Fancy Hunger Dream:
It began when I "remembered" going on a trip or something to New York (which was a lot more like Chicago but an island. I knew this because I saw the whole place from above from the window of our zeppelin bus) And we were in this really insanely fancy art deco hotel, that blared out in spotlights like a Vegas monument against the backdrop of much less fancy, shadowy buildings. To the left of it was a suburb of 2-story houses in a forest of ominous dead trees. To the right of it was some industrial Home Alone 2-lookin' roadway that I didn't go down. It was at the mouth of a 3-way intersection but I didn't see what was on the third road, it must not have been important.
In front of it was this weird mass of 6'x6'x6' marble blocks stuck together at different heights, that took up the square of the whole intersection. I psychically remembered there being big crowded, fighty protests here that reminded me of the riot toward the end of the Dark Knight Rises. I think their problem was they wanted thee blocks removed because nobody could drive across the intersection, but it was a historical monument so they had to stay.
At some point, the people I came here with disappeared. I think they were going to a theatre, but I didn't want to go because this whole ass place felt like the sort of place where Batman's parents would get shot. But the thing is, without the people who knew the city, I was lost and couldn't go anywhere. So later when I changed my mind about going, I took the elaborate garish mirror-polished brass elevator down to the bottom and sort of set off down the path of the woods suburb. I went as far as I dared because the further down the roas you went, the more fucked up the houses started to look, and the trees got more dense, and there were things somewhere off in the far distance making distorted kookaburra noises that echoed down the road.
I suddenly became keenly aware that this was the 80s because I didn't have a cell phone, and my first instinct was to seek out a pay phone. There there were none here, so I looked around to see if any houses still had their lights on. But the only one was this really cursed-looking old house behind me, with crooked floors and this whole medieval forward-leaning look where each floor was leaning further out than the one under it, but it was built in the style of a suburb house with balconies and shit.
I began recieving intuitive dream-signals of all the tales and rumors of people who feared this house, despite already living in a neighborhood this fucked to begin with. They told me of people who sood in front of the open door of that place and were never seen again. That everyone who went around back found blood on the porch, and if they touched it it would scream at them and burn the skin off their hand.
Through the curtains, I could see a fuzzy (blurred by the thin silk curtains) human sillhouette with glowing circular eyes slinking slowlyover the floor like a snail, in such a way that he sort of used his face as a foot. (I don't know how I could see it at that angle, that close, and still have it be blurred by the curtains, but perhaps I was astrally projecting myself out of fear.) Needless to say, I started running back to the hotel instead of knocking on the door to ask if I could use the phone.
I was going to go down the opposite road when I noticed there was a very steampunk-looking wood-and-brass vending machine among the marble blocks, and I looked inside. There were all manner of things I intuitively understood to be candy, but they were ridiculously fancy, victorian things that looked like christmas ornaments. I assumed there was a fancy artisan within this very fancy hotel who made them and supplied the vending machine. Some maintenance dude noticed that people were looking at it, and moved up to unlock the glass cabinet door, telling everybody to take 3 for free because they were going to replace the candies and they didn't want these to go stale and out of season. He had an untrustworthy facial structure, but he seemed like a genuinely cool dude so I tried not to hold this against him.
I picked this thing that looked like a spiralling icicle that had been squeezed out of a cake froster with lots of swirling ridges. Which, I knew due to obscure historical knowledge (this is made-up) was called "Cat's Glove" because before they knew how to make it out of clear sugary stuff, the original way of sering it was in these tubular cream lumps that looked like the mittened feet of one of those black cats that has feet like that. It was supposed to get soft and melty in your mouth and taste kind of like a creamy meringue flavored with vanilla and sugared violet petals, whatever those taste like.
I also picked another one that I had no idea what it was like. But it was like this blue sapphire-ey powdered thing that looked like a blue turkish delight. It was contained in a little christmas bell made of turquoise "metal", but the bell meltes slightly against my thumb the way chocolate smears. So I realized that the bell wasn't metal at all, but probably also a confection of some kind. It seemed to have that lustrous appearance all the way through, though, because the "melting" didn't rub away the outside. If I "rang" the bell it would make a sonorous little clunk noise like hitting a clay pot with a drumstick, leaving me to believe that the candy bell was some kind of crunchy porous treat that turned into dissolvable sugardust. I don't remember taking a third candy because I think I stepped aside to give someone else a turn at the machine prematurely.
Then suddenly I was having dinner at home with my parents. My uncle (friend of my parents, not related) was back in the state, and this was a thing worth celebrating, so we were having a fancy dinner of spaghetti with caviar (I think I was just hungry) even though I know my mom is the one who cooks things like this and she also dislikes caviar. I told her this was weird. And I think at some point the subject was brooched that we should've gone to sweden because caviar is much less expensive there. But she told me that it would also be really expensive to go to sweden in the first place. Before I could wake up due to that sudden burst of logic, the scene faded out. And cut to what I could only presume was the next day.
We went to my uncle's huge drafty house that I remember going to a lot when I was little. Except it had a bunch of weird editions to it that I knew weren't there in real life, but I went with it. The place used to be like a horse stables for a much huger estate in the 30s, but now it was a house. But this also meant it had a lot of huge rooms and a hallway spanning a whole floor on one side which kids would always run up and down. I presumed that I must have been much younger since he hasn't had this building for years. But my little cousins who weren't born yet and are the size relative to me that I remember them being, confirmed that something was awry. I was in some middle ground between being percieved as a child but also being as tall as I was when I was at least 16. At any rate, I scrambled up these precarious stairs that were placed up the side of a wall, and opened a door to this little alcove decoraded like a windowless captain's quarters from the age of sail, where the cousins were working on some of those big battery-powered kid-cars that they "found somewhere".
We got in them and rode out the side of the building into the road somewhere. One of my cousins had one fashioned after a 1920s race car, the other one had one that looked like an 80s truck. I of course took the one that seemed to be a lowrider, and my suspicion was correct because it could lift itself on hydraulics. They were fast things, and seemed to handle more like go-karts than the little ridey-cars for kids. Which was to be expected because they also looked way more like actual cars, it's just that they were small and you stuck out of where the roof would be.
You could really get some speed on these things, it felt like you could get up to 60 miles an hour if you were careful. And for a while that's what we did. I was cruisin' (listening to the smokey robinson song, too) having philosophical thoughts about how I'd rather have farmed caviar than wild caviar, because if it's farmed, they can doublecheck it and make sure there's no fish cum in it.
Eventually we realized that this maze of suburban houses (which had quickly turned into some weird small town marketplace in Spain) was miles away from my uncle's place, and that if we wanted dinner we were gonna have to hurry up and det there. This wasn't really on my mind at the time until about halfway through the race, we just wanted to see how far and how fast we could go.
With the sun setting behind us, we started speeding downhill, on this full-sized highway that was dangerously placed on the side of this massive craggy plateau, as if carved out of its side, and it sort of went aaaaalll the way around, encircling this massive city that the plateau overlooked, and gradually spiralled around to ground level where you got to the edge of the lake and you could drive inward and presumably find my uncle's place. (This is not accurate wisconsin geography, my uncle did not live in a giant city.)
Naturally, we were going way too fast since it was downhill. Our plastic wheels couldn't handle it, and if we stepped on the brakes too fast it would shear up our wheels and we'd have to carry our cars until we found new wheels lying on the side of the road. Usuwally, there were these shelves, and we'd "steal" wheels from discarded car toys that would magically become big enough to install on our cars.
I was having a merry time speeding downhill on the freeway before we were stopped by some annoying dude with big "millenial" glasses and poofy hair. I knew instinctively from his energies that he was a kiel-like individual, (the pedophilia was more ambiguous, but the attitude was not) but I also knew instinctively that he wasn't the kiel, because he very clearly was not a bio-hole. I still craved to do violence against him all the same.
He teleported us to a classroom, presumably in a building off the highway, up one of the grassy hills where we would find the shelves of abandoned things. He lined up my cousins with some other kids and scolded them for selfishly stealing wheels and going at dangerous speeds. And for waht, a feast!? How selfish. For shame. Our punishment was to study table manners under his tutelage until we were fancy.
Feeling like the (ir)responsible adult who needed to protect my kin, I attempted to jutify our doings. I told him that the object of our racing down the mountain was not for the food at the bottom, but instead for the thrill. For the glory of driving! The freedom! The childlike wonder of just being able to do that in these unassuming little devices. I told him that our hearts craved only the desires inherent in all youth, to dance in wild danger with the raging python of Velocity, and, like the demigods of myth, enter the darkness and emerge victorious from the Once Unknown.
He, seemingly trying to be cool, said he totally understood. And said that my assignment was instead of learning table manners, would be to like and retwet a post from a PoC (actual term he used) about their tabletop gaming experience, to set an example to the kids that these same thrills could be felt "in more constructive ways" that "helped develop their race and gender skills".
I told him I'd rather learn about table manners with the others because I didn't have any social media (except this, but I wouldn't admit that to him.) He nodded obligingly and went on with his lecture about some Scottish history or something that began with some chastising comment about hows scotland was "a little rapey" back in the 1700s and should by and large be frowned upon as a country. But if they did one good thing, it was inventing the lochaber fork, which was the third fork on our left...
Things got foggy after I flying-dragon-kicked this kiel-like creature in the mouth. He hissed and turned into this hunched and ragged figure that shambled uncomfortably like a bloodborne enemy. I noticed that he had glowing eyes like whatever thing lurked behind the curtains of the Fucked Up House, and this temporarily dissolved my cojones to fight with him.
He started chasing us down some kind of plumbing maintenance tunnel, but luckily this was far enough underground that I knew we could climb up to my uncle's place if we found the right way. Luckily, it was a one-way system, so as long as we went far enough, we'd just find him and the chase would be short-lived. That is, if I didn't just turn around and hit him again, which I think I was going to because he was hot on the heels of these kids with shorter legs than mine. But then I woke up.
