dream eater
I dreamed I was in the house I grew up in. I had gone upstairs to get something and I noticed just outside the window there was a big spider moving about in its web. The web was so strong and so big that the spider had lifted an entire head of cabbage from the garden all the way up to the second floor to eat the bugs that were on it. I was amazed, as I had never seen anything like this, but I was about to be utterly astonished.
When I backed up and refocused my eyes away from the spider, I saw something enormous was coming up the web, which I now noticed stretched from the window to a large tree at the edge of the yard. It was a full-grown elephant. It had been eating the vegetables in the garden and when it saw the head of cabbage in the web it tried to grab it, but got stuck itself. As it struggled, it climbed higher, until it was about twenty feet in the air, just below the power lines. It had an extremely happy and goofy look on its face, almost like a cartoon, and I myself became equally happy to be witnessing an elephant in my backyard. But then it climbed just a few inches higher, and it touched a power line. Instantly its entire body caught on fire, but the fire burned out a second later in a puff of smoke. The elephant was still alive, but very dazed, and obviously in pain.
I started running downstairs, yelling before I was even in earshot of anyone that we needed to get the hose. When I got to the dining room where the door to the backyard was, I yelled it again, this time explaining that an elephant had caught fire, and that we needed to call someone. Once outside, I grabbed the hose but paused after I realized the elephant might still be touching the power line, and if I sprayed it, it could get electrocuted even worse.
This is the dream I had last night. I considered it a good one, worth telling for sure, if anyone had been around to tell it to. The look on that elephant's face had reminded me of a golden retriever jumping around in a pile of leaves. But the jubilant mood did not transfer to my waking life. I had awoken into the dark world, the one where I'm so barely here that people can look right through me, as if I'm a ghost.
I spent the day haunting my apartment, and the dream kept coming back to mind. Finally, after night fell and most people who were being reasonable were thinking about going to bed soon, I decided to go find it. I went to the graveyard where old dreams go when they're finished.
I dug it up, which didn't take too long as it was still fresh in my mind. When I opened the casket, the dream was in there, written down in my own handwriting on a piece of parchment paper. I picked it up, and it seemed to change somehow into a food, something like a pastry, and I knew that I had to eat it if I wanted to relive it, so I did.
I remembered the dream quite vividly, but eating it made me feel bloated and gross afterward. I went to lie down hoping it would go away, but instead I slowly became depressed and lost my sense of belonging to such an extent that I felt unwanted, not even neutral. I sat around for an hour in this state not knowing what to do with myself until it occurred to me that if I wanted to feel good again, I could just eat another dream. I seem to remember one where I was talking to a girl I liked...
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October 2nd, 2026