Dream #1
Superhumans in captivity: a closed circuit television system watches a bunch of variously-powered people in caged enclosures. A zoo. Click. Some kind of fish-man. Click. An impossibly nimble Chinese woman does a reverse tumble along the top of a thin wall. Click. There's an unspoken understanding that their biographies are like those of characters in a beat-em-up game like Streetfighter or Mortal Kombat. Suddenly I've become the Chinese woman, and all hell breaks loose as the captives all break through their individual enclosures and into each others' habitats. I'm face to face with the fish man -- his torso looks just like a salmon fillet -- and I suddenly discover my Special Attack Move: like Mr Snow from Planetary, I extend my hands and freeze Salmon Fillet Man dead.
Dream #2
It's Virginia in the 19th Century. An aristocratic Skeet Ulrich, in bumpy demon-face, strangles a 15-year-old boy, who slumps to the floor of the courtyard, lifeless. Blood sweating in a strange pattern from his palms, Ulrich places his hands on what seems to be some ornamental gothic masonry and pours energy into them, creating two Hellhounds. These slavering beasts, whose eyes are horribly black and round, are made to kill his wife. My party of men arrives, though, and somehow this changes Ulrich's schedule, even though we appear familiar. His demon-face receding, he pronounces his Hellhounds imperfect and corrrupted, and hands me two droppers of poison. I stand nervously on an upholstered armchair as the Hellhounds snap upward at me, and I let small droplets of poison fall into their mouths...
Hours later, in silhouette: the boy's body lies on a wheeled stretcher in a morgue. Curtains part, and a woman leans into view. She whispers:
"Whore! Whoreboy! I need a piece of you."
Still in silhouette, we see a pseudopod blossom out of his back and through the stretcher on which he lies, and it faces upwards, listening, flowering into some kind of sensory organ, like a huge orchid. It is here we realise that he is a kind of doubled being -- his tentacled monster-half always on his back, but usually hidden. Perhaps we are all like this. The woman leaves. As she moves out of frame, more silhouetted tentacles extend from him like a plant growing at hyperspeed, tending toward her as young shoots do toward the sun, in a kind of inhuman desire.
