Fevered Meat Dreams

I'm a weak-willed vegetarian. After a large meat-filled meal, I quickly fall into a sweaty deep sleep. These are my fevered meat dreams.

[feveredmeatdreams]

meatloaf on a stick, chicken in a waffle cone, pork chop on a stick ... thanks, state fair

Okay, this was an absurd amount of meat and a crazy day. Butter sculptures ... Here’s the dream.

Setting: Dystopian future where only children have survived (and some adults sprinkled in here and there) while violent evil ghosts roam wild and brutally kill anyone they find.

Yeah, this was a nightmare.

Our group of child wanderers, supervised by two moms, searches for shelter on a frigid night somewhere in northern coastal Russia. We find an old abandoned church which seems safe (despite the fact that the antagonists in this dream are fucking GHOSTS).

After getting inside, we light some candles and warm up. Soon, one of the children (a super annoying boy with a Cockney accent — let’s call him Gavroche) finds a spooky Soviet-era tunnel in the basement which presumably leads to something great.

A short way down the tunnel, we find some junk blocking most of the passage ahead. Then, the ghosts ambush us! Mercifully, Gavroche dies immediately. Unfortunately, so do many of the other children (about half, I’d say).

The moms fight off the ghosts and we run back to the church to regroup. They tell the remaining children to leave the church and head for the coast to find a town nearby. The moms pledge to stay behind and slow the ghosts down by sacrificing themselves.

THANKS, MOMS.

Conveniently, there is a town. It has some more adults (including some old scientist dude) and a cool tower with a helicopter landing pad on the top but no helicopter. Instead, there are a couple of flying cars (!) and ghost-killing rifles (?).

Our good friends, the recently fed ghosts, show up. They are about to break into the tower, when I, the hero of my own dream, shoot them with the rifle from the passenger seat of one of the flying cars. They die (can ghosts die?) and we, the dystopian future child survivors of a ghost-based apocalypse, win this round.

This was a pretty great way to end a nightmare. A+

[feveredmeatdreams]

bad breath burger

Here’s a short one (I think I had the same dream on repeat all night.) A woman is walking through a shopping mall past a cheap jewelry kiosk.

The lady peddling her wares calls out, “Miss, when was the last time you fell in love?”

The woman is startled and drops her phone, which bounces under the counter. “That’s an odd question. Could you please hand me my phone?”

As the kiosk employee is bustling around trying to find the phone, the woman takes a second to look at the jewelry. A piece catches her eye.

As soon as the phone is retrieved she asks to see this piece, a necklace with a small emerald stone inset. There is a comically unnecessary amount of confusion about which piece she is indicating to the employee. Immediately after getting it in her hands, she drops the necklace and it shatters all over the floor of the mall.

Weird. Thanks, meat.

[feveredmeatdreams]

pork belly, octopus, rabbit, nduja

This dream matched the qualities of the meal quite well: pleasant and random. I was lost in a place I’ve never been and my goal was to make it back home. This time, I was on a middle school trip to Tokyo. Except it was not the bustling, ultra-modern metropolis you might expect. It was more like the city in Ozu’s Tokyo Story (which I watched a couple of weeks ago). Instead of towering skyscrapers, elevated highways, and never-ending lights, this Tokyo was an ocean of one-story structures tightly packed together. I’m taking time to describe the landscape since most of the dream was spent just wandering around.

How exactly did I get lost on my school trip? We were staying in a treehouse hotel because, you know, Japan is famous for those... I dropped a bag and the tree caught it on an awkward branch just a little below the walkway I was on, so I climbed over the railing and went to get it. Once I got the bag, a friend called to me to come back and I told him that I would just climb down to the bottom and meet him there. Somewhere along the way I fell, and the dream changed gears dramatically.

I woke up on a beach, completely lost and with a deep desire to get back to the treehouse hotel. Now begins the wandering through the streets of 1950s Tokyo. I can only recall two major highlights. First, I somehow stumbled upon an outdoor bar that I recognized from some Anthony Bourdain show to be what is considered the best cider bar in the world. This finding was very tragic because I didn’t have money to get a cider and couldn’t speak Japanese well enough to butter up someone into letting me have one. I sighed and walked on. 

The second major feature of the wandering was finding myself on a small farm on a hillside overlooking what my dream mind definitely considered Tokyo. A nice woman walked up to me and asked if I was lost. I told her I was and that I couldn’t remember the name of my hotel. She wanted to help but couldn’t, so I kept wandering. The dream ended when I gave up on ever making it back to my middle-school trip and opened a small ramen restaurant on that hill overlooking Tokyo. Not too bad. 

[feveredmeatdreams]

saucisson sec + beer (2)

Meat does strange things to my subconscious mind. So does alcohol.

After a nice night out, I dreamt about coming home from a nice night out--fitting, I suppose. While joking with my friends about something or other, I notice a ton of police cars with lights flashing and blocking off a section of the street by my apartment. There are enormous crime scene tents set up, lit by the red and blue flashing lights.

After explaining to a cop that I live on the block, I see a young rookie struggling to control a tiger on a leash. The tiger looks extremely pleased, blood smeared all over its maw. It looks at me and begins to vocalize in a very high-pitched voice, like a mewling kitten. 

Fast forward to the next day. I’m touring a garment factory (this is apparently my dream job). As I walk through rows upon rows of humming sewing machines, workers dutifully stitching, I notice a bird flittering about. All the workers appear to want to feed and pet the bird. Some give it crumbs, and others have bird baths on their desks.

I ask my tour guide about this odd inhabitant. “Oh, well, that’s our only pet left now,” she responds. “Last night our tiger escaped and ate our lamb.” This deeply worries me. I feel that there is a great injustice in the untimely demise of this factory’s unlikely menagerie.

Sensing my anger, the tour guide adds: “It’s okay. It was all Congress’s fault and they will be fired for it very soon.” A wave of relief washes over me.

I continue on my tour to see some extra large auto loom machines in action.

[feveredmeatdreams]

Barbecued pulled pork sandwiches lead to dreams about Chris Pratt and Poteau, Oklahoma.

[feveredmeatdreams]

BBQ pork (1)

As I’m sure many others have, I found myself dreaming about Chris Pratt.

For some inexplicable reason, I was talking to Mr. Pratt in my hometown of Fort Smith, Arkansas. He desperately wanted to leave (understandably) and head to Poteau, Oklahoma (less understandable). I found myself trying very earnestly to give this Hollywood star directions to the small eastern Oklahoma community he so badly wanted to get to. After watching me make wild gestures with my arms and listing off every turn I could remember, he thanked me and drove off into the sunset.

Like dreams often do, mine jumped to a completely different setting. Now I was the host of a late night talk show, interviewing none other than Chris Pratt. As we laughed and bantered, he brought up the time when I gave him directions to Poteau. He told the audience and me a wonderful story about getting lost in tornado alley and finding himself in Dallas, Texas three-and-a-half days later as a result of my shoddy directions. I called bullshit, in as friendly a way as you may imagine a talk show host can.

“Well,” he said. “I guess it was my fault too. I thought Poteau was spelled P-o-t-o-e, so I would never have made it there anyways.” The audience laughed and I did too. 

I guess, in the world of fevered meat dreams, spelling really counts when it comes to reaching rural destinations.