Recalling A Dream: The One With The Rats and Saucers
By Georgia Bowan
I am in a house I have never been in before but somehow it feels familiar to me. This happens a lot when I dream. I feel that the setting I have emerged in is one I know all too well, but in reality I have never been there once in my life. Maybe the house is some kind of repressed memory? One from when I was a thoughtless infant? Or maybe I have been to this house once before, in my past life something strange like that.
Outside the house, I come face to face with a two headed cow. Using a hose, I spray water onto the cow until it shrinks and shrinks. The two headed cow shrinks so small and now it is a baby piglet. This all feels normal to me, like nature is just taking its course or evolution has quickened before my eyes.
The piglet, only a few months old I think, latches onto my ass with its tiny teeth and takes a chunk out of it. I panic because, what the fuck? A piglet has just bitten off part of my flesh. In desperation, I ask the people who live inside the house what to do and they tell me that the animal is some kind of cursed creature that is a spawn of Satan himself.
They pick up the little piglet, who now looks so sweet and innocent. For a moment I forget it’s violence towards me and want to hold it in my arms like a baby.
“We should have put this thing down a long time ago” the family says and they grab a shovel.
“No” I cry out “Don’t kill it”
I pick the piglet up and begin to walk away with it when suddenly it turns into thousands and thousands of large, feral, squirming rats.
I scream out and release my loving hold on them. I claw the rodents off my clothes and skin in genuine disgust and fear. When the rats fall to the floor in a wriggling pile, a Seagull lands on the ground and begins to eat them one by one. I watch the gull swallow the rodents whole before my eyes until there are none left. The bird flies away.
Now, I am crying and my mother gives me a hug. I’m not sure why I’m crying. I feel disgusted and guilty and also, frankly, repulsed at the display I have just witnessed. All of it, from the two headed cow, to the wriggling rats, to the bird’s violent ingestion, it has all made me feel so confused.
“It’s okay” my mothers tells me “let’s go inside and forget about all of this.” She acts as if nothing has even happened and it frustrates me.
Inside, the house is messy with cups made of china and silver cutlery and unburned candle sticks that litter the floor. Every shelf in the house is slanted on an angle and, as I walk, I keep knocking things over. I feel too large for the house and embarrassed by myself, but when I knock over the porcelain pieces, they don’t smash against the cold hard ground.
Instead, the plates and saucers spill in a hyper real and almost awkward slow motion fashion. They fall like a ballon running out of air or a piece of styrofoam escaping between my fingers. Despite this, my father yells at me for making a mess and tells me to get out at once. I wake up.
