PEENER (Part VI)

I appears that I garroted a guy dead, Phil thought. He was trying to keep the impending anxiety attack at bay. “This is only a dream…this is only a dream…” he began repeating.

Then an odd thought occurred: if this was only a dream, then I can do whatever I want. “What’s going on out there?” he heard a female voice from outside the garage. This was the perfect opportunity to engage his most deranged fantasies. It would be the perfect cure for my writer’s block, he finally concluded. Phil dropped the makeshift garrote and picked up a baseball bat.

“I’m out here sweetheart!” he shouted back. “I think I injured myself. Can you come out here?”

Phil readied the bat and stood by the door. The knob turned. A petite middle aged woman in a nightgown stepped out. She immediately saw her decapitated husband almost screamed. Phil slammed the door behind her shut and grabbed her mouth. Her trembling in his arms initiated a strange arousal.

“I killed your husband,” he calmly told her. “Scream and I’ll do the same to you. Understood?”

Through streaming tears, the woman nodded. Phil released her and she turned around to face her captor. He kept reminding himself that none of this was real despite what his senses were telling him. Now he gazed upon the shaking creature in front of him wondering what to do next.

“Please go,” the woman muttered. “I’ll tell them I saw no one.”

Phil chuckled. “I don’t think so,” he said. He couldn’t stop himself looking at her helpless body through the form fitting nightgown. “Remove your clothes,” he ordered.

The woman began to quietly weep, then she complied. Moments later, as she stood completely nude in front of him, Phil briefly considered violating her.

But this was all too real for him. He’s had lucid dreams before, and usually they ended the moment the lucidity began. Then thought of raping her began to disgust his sense of morality.

So he bludgeoned her to death instead.

Then burned the house down.

TO BE CONTINUED…

PEENER (Part V)

“What’s that thing on your head?” Tina asked right before bed.

Phil was sweating bullets. “Nothing, just a thing to help me sleep better,” he explained. “The therapist gave it to me.”

“Are you okay? You don’t look well.”

“Yeah yeah! I’m fine. I’ve just been working out before bedtime. You know, to help me sleep better.”

Tina wasn’t convinced. “Phil, you can talk to me, ya know? I know you’ve been struggling to write for awhile. I’ve been worried…”

“You don’t have to worry about me! I promise. It’s just a little writer’s block. All writers go through this.”

Tina took by the hand and looked him in the eye. “Okay,” she said. “I guess I can be a worrywart sometimes. Just promise to open yourself up to me.”

Phil nodded. “Okay, I will,” he told her. “But I promise that what I’m going through is nothing that you have to concern yourself with. It’s just a passing phase. I promise.”

Tina held her gaze for a moment. “I believe you,” she said. She kissed him on the forehead, turned off the lights, and soon both were laying together in bed. Phil activated the small device on his temple and made sure the dream emitter was functioning. This better fucking work, he thought.

He was fast asleep; faster to sleep than he had ever been before.

What felt like seconds later, Phil was standing wide awake. He was in an unknown garage.

He looked around to a workbench. In his hand was two wooden handles, seemingly sawn off from a broom, that were connected by a blood soaked steel wire. “What the fuck?” Phil said aloud.

Obscuring his vision from the other side of the garage was a vehicle, a large black 2043 Porsche SUV. Beneath the vehicle, a puddle of blood was forming. Phil cautiously walked to the other side.

“Jesus!” he screamed.

On the ground was a body. Moreover, the body was missing its head. Blood was still pouring out from the neck.

TO BE CONTINUED…

PEENER (Part IV)

Wade was coughing uncontrollably as a cigarette dangled from his lips. The emitter box was laying in pieces across Phil’s floor. Wade would pick up an individual piece and study it closely. He was meticulous; a little too much so for Phil who was pacing back and forth.

“Tina will be here in an hour. Will you be done by then?” Phil asked.

“Shhhhh,” Wade replied with his index finger up to his mouth. “With what little time I have, I need to focus.”

Phil rolled his eyes. “We don’t have time. This is illegal. Besides, how do you know May?”

“I don’t know May.”

“Then who do I need to go to if this doesn’t work?”

“Uhhh,” Wade thought. “Just go to May.”

Phil sighed. He sat down at the edge of his bed and watched Wade put the emitter back together. When he was finished, Wade hooked the box up to a computer. “What are you doing?” Phil asked.

“I’m downloading an encrypted software to the emitter that will alter its programming.”

“Okay? What will that do?”

“Well,” Wade paused as he pondered his words, “it’s difficult to explain. The software will allow the emitter to provide a more, let’s say, rewarding dream experience. We call the software Psychological Energy Emanation for Nocturnal Energy Rest.”

“That’s quite a mouthful,” Phil said.

“We call it PEENER for short.”

Phil was puzzled. After Wade finished downloading the software, he packed up his computer and handed a small device to Phil. “Before you sleep, put this on your temple,” he instructed. “This will connect you directly to the emitter so that only YOU experience the dreams emanating from it. Believe me, you don’t want your sleeping partner to have any of those dreams if they’re not prepared for it. Plus, if she does experience any of it, that might dilute your own experience. So wear that device.”

Phil held the small gadget in his hand. “So I can for sure contact May if I have any questions, right?”

Wade paused once again. “Sure,” he said. “Sweet dreams!”

TO BE CONTINUED…

PEENER (Part III)

“Philly, baby! How’ve you been darling?” May greeted her top client, Phil.

“I told you not to call me that,” he said. “I hate Philadelphia.”

“Please forgive me, sweetheart,” she pleaded as she hugged him. “Can I get you something to drink? Some champagne, perhaps?”

“What’s the point? There’s nothing to celebrate. I can’t get anything onto paper.”

“Nothing?! Phil, please, take a seat. Tell me: is therapy not working?”

Phil sat down in a large mahogany leather chair. “Dream therapy is a joke,” he explained. “I’m sorry to disappoint the publisher, but it’s going to be awhile before I’ll have anything to give them.”

May poured herself a champagne and began to think. “Look,” she said, “I know I’m your agent, but I’m also your friend. So can I give you a suggestion? Have you thought about a memoir? You’re a war hero after all. There’s probably something there that the publisher may be interested in.”

Phil hem and hawed. “I don’t know if I’m ready to go down that road, May,” he said. “I think I’d rather stick with fiction.”

“Okay…alright,” she said, “I have an idea. Now feel free to shoot this down if you want. But please, bear with me. Dream therapy has worked really well with my other clients, but they had to do something a little extra…”

“What do you mean?”

May took a big sip from the champagne. “Well, they kinda had to tinker with the dream emitter a little before they got their desired results.”

“I’m not following.”

“Well…the emitter is, of course, heavily patented so that makes it exceptionally difficult to hack into. A lot of safety measures are put into place so that users won’t experience any, well, unpleasant side effects. But from my understanding, there is a way to break into it to provide, I guess, a more rewarding experience.”

“Okay…”

“Now hear me out,” May interrupted, “I don’t think that there’s anything dangerous to the user about this, it’s just not entirely legal.”

Phil was confused. “May, I don’t know what you’re saying.”

“You mostly have pleasant dreams? Correct?” May asked. “Well how about instead of GOOD dreams…you have, let’s say, more INTENSE dreams.”

Phil chuckled and shook his head. “I don’t know. This sounds crazy.”

“Can you at least try it out?” May pleaded. “Now I know a guy who knows a guy who might know a guy who knows how to ‘tinker’ with the emitter. I can get you set up. What do you say?”

TO BE CONTINUED…

PEENER (Part II)

“Dream therapy just hasn’t been working,” Phil explained to his therapist. “Sure, getting in a gangbang with Bill Nighy and Kenneth Cranham was amusing, if not strangely arousing, at first. But now these dreams are getting bizarre, and frankly downright annoying. Some nights, I want to turn the emitter off and get a plain nice rest. Face it doc, maybe I’m just not cut out to be a writer. I’m an empty vessel, void of anything creative.

“First off,” the therapist retorted, “I’m not a doctor. I’m a simple ass therapist. And secondly, do you think your emitter needs calibrating? Are you sure that it isn’t malfunctioning? Most of my clients have found dream therapy to be thoroughly beneficial.”

“No, it’s not malfunctioning. You know I’ve been suffering from writer’s block for a long time now. I think I made a deal with the devil to write one successful novel and now I’m paying the price. I’m a one hit wonder.”

The therapist shifted in his seat and placed his pen up to his lips. “I think you’re running away from the real problem here,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. The off world rebellion. You are a highly decorated soldier in that war.”

Phil threw his hands in the air. “Come on! You know that I haven’t had any symptoms in nearly two years. Not since my novel was published. That has nothing to do with my current problems!”

“Something like that doesn’t just go away, Phil. Just because it’s been awhile since you’ve experienced symptoms doesn’t mean that it’s something that no longer affects you. You were evasive of it then and you’re being evasive of it now. You can lie to me all day. I get paid the same. But if you want to get your money’s worth out of this, you have to start being honest with yourself. And besides, this issue you’re avoiding might be the solution to your writer’s block. If you want my professional advice, be honest with yourself and perhaps this dream therapy will start working.”

TO BE CONTINUED…

PEENER (Part I)

Phil was flying his phallic shaped spaceship around the Jovial moon of Io. He crossed the thin atmosphere and scanned the surface of the sandy and red terrain. “Initiate landing procedures,” he ordered the computer. Almost instantly the thrusters fired and landing gear was lowered.

“Surface conditions?” he asked the computer.

“The atmosphere consists of mostly sulfur dioxide with trace amounts of oxygen,” the female voice reported.

“Prepare my space suit,” he ordered.

After gathering his gear, Phil lowered himself onto the surface of the dusty moon. He took out his scanner and began recording his findings. “Mission log,” he said, “there are no signs of life and Io appears to be a barren wasteland.”

Suddenly something caught his eye. Phil walked over to a rock that was emitting large amounts of radiation. He readied his phaser and radioed in. “Mission Control, it appears I found something…,”. But before he could report his findings, he was struck from behind.

Phil was suddenly chained up, nude, cock hard, in a bunker seemingly under the surface of Io. Three large-breasted women dressed in silver garments appeared before him. “We are representatives of the Pussyonida government,” they said in unison, “we are here to confiscate your semen so that we may repopulate our planet…”

A loud buzzing noise pierced through the air. “Wake up sweetie,” Phil heard. There was a brief moment of lucidness before he opened his eyes. “Coffee is brewing,” his longtime girlfriend informed him. Phil had been dreaming this whole time.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered as he rubbed his eyes. Phil climbed out of bed, put on pants, and observed himself in the mirror. “I’m one disgusting mother fucker,” he said to himself. His hair was disheveled, his face heavily stubbled.

Phil shuffled into the kitchen area, plopped down in a chair, and Tina placed a cup of coffee before him. “Did you dream well last night?” she asked.

He shook his head and looked out the window. “Fuck no,” Phil replied. “It was all wholly unoriginal. Unoriginal thoughts. Unoriginal ideas. Face it, Tina, I’m a hack. I can’t even have an original dream.”

TO BE CONTINUED…

Unresolved anger issues

Everyday I ask myself ‘should I start therapy?’

Let’s take a look at my dreams for example. I assume that dreams for most people, when they’re not nightmares, are mostly nonsensical and benign. For me though, they’re an opportunity to engage in rage-fueled fantasies.

From last night, I dreamt that I was getting a mani/pedi/massage from some high end resort because someone felt that I needed a stress reliever. Don’t know why they thought I needed a mani/pedi, but there I was. Suddenly the power went out so the resort thought it was a good idea for all the patrons to go outside for a jog.

I didn’t like my fellow patrons because they were a bunch of stuck up, rich, white people. You know the type: they wore plaid flannel shirts with North Face vests and thick rimmed glasses. Anyway, the activities director suggested we all go for a jog. Halfway through it, the director announced that whoever finishes their lap first will get all their expenses paid.

Naturally, I bolt for the finish line but some jackass and his wife were in lockstep with me. I eventually run out of steam and the couple cross the finish line first. Afterwards, when I was cooling down, the asshat that beat was annoyed, saying something like “if you didn’t start sprinting, you might’ve beaten me!”

I fly off the handle, replying with something like “maybe if you weren’t such an old sack of shit, I’d kick the fuck out of you!”

Then the dream ended.

The next dream was a bit more unusual. So I was at a Six Flags when I get off a rollercoaster that took you around the galaxy. It was really fuckin bitchin tbh. Unfortunately I walk out the wrong door and accidentally leave the park.

Unable to get back in, a police officer…who’s obviously a homeless guy and not a real police officer…stops me and asks to see some ID. I play along because I felt sorry for the guy, so I take out my wallet and pull out my driver’s license. Right then, I get distracted by ANOTHER “police officer” and the homeless guy grabs my wallet but bungles the attempt at thievery. He drops the wallet on the ground and I shrug. “Look, you don’t have to steal my wallet, I’ll happily give you $15,” I say to him.

But it was all a set up. Some odd gang of sociopaths kidnap me and subject me to a series of tests. They inform me that if I survive, I’ll be initiated into their gang even though they kidnapped me and I never asked to be initiated to begin with. So I thought fuck this and instead of playing by their rules, I instantly begin a reign of terror where one by one, I track down individual gang members and torture them.

The dream suddenly shifts narratives of the same story. Word reaches the CIA that I’ve been kidnapped. Harrison Ford is my father and Jon Hamm is his partner. Hamm informs Ford, my father, that I’ve been kidnapped. But my father proceeds to do nothing believing that he’s teaching me a lesson in “trusting strangers”.

So Don Draper takes matters into his own hands and he’s off to the rescue. Together we torture, mutilate, and kill my kidnappers in a glorious and satisfying bout of revenge.

I don’t know what any of these dreams mean but they are not uncommon. Clearly there’s a deep rage seething inside of me. Thankfully I’m not dreaming about murdering random strangers because that would be cause for concern. But clearly I’m looking for someone, anyone, to start some shit so that I can indulge in some indignant rage..

Dream on!

I’ve said before that I get some wild ass dreams. Maybe it’s the side effect of Cialis or maybe I should stop eating popcorn before I go to bed. But at any rate, these dreams can really fuck up my day.

The latest one involved the guys from Cum Town and an LSD trip that I won’t go into. But it got me thinking about the most fully fleshed out dream I’ve ever had.

About ten years ago, I dreamt about a dictator that summons his advisers to a dinner and everyone had to wear war paint. When the meal was served, the food is revealed to be the pieces of carcasses from the dictator’s vanquished enemies. One guys is served a dude’s face. This alarms the advisers who request foreign assistance to topple the dictatorship.

Obviously, the US responds by deploying an elite task force, led by a commander that was a drama major in college. Unfortunately, other nations have an interest in this country, so they too deploy special forces to take over the government. Without warning, the US task force is killed off by a competing nation and the commander is held captive. To make matters worse, even more competing nations pile into the country, escalating into an orgy of death and destruction.

Good news is: the dictator is killed. The bad news: the entire country is in ruins.

Of course, I’ve added more detail and commentary as time progressed. I really wanted to turn this into a novel, screenplay, etc. US military intervention was, at that particular moment, still a point of contention. Now that discussion has shifted (what a difference ten years makes) so I don’t know if I will ever flesh out this dream into a full blown story. But the nihilist in me still loves it: while outwardly it appears political, the story ultimately turns anti-political by devolving into pure action schlock. Everyone is a bad guy, so you root for everyone to die as you enjoy the spectacle of some poor nation getting blown the fuck up.

So please, somebody write this story into a book, movie, or whatever. Cuz I’m too lazy to do it.

the shape of things to come

Had a dream where I was back in the Army. David Duchovny’s character from Californication was also court-ordered to serve. He was a complete fuckin asshole and I beat the shit out of him.

I tend to do that in dreams because I have unaddressed anger issues.

Unfortunately the Army was doing some time-travel experiments. So they put me to sleep and I woke up in a gutter, shoeless, and covered in piss. I grab some dude off the street.

“What year is it?!” I ask him.

“6025,” he said.

“6025? Why aren’t we exploring space?!”

The man began to cry. “We just plum forgot about it 🤷‍♂️,” he replied.

The future didn’t look that much different from the present. Except that people were much taller, more androgynous, and looked younger.

People were attending grade school in their 30s. The world grew so complicated that it took several decades before anyone could become “adults”.

I was getting some strange looks.

“You don’t have to be bald, ya know?” the receptionist lady told me. They made me go to therapy to update my appearance. “Male-pattern baldness was eradicated centuries ago.”

I wept for joy. “Please move my hairline forward and don’t make me a redhead 😭😭😭,” I said.

I had a full head of hair but I was still short as shit.

As I was driving through Chicago to get to O’Hare, the roads were paved with with old, derelict cars. This system wasn’t perfect though. As I went under an overpass, an old 1950s-style truck fell from the bridge and killed several motorists.

I was fine though.

Honestly, this future sucked. One thing was pretty accurate however: material conditions made life so comfortable that people viewed fiction as more of a reality than reality itself. The only struggle people had was the ones provided by entertainment.

Therapy to cope with the death of a beloved TV character? Sounds about right to me! 😀

we’ll always be together in electric dreams

Ever had a dream that made you wake up laughing?

So I was at a writer’s workshop where some dude was trying to get under my skin. Then we became best friends. Tom Brady also showed up because he was trying to get his acting career started. Why he was at a writer’s workshop was never explained.

Then, like a ghost from the past, appeared an old friend. In real life I haven’t spoken to him in nearly 15 years. His brother was actually my best friend and our friendship ended in the worst possible way: in a courtroom (we both lost btw). It’s one of my biggest regrets, and in truth, I dream about him often.

But his brother shows up, and I confide in him that I think highly of his sibling and I miss them both. In fact, I tell him that I am at this workshop because I am writing a fictionalized version of our friendship.

The Brother tells me that I can’t do that. I ask why and he disappears into a bookstore. I go looking for him and I find him with three small children. I ask him again why I can’t write the book. He tells me that his brother’s dead and that one of these children is his son.

It was a poignant moment in the dream. It reminded me of the passage of time, how we were once small children, and how we are now creating the next generation. I tell the Son of my best friend that I too have a son, how fortunate he is to have his uncle, and that his father was a good man.

The Brother disappears once again, and I help the Child find his uncle. As I walk with the Child, he tells me to not have regrets, and that he hopes to meet my son. I tell him that “that’s a very nice thing to say,” and that I hope they meet someday too.

Finally, we find his uncle standing outside. He’s with two men in suits. I tell the Brother that per his wishes, I won’t write the book. One of the men in suits spoke up and said “that’s a wise decision.”

“Are you an attorney?” I ask.

He nodded.

“What if I changed all the names and events? Can you sue me then?” I said.

“Well clearly he (my best friend) is everything that he’s not,” the lawyer replied. Whatever that meant.

I look over to the Brother. “Did you invite these guys here?” I ask.

He did.

“Well fuck it,” I said. “I’m writing the book.”

I then pointed at the lawyer’s shirt like he had a stain. When he looked down, I lifted my finger up to his face.

“Fuckin loser,” I said.

Then the dream ended.