Mirrors and Shadows

"Stand in front of the mirror," she says, "and tell me what you see?"

I look. "I see us," I say.

"Look harder!"

Then I see it. Our reflected forms stare back at us, my own looking slightly confused. Behind us, I see the form walking back and forth between the items of furniture. It looks, for all the world, like a silhouette of myself. It's the same height as me, the same size as me, only it is merely a shadow. I can see right through it.

I feel slightly alarmed looking at this shadow-me, but she places her hand on my arm and smiles at me and despite the prickling of the hairs on the back of my neck standing up, I feel better.

I really have no idea what this was about, or where it came from, but it was very spooky and exciting!

"Those aren't rocks"

It's cold, yet I'm standing in bright sunlight in a parched landscape. The wind is gently blowing and the odd tumbleweed or two goes rolling past.

I'm trying to get to a road that leads to a town. The term 'road' is perhaps a little generous for what is nothing more than a dirt track. Still, it's proving very hard to get to as the ground is very loose and uneven with fragments of white rocks and pale yellow sand. It literally is two steps forward, one step backwards trying to walk across this strange surface.

Suddenly my foot catches on something - a gun metal grey lump half submerged in the sand. It looks so out of place that I kneel down to take a closer look and I notice that it is in fact leather, parched dry to a rock like substance by the sun and the heat. I dust some of the sand away and it becomes clear these are in fact a pair of boots. A little more dusting and I clear the sand away from pale bones jutting out of the boots.

Blinking, I turn around to see a tall figure a little way distant sweeping sand into little mounds. I call out to him to ask about the rocks and without turning, he calls back 'Those aren't rocks. They're bones!'

I lift some up in my hands and gently finger the fragments wondering how exactly this came to pass. Were the graves really that shallow?

The end.

Testing, Testing

I'm back at my old school, which curiously seems to have grown considerably since I left. They've also updated the old Victorian buildings for spiffy new high-tech, glass creations.

I'm trying to find somewhere to test out a science experiment but no-one is willing to let me do it in their classroom. Admittedly, said experiment is a .50 calibre (12.7mm for our metric friends) handgun.

Eventually, I'm allowed to try it out in my old computer science class, providing I shoot at the old computer boxes and foam that is stacked at the front of the classroom.

Fill me with your little babies (not)

I’m in an underwater colony. Billy Idol wants me to have his children. I’m not too tempted, as he has asked pretty much everyone else in the colony before moving on to me.

Billy's looking a bit rough and his leather coat has definitely seen better days. I'm taking the next shuttle to the surface.

Luminous

A bioluminescent underground landscape covers my entire field of vision: tiny mushrooms and plants glowing in blue, white, violet and pink. These enormous caves are the home of a people who are very concerned with rites of passage. The person going through the rite is locked in a cage, where they become involved in a battle against their fear of their dark twin. The dark twin is a creature wandering the caves. When the person in the cage has won over their fear, they are released from the cage, and set out to find and kill the dark twin.

Bizarre 'Bizarre'

A small shop in a railway station has an freakishly large stock of 'Bizarre' magazine. In fact, it seems to be all they are selling so I figure I might as well pick up copy. This month, in a special festive give away, there is a mini-disc attached to the cover which is an audio book. Quite which audio book is not entirely clear as it's cover is reminiscent of the 'black' album with nothing at all visible.

I think there's something wrong with my copy though. I open the box and find the Ghostbusters sound track. I am rather pleased about this.

I did actually buy Bizarre yesterday on my way home. No audio book though, but they were playing Ghostbusters in the hotel's bar on Friday night. Last night there was a piece on vinyl records and the first one people bought. Mine was the Ghostbusters sound track.

Steamboat trips and stationery sins

It was probably a good idea to get a ride on the old steamboat, even though it is a bit pricey at SEK 2500. "But they serve excellent dinners", you say. "And all details are true to the period!" They do indeed, and they are.

Except for us, almost all the other passengers on board are white-haired old ladies and gentlemen, obviously out together on some kind of group excursion. It is a lovely day and they all seem friendly and in a good mood, easy to strike up a conversation with. Soon, we find ourselves among a fairly large group gathered around a dark oak table in the dining area, deep in excited conversations about art, literature, society and philosophy. Not everything uttered is necessarily true, but nobody can deny we are all having a very good time. They are really hanging on your words, dear friend, but I can tell you are, in fact, bullshitting a lot (and you know that I know this, you catch my eye every now and then to give me a smile and a sly conspiratory wink). But it is all in fun, and no harm done.

Meanwhile in secret, downstairs behind soft and silencing heavy velvet curtains: oh, the decadent, sinful games that can be played with paper clips.

Dog ate the eggs

A glitzy hotel room, which is frustrating as there's no apparent bathroom anywhere and a door to the adjacent room does not appear to lock. But I do have tea lights made of chocolate and dusted with cocoa powder, although they're proving somewhat tricky to light.

Breakfast is on a tray - eggs with toast. I can only assume that they've been on the menu for a few mornings in this particular room as for some reason, the bedside desk surface is suddenly covered with congealed egg.

I break the top off of one and am pleased to see a runny yolk. Sadly, it's runny because the egg is still raw and a few cautious dunks of toast don't really improve anything and I'm left wondering what to eat.

The eggs don't go to waste though. My dog seems quite happy to munch them down. I'm slightly concerned the hotel might not be too happy with him however, as he is soaking wet, covered in mud and has left muck all over the nice white sheets on the bed.

Hopefully not an omen for the hotel I'll be visiting in the next few days! (Having seen their price for breakfast, I think I'll pass on that - I wouldn't want to risk raw eggs!) Still, I know where they came from. I watched a cooking show where they were poaching eggs to eat with Christmas meal leftovers. The TV chef's looked quite nice though. The chocolate candles? No idea. The mucky dog - well, he usually gets like that on a good day out. He gets to loaf in bed in the morning too, so yes, that visage could well happen!

Leaving?

Lying still, face down. I smile as I watch the world open up before me. A giant black circle forms, sending stomach twisting pangs of vertigo through me as I peer into it. I want to fall into it and try desperately to will myself into it's blackness, but I find it hard to leave my body.

Then suddenly I relax and feel myself falling, the physical world snipped gently away as I float free towards the circle.

Between the waves of vertigo, I allow myself a brief smile as I realise that I'm dying and you know what? It's really not so bad. It feels wonderfully liberating to float off into the ether.

Appreciate this sounds a bit 'gloomy' but it really wasn't. I've had a few 'dream deaths' and this was by far the most relaxed!

Foam

For no apparent reason, I am wandering around in a shopping mall wearing nothing but a layer of shaving foam all over, and am desperately trying to get in to any shop to purchase something a little more practical.

You see, it's raining outside and I don't want to get wet.

Towers

The pyramids of Giza were lookout towers, back in the day. They were attached to mountains. One day the mountains sank below the desert sand, and all that remained were the pyramids.

The end.

Too Many Rooms

This house has too many rooms. None of them seem happy either. As the day wares on, they shuffle and jostle for positions, all trying to get the best view out of their windows.

I've given up trying to navigate them in any sort of orderly manner and now just open a door at random with no idea where I will be going.

This door leads to a bathroom, of sorts. It's cluttered with boxes and papers piled in every corner and I have to clear some to make my way to the sink. As I turn on the tap, the view out of the window shifts from hills and fields, to being square on to another window in what I can only suppose is the house opposite.

I sigh, and sigh again as after a few minutes, I realise there is no hot water coming from the tap. I can only suppose trivial details such as plumbing fall by the wayside in the house with too many rooms.

Fires in the Long Grass

It's an unnaturally hot day and crowds of people are sitting about on a green, enclosed by crumbling red brick walls. They're sitting and chatting and sipping cool drinks as they complain about the heat.

I'm trying to play with my dog, but he isn't really interested in running about. Instead he prefers you to turn the garden hose on him and will only run after his ball when he's wet. He also has his eye on a Malamute puppy that is bouncing about around a group of people sat on chequered picnic blankets.

In a corner, under the shade of a tree, my father is cutting the grass, which is unusually long for the time of year. He is very happy with the fuel efficiency of the lawnmower he is using, particularly seen as small mowers like this generally don't get many 'cuts to the litre' (or so he tells me).

Then comes the alarm bell and it's a fire evacuation drill. Everyone looks suddenly confused by the fact the grass has turned into the wooden floor of a school hall and they're all now wearing a curious assortment of uniform bits and pieces. No-one is quite sure where to go, although the general thinking is we should be outside on the grass.

We make our way outside and form semi-orderly lines behind small pink/purple circular signposts that are lined up in a flower bed. No-one is quite sure if they're stood in the right line and all are hoping for someone in authority to tell them whether or not they are in the right place.

I find it all very frustrating and just wish I could be back out on the grass with my dog and his ball.

Letter to Karin

Dear Karin,

Some nights ago, I was having a great time at the fancy twilight (twilight as in "the time after sunset", nothing else) picnic and garden party in the Purple Gardens. Great event, nice food, free drinks, lovely people. You should have been there.
And you know what, I met a person there who said they were your sister! Imagine my surprise – I had no idea you had a sister, much less a sister like this person. She didn't look much like you, I must say.
To be honest, I'm actually not entirely sure "she" was female, but she didn't seem very masculine either – very androgynous, undefinable.
From the pimply skin I would guess about seventeen, with long blond hair, and she insisted she was a Tengu (although it must have been pretty obvious to most guests that she was in fact an incarnation of Apollo, if anything.)

Sound familiar?

Anyhow, a very charming and entertaining young person, talkative and friendly to all. But, and this is the reason I'm writing: this nice person who said she was your sister (sorry, I didn't catch her name) was also not wearing any clothes at all, and was happily running around completely buck-naked among the guests and food tables in the gardens.
(And still I could not make out whether this person was a she, or a he, or both or perhaps neither. Maybe it just wasn't a very important thing, at the time.)

Thing is, I couldn't help notice that some of the other guests seemed a bit embarrassed by her lack of clothing. The general mood and conversation turned a little bit weird at times, smiles turned a little stiff, you know...
My dad was there too – you know dad, he's a bit old-fashioned, not really up to date with all the new things kids do these days. He was too polite to comment, but I could see he thought all of this was very strange indeed. I really had no idea what to say to him so I just pretended that nothing out of the ordinary was going on.

I'm sure she didn't mean any harm. As I said, she was a delightful and charming person to meet, nudity aside. If all of your non-corporeal relatives are this nice, they are very welcome to visit my future dreams – but perhaps you could gently suggest that they might consider putting on something, like maybe a pair of boxers, before visiting – at least when at larger formal events.

For the sake of the other guests, you know.

Me, I don't mind so much what people wear or not, as long as everybody is having fun and there is enough cake for all.

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know. :)

Talk to you later!
Lots of hugs, J.

Cat houses

"Have you seen the cat houses?" my friend asks me and points down into the valley. I follow her finger but can't make out what she's pointing at.
"Where?" I ask her.
"Right there," she says. "I know they don't look like cats now, but they do sometimes. We call them cat houses."
It's a series of white apartment buildings, wide at the base and narrowing further up - vaguely the shape of power plant chimneys. Cat houses.

Rock and Roll, Rashes and Car Crashes

A somewhat disjointed night of strangeness that involved heavy metal, car parks, waterproof rubber leggings and confused people with towels in their ears.

The sequence of events were all over the place, and the fog of the morning has scrambled them up somewhat, but here's the highlights.

1. A rock concert with Slipknot playing and running around the stage with a giant mechanical phallus - go see Rammstein doing a live version of 'Pussy' and it's a cut/paste but with a different band;

2. Some sort of strange party in a newly constructed house in the middle of nowhere, where the main aim of the event was to drink heavily and then gang up on people and then throw them into a deep mud puddle in the garden;

3. A set of blue, rubber, waterproof clothes that appeared after the 'mud party' - they were somewhat poorly fitting - the person wearing them was unable to hear my comments though as they had green hand towels jammed into their ears for some reason, which was not immediately apparent;

4. A crowded car park where a red car was trying squeeze out of a space but kept (literally) tripping up over a car that had parked next to it and left the steering wheel turned hard right, with the front wheels stuck out;

5. People developing curious rashes all over their bodies.

And then I woke up!

As an aside, the car thing comes from someone who lives up the road from me and who has a big 4x4 and who -always- parks like this. The rubber waterproofs were what I had as a kid when I used to go deliver newspapers before school. Mine were green though. And the rash, well, that comes from one of the medications I've been asked to consider. It frequently causes a rash in people, which can develop into something very unpleasant that quite literally causes your skin to shrivel up and die! Has been somewhat playing on my mind lately the thought of that as otherwise, it sounds like quite a good drug.

Swimming and Cycling

A curious, mixed up affair that involved being lost in a town (no clue which) trying to catch up with a lady who was a swimming champion. She and a bunch of other ladies had swum the circumference of the Earth and were now being hailed as heroes by the gathered media.

Curiously, though they seemed very happy about this, they didn't come out of the rather shabby office block in which they had gone to get changed. Inside, they were all sat in an open plan office dressed in pink jeans and pink t-shirts with red ribbons in their hair.

Throughout this, I was wandering around admiring the chaos that the media was creating and had decided that I too needed to circumnavigate the globe. However, I'm not much of a swimmer, so I thought I'd cycle it. The weather wasn't very nice though, so I decided to do it all on an exercise bike.

Crushed

Lying in a bed with grey sheets, my head on a grey pillow. The room is grey and a silver/grey light is coming in through the window. A man stands by the side of the bed, wearing a grey coat and a dark grey suit. His eyes are sunken in and surrounded by deep black rings.

I'm trying to move, but I can't. Something is crushing me against the bed, forcing me down into the mattress. My body shudders with the effort of trying to move, but I remain crushed, pinned and immobile.

Then my brain clicks in and tells me I'm dreaming. It's telling me I don't need to move, I just need to wake up. I grit my teeth and tense up again, this time trying to drag myself to consciousness and with an almighty effort, I pop back into the world face down on my pillow, blinking blearily at the morning light that is creeping through the curtains.

For the scientifically minded, this is a phenomenon known as sleep paralysis that I've had on and off for most of my life. It's thought to be one of the explanations behind UFO abductions as you are always immobile, and generally there is someone or something, looking over you. I've seen the grey man many times there, and the first time it ever happened to me, he was peering in through the window of the door. I've also had a strange, twisted, hag like creature that stood in a cloud of darkness in the corner of my room (possibly my own 'Night Hag') and two silver, ghost like creatures that floated and peered at me with owl-like eyes.

And then there was the dog... In one episode I've never managed to explain, I had a session of this, only a large black dog was crawling over me and raking me with it's paws. When I woke up, I literally 'peeled' from the sheets as I turned over and I found three cuts running across my back, each about 30cm long. They were too far apart for them to have been made by my fingernails, unless each was done separately, and the best explanation I could come up with was I had scratched myself on the poppers on the duvet cover, but that isn't much of an explanation. To this day, I've no clue how it happened.

Space ships and zombies

I am on the crew of a space ship. We're shipping about a thousand people over to a new colony. They sit in long rows in the passenger lounge, staring out through virtual windows. They're very quiet.

We have to make a pitstop on a small forested planet. The crew gets out to stretch their legs, get some air, take a piss. Going back to the ship, someone is shooting at us from the entrance. Crew members are falling down around me. I throw myself down on the ground and creep slowly forward to see who's shooting, but I can't see anything, so I crawl away from the ship instead.

A bus comes by, so I get on. It arrives in a city. At the next bus stop, a group of zombies in togas get on. They're curious about me and try to communicate, but I won't have any of it.