it was doing so in a nonthreatening manner and it was clear that it did not intend to prey on the smaller cat.) It had also happened that I had lost track of one of the fat turquoise frogs.
I was searching for the frog, worried that it might have been eaten. I did not find it, but I did notice that the other frog had had one of its eyes fall out. Actually, I saw it happen - I saw the eye, which was a thin sliver, not at all like the eye of an actual frog or toad, fall out of the eye socket. Now the frog was minus an eye, and potentially the prey for one of the other animals, so I decided that at this point he was entitled to a terrarium enclosure of his own.
I drove to Kroger, which is a grocery store open 24 hours here in Indiana which also sells all sorts of things including pet supplies, looking for a terrarium. I was wandering around lost; then a young Mexican man, tattooed, of average height but stout and well-built, came to assist me. He asked me what I was looking for. I told him, a terrarium. He told me of the aisle I could find one in, then also suggested that I could just use one of the large, clear plastic bins being sold for storage for the same purpose. I opted against that, and went to look for the actual terrarium. Before I could leave, the guy turned to me again and pointed out a very high-quality glass terrarium that was mounted on a nice hardwood base; he indicated that it was the floor model and that I might be able to have it for free. He asked a female supervisor, who happened to be standing there, and she said that I could have it. He asked me what I wanted it for and I told him it was for a pet frog. He asked me how I could stand the croaking of a pet frog at night; I told him that I didn’t mind it, and that I actually found it soothing. “I like the sounds of nature,” were my exact words. “I can lie down on the ground outdoors and be asleep in two seconds.”
So I grabbed the terrarium, then went off to the gardening section where I hoped to find a bag of potting soil with which to line the bottom of the terrarium. However, the aisle was clogged with carpets. There were giant carpets and rugs, rolled up, sticking from the shelves, and there were gigantic yard-waste bags woven out of rough wool also. As I walked down it, the aisle got more and more cramped and crowded; I decided I was never going to find a bag of soil, so I just walked out of the store with the terrarium I had been given for free. It was my plan to go outside with a shovel and just take dirt from the ground.
As soon as I had exited the store, I was stopped by a policeman who had come up from behind me. I also noticed that the terrarium I was holding was no longer, in fact, a terrarium, but was a wheel from a car, only slightly smaller in scale. I guess it was about the size of a motorcycle wheel. The policeman told me that the wheel I was holding belonged to a stolen vehicle that had just been recovered, and that I should put it down on the ground and then put my hands on my head, which I did. I noticed that the vehicle he was talking about had somehow materialized right behind the policeman, on the kerb directly outside of the supermarket. It was some kind of very new and flashy version of a contemporary economy car, like the two-door Ford Focus. Its wheels had been coated with some kind of shiny coloring, more or less the same shade of turquoise as the frogs and part of the snake, although the paint of the vehicle itself was orange. I explained to the policeman that I had no idea about the wheel or the car, and he believed me and let me go home.
When home, I set about organizing the terrarium in the closet next to the one belonging to the snake. I was rapidly running out of room for all these animals. The badger was now missing; I assumed it had been eaten by the alligator. The frog was still there, but it was now significantly smaller. I figured it was time to feed the alligator, so I went into the other room and grabbed the rabbit which I had set aside for that purpose. The rabbit was ornery and it twisted around (I had grabbed it by the scruff of its neck) and bit my forearm; I jerked the skin of the animal in anger and snarled at it. In the next room, the rabbit had somehow gotten free of my grasp and hopped to the floor, shrieking as rabbits do when they are hurt; I can’t recall what happened to it after that. I assume it was quickly eaten by one of the animals.
I was now somehow in a train station in Chicago and I was with a friend of mine, Aaron. The setting of the dream had rapidly changed, as often happens, and I was walking through the station arguing with Aaron over the Second Amendment. He was passionately and also very rudely and angrily denouncing the Second Amendment as an outdated and irrelevant right, and I was trying to refute him. The whole situation was bizarre because in real life I do not ordinarily engage people in debates over gun rights in person (as opposed to on this forum) and also because my friend would never in real life be so adamantly opposed to what I was saying. We walked through the streets, and were now outside a cafe which Aaron was about to go into. At this point we were both very angry with each other and I was wondering if this friendship was going to be ruined. The prospect of it horrified me. I can’t remember so much about this part of the dream.
The next “stage” of the dream was set in the same train station as before, only this time I was trying to speak with the clerk behind a counter but she didn’t understand anything I was saying. The only way to speak to her was through a microphone affixed to an analog radio which transmitted the signal into her room (which was walled off by a glass partition, like most kinds of ticket offices seem to be.) The problem was that some children had gotten hold of a radio transmitter on the same frequency and, as a prank, were making noise and bothering the woman working in the office. A couple of Korean or Chinese people, young adults and very well-dressed and proper-looking, complained that the transmitter had been stolen from them.
I can’t really remember what happened after this; I think I was probably awake shortly after this part of the dream.
Strange, isn’t it?