The Cheese Dreams

I use my mouth and my teeth and my œsophagus and all that physical-body stuff to eat cheese. It goes into my stomach and its brilliant power of dream-mentalism swirls up into my head and then I go to bed and my brain does dreams inside my sleep. Then I type them out of my me into the world, through Internet, and they go into your brain.

[thecheesedreams]

The Spectre of St James

Post-prandial cheese push: a fabulous farrago fronted furiously by a creamy, malty slab of ewe's milk. A splash of red. Perhaps another. Quince. Retire. Drop out of existence for a few hours until recalled sharply by the sighting of a gargantuan drum-like structure above the atmosphere, an escapee from a '50s future feature, bristling with dishes, antennæ, a giant metallic cake with an interstellar vibe, a pastiche of an earthly space-laser with a space-faring brief, humming and buzzing with activity, travelling at tremendous speed, lowering itself to a giant crater in the desert, nestling briefly in a spectacular self-sunk screw-hole, veiled by geography but osmotically announcing itself to life across the sphere, trailing a series of transmissions seemingly representing a set of documents in some otherworldly Sanskrit form, its characters combining ancient Abyssinian and Armenian glyphs with another format that no-one consciously understands, yet which select people across the globe somehow absorb into their unspeaking under-minds and recognise as speaking to them of and across distance and time unknown, imparting strange stories of journeys from places we've never seen and travelling distances we'll never comprehend, borne by a carrier crashing through the atmosphere and somehow transfusing dense forestry with dry, dusty dunes, sand whistling through warm winds carrying context and sending sentiment from one point in this colossal continuum to all others it can access using its unique collation of technology and tenacity, a conveyed message of calm, determined yet derived from desperation. We transcribe what we can, painting pages with symbols we have no idea how we even half-understand, according interpretations aligned with our experience, an economist attaching analysis, a master of no trade jacking in a generalised grasp, each reaching for consensus and seeking somehow similar souls to flesh out puzzling passages, looking for linguists, attempting to alert companion custodians of fractionally perceived passages to the existence of their collaborators, attempting to pull together a complete copy of the complex codex, so that we can collectively understand the overall meaning and render meaningful the bafflingly huge journey undertaken by these alien ambassadors and ensure their message is heard and acted upon. We print out thick, full copies of what we have, pushing ourselves to pull together a canonical version, packaging parts into parcels to post to authorities on what we perceive to be the areas alluded to by as-yet unapprehended sections, still far from clear on what we've got or how we got it or why we need to do what we're doing, yet crystal clear that it's important, an urgent exercise to be executed immediately, converting our so-far small band of conspirators into the last hope of undermining the assiduous advance of an otherwise all-enveloping earthly empire, unsolicited yet critical external assistance aiding and abetting our efforts to establish a coalition of those willing to give a shit about the survival of the species against its own worst instincts and excesses. We complete the consignment and commit it to be carried to its other intended interpreters; an epistle of intention edging out through the ether, at the same moment and with the same action as the transmission of the tangible portion through the post, our envoys in the imagined and enacted worlds carrying our hopes and dreams ahead of us into the endless desolate dark desert of future times. Goddammit, I just dreamed the plot to Arrival. Kinda.

[thecheesedreams]

The Chiswick Camembert Caper

Input:

3/4x mini-round M&S Camembert

6x cheese biscuits from "As Nature Intended"

Output:

1x long-range-remote-control-responding, double-wheel-instead-of-back-legs-relying, low-center-of-gravity-having, Sonic-the-hedgehog-colour-bearing, wild-fox-grimace-exuding, multiple-pine-cone-shitting Shiba Inu clone wheeling 'round the block, ejecting turdstones the size of Christmas decorations and showering grinning-like-a-bastard facial dribbles on all who deign to pass by.

End of report.

[thecheesedreams]

The Palermo Provolone Phantasm

As a casual introduction to a previously unmatched festival of sweetbread gorging, I guzzle a thick slice of grilled provolone at a local parrilla. Bubbling hot outside; elastically runny and cool inside, with the exterior appearance of a rice cake. Smothered in chimichurri sauce, sporting a stylish jamón jacket and a sweaty red pepper cravat. Drool.

A few hours pass; reading, relaxing, inwardly digesting. You know how it is. I retire. Slumber sneaks in.

It's not long before I find myself at a remote ranch. I'm hanging around outside, a little way from the saloon, shooting the shit with the horsehands as they play training games with their lassos. We discuss the finer points of ZZ Top; though I don't venture this opinion, I feel like 'La Grange' is a pretty suitable selection for the current scenario. But I digress, as the real action is making its way towards us, with a studied nonchalance I find unconvincing.

Two figures have shown up. Three. They're strangely attired, like Buddhist monks, with heads like the Mos Eisley cantina band players'. Kind of. Bit more rounded, maybe? Anyway, you know how it is. Takes all sorts.

There's a strange, eerie sense of calm attached to these guys - and I mean, attached. Bolted on. I'd like to say it emanates from them, but that's not so - it's artificially affixed. Never mind my misgivings, though, as they seem to exert an attraction to the animals; they're calling, somehow, to the horses, and in turn to their handlers. My companions seem to fall in line with their charges, as these silent, strangely ethereal, yet somehow lumpen characters start to lead wordlessly away from the habitation. I'm falling in, too. Though I don't really know why. It seems like the thing to do.

We trot along while the countryside gradually transforms around us; starting out a mixed, rocky, sandstone grey, verdure creeps increasingly in, and the terrain starts to rise. A couple more of these types appear in the middle distance, their robes ruffling lightly in a low breeze, and I realise I'm feeling more than a bit uneasy about all this. But it's what's happening, so there it is. Their numbers swell as we start up what's now obviously a tree-lined hill, moving towards a growth of forest at the top, and I realise each of them is singing some kind of siren song to a small group of people like us, drawing them as we're drawn, without reason or explanation, now obviously more herding than guiding.

Breaking through into a clearing as we crest the peak, I feel a sudden urge to kneel. I don't know why, but it's immediately as if I'd always wanted to kneel, here, now - and as I do, I see others doing the same, and hear a voice singing a pacifying lullaby inside my head, a lilting, rising, falling musical hook into my brain, reassuring, mollifying, nullifying: "there's other people here, there's other people here". A robed shape comes up behind each of them, like some strangely static dervish, and with a muted horror I realise that the positions, the kneeling people, facing the floor while these creatures move silently toward the back of their heads, form a tableau of mass execution. I see no weapons but I see clear, ineluctable intent. No-one else sees it, no-one's trying to get away; but I have to run.

With an unexpectedly uncomplicated wrench, I manage to break myself out of what's become a strange, subdued reverie, and I try to move away without being detected. I see a couple of them noticing me, duck away under branches hanging down from the canopy and try to walk back down the hill, but my muscles start to disobey me. There's no sense of struggle; the physical sensation's transformed into conceptual awareness, the realisation dawns that this is how it should be, this is how it was always meant, like some longed-for expedition to Petrin Hill. But I don't want this! I don't want this, I don't want to want it - but it doesn't matter. It's what they want me to want. I see how much better they are at this. There was never anything I could have done. The camera angle lowers, two slender, white-garbed figures hove into view as I descend to my knees and I see only their lower halves, my sight starts to swim, it's inevitable - and I wake.

Jaws clenched, staring intently at the counterpane, stupefied by the cold hard lines of 5am slicing through my vision, I push myself to rise and, staring hard at my reflection in the bathroom mirror to enforce concrete existence, try to block out the ear-worm. There's other people here … there's other people here …

[thecheesedreams]

The Tillamook Terror

Herewith, my accidental Recipe for Caseio-Oneiric Disaster.

Ingredients:

11 episodes of “Breaking Bad” in 2 days

One sliced thumb in the preparation of…

One 4-egg omelette sprinkled supra-liberally with sharp Tillamook cheddar

Instructions:

Spread the TV show thickly over a couple of rainy days’ hiding inside. Allowing the first nine episodes to settle, retire to kitchen.

Take approx. 2-3mm off the top of your thumb in dicing ham for the omelette. Apply sticking plaster.

Cook omelette slowly with a stupidly deep layer of tangy, processed, plasticised, ready-grated Tillamook reclining across its surface. Ingest at a rate of knots.

Return to TV and pile on the last two episodes for good measure.

Journey to the land of Nod.

Results:

The safety and warmth of your home is transformed into the clean but slightly claustrophobic, childishly-decorated motel room above the manager’s office space in a dingy, dark, commercial warehouse. Your companion contributes cantankerously to your bickering; dirt and mould encroaching everywhere in the cavernous corrugated corridors downstairs contrast  with the washing-powder odours and creamy cleanliness of the living quarters. A smooth but suffocating sensation of stasis concurrently comforts and crushes.

A change: cold dread creeps dryly down your spine as the realisation washes over you - they’re coming for you. They want the only thing that stands between you and abject failure, collapse and ruin. You’ll have to work out what it is. Go through the cupboards. Turn out the desk drawers. Find out. They’ll never stop! The only way out is to run. Both of you must somehow get away, the stash intact. Pack it up! Get out fast. Get in the car; find somewhere to hide - yet ...

There’s nowhere to go. You’ll run forever if only you can stay ahead of them. But they’re fast. No human’s that fast. The engine rising to a scream, you scramble onto the back seat and gaze nervously out back at the gathering pall of menace swarming up the road behind you. They’re almost with you - you were right, the killers run at superhuman speed, the very thought of their progress clotting, curdling into a swarming, gelatinous mass of insidious intent, transcending and transmuting their visceral physicality to solid steam streaming into the air around you. Tentacles tear from the core, grapple with the atmosphere, careering chaos crawling to the car, emerging hands erupting, spreading, fanning out like smoke and lightning and solidified swirl behind, the shape of a face materialising into an ectoplasmic head inside your suddenly porous escape capsule, ebbing and flowing, in and out, round and about, pushing and probing at the boundary, trying to outrun, engulf, ensnare, until - something shifts. A distant call? An edict from elsewhere requesting a retreat? But it’s a reluctant, recalcitrant recession, it won’t last long - and you can’t run this fast forever.

You wake up staring, stark, suspended, the certain knowledge lodged deep in your gut that they’ll return, soon, swifter, stronger ... how to guard against their primeval power?

No answer. All hope is gone. Ignore the screaming of your senses and wait patiently for reality to reassert itself.

[thecheesedreams]

Pelagic pandemonium?

Resting early after an unexpectedly good dinner on my first evening on the edge of the Pacific, I become aware of a consciousness drifting up from empty blackness toward insane, howling, primal noises. A hole in the ground on the edge of a reservoir reaches down to, and up from, the bowels of earth. There's machinery. A turnpipe. Voices babbling. A chickenshit priest stands at the edge of this chasm in reality, shuffling dirt into the maw of the abyss. Brave children scrabble around the edges, blazing naïvety and innocent strength into the whirlwhind of madness. Mud's all around. Swirls of possible loss and potential redemption. What? "CHAOS! COLLAPSE!" - but you're talking nonsense! - "Is that what the voices say?" Yes! "Who says that?" Huh? You did, you twat - you are 'the voices'! - and I wake, realising slightly sheepishly that I'm shouting "TWAT!" to myself. So. The product of nearby oceanic hum? Roaring wind? A motel dropped on a ley line, perhaps? Or the unanticipated agression of that rather splendid glass of port? Or … a solid slab of baked, thoroughbred cheesecake? I think we know the answer.

[thecheesedreams]

Control Experiment #1

On Saturday, I ate no cheese at all; none by day, nor any by night. A handful of walnuts, scraped through some hummus and wolfed down with some red seedless grapes shortly before retiring, was apparently all it took to conjure up the powerful image of three late-middle-aged, leather- and PVC-clad, peroxide-permed dominatrices stealing suspiciously similar walnuts from the shelves - and smashing champagne bottles with their steel-reinforced underwear - in CCTV footage of a supermarket heist they stopped to pull on their way to gatecrashing a garden party at which they would watch several foxes biting the ankles of a large brown bear chained to a post. At this point, it seems that perhaps the cheese is simply toning down the dreams somewhat. Normal service will presumably resume shortly.

[thecheesedreams]

The Stichelton Crescendo

A January Wednesday. An unpasteurised block of boutique British blue, purchased with precise change, its seven-and-a-half-ounce weight left loitering in a large coat pocket for a couple of hours. I took it home, wrestled with the hand-wrought wrapping and exposed the heaving, breathing, mouldering dairy slime within; shaved off solid slices and slurped them in 'til my cheeks flamed with lactose licentiousness to match, gave it an hour or so to settle, and topped up with one last layer before retiring to sleep, perchance to ... What? Who's that? I know you. I know your face. But why there? In that place? Hold ... no, you don't fit with ... wait. It's early. So early? A yellow, brown, crumpled-duvet fold of faces. A murmuring, muttering confusion of friends, familiars. We're here together, conjoined in companionship. No - I'm here alone, it's dark, I'm awake. There's the whistle of the wind in the vent. How are you there, then? What are you ... what's that? That spectre of solidity in the angles of the room, coalescing soul-smoke, oceans of identity ebbing and flowing through - what space? what distance? what proximity? Bang. Back in the room. Clear, crisp. White walls, shadow. But ... what is it that engulfs, ensnares, frames, follows, fills? Will it take hold? Will it spare me or leave me desolate? we - I - you ... an icy lake. An aging trawler breaking the surface, frosted in time. A skinny lump of human creature on the footboard, agèd yet ageless, wizened, taut, playing with beads on the frozen flats - preparing poison? Plunder? But how she's frail, fragile, silver hair disguising a knotted brow and ... oh, no - not frail. What horror is this? See the steely glance. A brooding, murderous witch insanely intent on insidious acts. Pushed into the ice, she spreads thick black lines about, rending the shattered surface like cracks in a mirror. Shock at the cold forms fright and turns to terror, yet she floats like a bobbing buoy. Fish her out and risk the lives and loves of all those unsuspecting and unwilling inhabitants of her nefarious plots, or let her freeze, fade into the formless void of the deep, and suffer the unending memory of those eyes, those piercing pinpoints of agonized fear? The choices convolve, a vindictive vortex merging, mingling to a silent, screaming scirocco - but it's too late. I'm awake, and the eyes remain. Three days in, and already I'm undone.

[thecheesedreams]

Chairman Cheddar

A pack of Tesco's Extra Strong Farmhouse Cheddar, 240 grammes. Left on the side for an hour or two to warm, ripen, sweat, prepare; half of the synthetically-sharp, pseudo-cultured blob subsequently summarily stuffed gob-wise in an access of oneiric expectation. Result: an excess of bureaucratic recursion; a 4am foray into a neo-Escherine vista of queues, lines, delays. Navy, civilians, commercial staff alike, piled in to a cruise-line cavalcade of shuffling souls, waiting wordlessly for direction, dictated divinely or communicated corporeally from its constructing committee. A cast of thousands, millions, infinite individuality coagulated as a congealed corpus, suspended soporifically in a meandering, trickling stream of eternal expectation; a tacit, preternatural comprehension that the unachievable end is already arrived. Hardly an unexpectedly anodyne outcome, from such a saccharine source.

[thecheesedreams]

Brie, thy name is Morpheus

Eleven o'clock; tick, tock. A cellophane-shrouded, ammoniac slice of supermarket Brie, two chunks already down and tempting a third - but no; gluttony, I'll not abase myself further before thee. Yet already my nightly fate is sealed; swirling streams of panic materially manifest as motorway murders, their cunning, concealed orchestrator looming large in my mind. Jacknifed lorries, felled trees, black ice, butchery. Lord Brie, how cruel thou art.