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Dream. All global financial markets have been crashed by a computer worm called the “Be Interesting” virus.

Dream. A long argument with J. D. Vance about clearance to fly on an airplane. Smoking grass with him and typing information on a medical certificate. — I hate dreaming of people named J. D.

Dream. A song. “Doesn’t anybody here remember I’m alive?”

Dream. I die and am reunited with my dead uncle Billy Joe. He is glad to see me but he can’t remember my name. I don’t care. The important thing is we are together again. I press my forehead against his.

Dream. “We don’t need the code. We have the code.”

Dream. My house was full of rats, snakes that ate the rats, and hawks and three eagles that ate the snakes.

Dream. A song. “You can utilize us, come what may.”

Dream. A song. “The dragon sleeps no more.”

Dream. Everyone I knew assembled to tell me the world would have been a better place if I had never been born.

Dream. Flying. Trouble at the airport. Never mind that. Flying home.

Dream. I found my mother’s old dresser. Some of its drawers still had our things in it, a marble, some of her jewelry. — I woke up crying.

Dream. “I feel like I could write such an important book about this, if I could just calm down.”

Dream. Outdone. Weak. Hemmed in. Bullied. Threatened. Tardy. Polite, or cowardly? Impending doom.

Dream. “The best way to kill a cactus is to burn down the house it’s growing in.”

Dream. I can fly.

Dream. John Goodman won’t read a book by J. D. Salinger. He says it inspired John Lennon’s murder. — God, I hate dreaming of people named John or J. D.

Dream. Accusation or exposure. Ridiculous. You ought to be ashamed of yourself for being such a stupid, self-important turd. The negative fantasy that someone would attack you. No one cares about you.

Dream. The writing room, the writing judge. Now that your turn is over, scrape your words off, out of the tray, into the sink or toilet.

Dream. I saw my mother smiling, waving to me.

Dream. I died. Now I was an angel.

Dream. “I was not always as you see me now.”

Dream. “The immortal in the ephemeral.”

Dream. A man with knobs of wood growing from his chest, and a bloody stump where his foot should have been. He was rude to me about the chicken I was eating.

Dream. “Wait until I write to you.” All right, I said, I will.

Dream. “In Paradise, no one cares.”

Dream. An argument with my father. He became more incoherent as he became more enraged. He said: “I’ll teach you about life.” I said: “This is what I remember life feeling like.” He threw his many guns out of the house. They were valuable, and throwing them out damaged them. I stood looking at them scattered on the sidewalk, colorful like a child’s building blocks, and screamed: “You’re trying to hurt me!” — I woke up screaming.

Dream. “Albion Fox wanted a sandwich.”

Dream. Charles Manson found the Ativan I had hidden in my sock.

Dream. “You live in an exhausted reality!”

Dream.  A naked man being tortured. Beaten on his cock with a club. Fed his own shit on the end of a flat paddle. His brain was pulled half out of his skull. His organs were ripped out, ground up into hamburger, and pushed back into him through a hole in his sternum.

Dream. My father was kicking me as I lay in the gravel driveway. But it was his talking that tormented me. I screamed: “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” — I woke up screaming.

Dream. The world’s most popular breakfast cereal was a Chinese brand named Snow Mouse & Ice Mouse.

Dream. “Pline,” a kind of traditional ice cream, was being phased out at a beachside inn, and the locals were enraged.

Dream. We all have numbers. I am E16. Many people don’t know, or can’t believe, that I am also the writer C4.

Dream. I stood in a plastic garbage can, urinating, filling the can, soaking my socks. It’s all part of the routine procedure, I told myself, unpleasant but it must be tolerated. The back of my head was cut open for brain surgery. I said I wished I could help. — A dark basement, many people kneeling in prayer. Someone said “I am Jesus,” and soon they were all shouting it, on their feet, “I am Jesus, I am Jesus,” marching up the basement stairs and through the house.

Dream. My father threw pieces of a broken machine at me.

Dream. I hear a boy singing a repetitive song to a girl who is crying. I go to investigate, to be sure that it’s only children playing or teasing and not something more cruel or strange. But I don’t see a girl anywhere. The little boy is still singing. — In the center of the garden is a pheasant or peacock under glass. A candle is burning under the glass. I’m worried about the bird. It could catch on fire, it might be asphyxiated when the flame drinks up all the oxygen, it could be frightened. My aunt Alice Carol is working in the garden. I don’t want to trespass on her jurisdiction, so I begin by pointing out the bird situation to her. She says the glass container over the bird is cracked, and it might break if it is moved. She says, “Is anyone walking on the suicide wall? I like it better than drinking.” She takes a running start at a low embankment, bricks topped by a shelf of rough concrete, jumps over it, loses her footing while landing, seemingly on purpose, and falls and skins her elbow and knee. Now she’s not my aunt, but my mother. “Oh, Johnny, why did I do that?” she says, starting to cry. I’m wearing a clean white T-shirt and I feel ashamed of my brief hesitancy to hug her because I will get her blood all over me. But I do hug her, and, as I do, I repeat, “God damn it, God damn it, God damn it.” And now: a boy is singing a repetitive song to a girl who is crying.

Dream. The gargantuan stag called Old Newton. The wolf with impossibly long legs named Lucifer’s Crucifix.

Dream. A song. “Everybody wants to be friends with me. Everybody wants to eat my energy.”

Dream. Answering machine messages from my mother. “I’m worried about you. Why would you stand there like that for fifty-two hours?” When I visited her in person, I was surprised to find out that my mother was the First Lady.

Dream. “I don’t want to fight you. You’re just a child, like me. All I wanted was to eat in the cafeteria. Why does everybody want me to act like an adult? I’m seven years old.”

Dream. A black stallion, rearing on a hilltop. Hawks, wheeling. A tiger. When I saw the stallion, I fell to my knees with my face in my hands, weeping. I wanted to share my vision with someone.

Dream. Asking my parents not to be angry with me. “Be quiet,” my mother said. “You slept on stage last night,” my father said.

Dream. “I examine my lethargy.”

Dream. Lightning strikes my parents’ house and burns it down.

Dream. Hell, unleashed on earth.

Dream. Arguing with my father, when suddenly I am attacked by a bear.

Dream. “A rat does all of the things that a rat does, and if it does not do them, then it is not a rat.”

Dream. “Here come the mighty interceptors.”

Dream. I was grilling hot dogs for my mother and my Mamaw and my father, and a hamburger for myself. My mother and Mamaw took their dogs and their plates and went indoors. My father took his dog, too, but stood there with my plate in his hand. He told me to put my burger on my plate. “It’s not done yet,” I said. He got angry. “Put it on there right now,” he commanded me. “No,” I said. He acted hurt. “No one says no to you, Johnny,” he said. I said, “That’s because I ask for things that are possible and that exist.” He became prophetic. “My wish for you,” he said, “is that one day you’ll realize how much trouble you’ve caused for all of us.” I said, “My wish for you is that you find happiness. My wish for myself is that you do not try to punish me and haunt my future by laying your eerie, vindictive curses on me.”

Dream. All Miss America pageant contestants must enroll in a secret Peloton group code-named “Chainsaw.”

Dream. “Do not tell me I am sullied.”

Dream. Meg Ryan whispers to me, “Let’s have sex.” MEG RYAN is an anagram of ANGRY ME and MY ANGER. — And GERMANY. — ANAGRAM is an anagram of MAG RAAN.

Dream. I had fallen into a deep pit full of alligators. For more than two weeks, I was not rescued. The alligators did not eat me, but I screamed until I went insane with fear. When after fifteen days I was finally pulled out of the pit, not only could I not stop screaming but I myself had begun to turn into an alligator.

Dream. Insect religion. Insects experience reincarnation and can remember all of their past lives, and this burden of memory is painful for them. In their religion, they pray for zero regression, a return to zero, a blankness, resetting the odometer, permission to be nothing.

Dream. A brilliantly colored landscape. Jungle, rocky dirt roads, flying, desert and dunes, ice fields, psychedelic colors and textures. I wanted so much for someone else to see what I was seeing.

Dream. My father is screaming at me. “You’re a three-year-old,” I tell him. I hold up three fingers, for him to count them.

Dream. A man announced that a science fiction film set was an elaborate mask for a genuine alien invasion. He was impaled on a fork of purple-blue lightning, screaming, burning, shouting Oh God, his eyes burning, groaning that he couldn’t see, lying down smoldering in the parking lot, not yet dead. His torment was a lesson to others who might investigate.

Dream. A song. “Tears in my eyes, blood on my hands.”

Dream. The greatest ping-pong game in history.

Dream. “Reducing the governable scene.”

Dream. I couldn’t believe anything that was happening. I kept stopping people to ask: “Is this the real world?” They all treated me like I was crazy. They encouraged me, or forced me, to doubt myself. But it wasn’t the real world: I was asleep. When I woke up, I felt vindicated.

Dream. I ran so fast that I could fly.

Dream. My father is better than I am at everything.

Dream. My father tries to strangle me to death. I turn into a cigar cutter and I chop him in half. Sometimes a cigar cutter is just a cigar cutter. — A black goat comes out of the woods. It says to me: “Did you just kill my father?”

Dream. “Less mystic, more biscuit.” 

Dream. I die and go to hell. Hell is a boring giant gray-green dome. When I was alive, everyone tried to convince me that hell would be full of exciting torments. People who are still alive are so stupid.

 

J. D. Daniels is the winner of a 2016 Whiting Award and The Paris Review’s 2013 Terry Southern Prize. His collection The Correspondence was published in 2017. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review,Esquire, n+1, and elsewhere, including The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing.