Paper Cuts
Created | Updated Aug 22, 2002
What Dreams May Come
spimcoot awoke from uneasy dreams to discover that he'd turned into a giant beetle overnight, or rather, during his afternoons doze in the cartoonists' lounge. This he could handle, but on the table lay an offer from Hollywood to turn his plight into a hilarious comedy of misadventure. He opened his mandibles to scream.
spimcoot awoke from uneasy dreams to discover that he hadn't turned into a giant beetle overnight. He crossed the cartoonists' lounge; always an unpleasant place to wake into: its chintz seediness something akin to finding oneself next to the u-bend with one's face up the loo roll dolly's skirt; and inspected himself in the mirror. Instead of the gorgeous man he'd expected he found a bearded apparition. 'How long did I snooze?' he wondered and moved away in disgust. The beard in the mirror stayed where it was. 'Have I turned into Groucho Marx
overnight?' he hoped, rubbing the beard shaped grime with his cuff. Still it did not budge. Peering closely spimcoot found that the image of the beard was actually hovering about a foot
behind the glass and, what's more, it was Wowbagger's. 'My gosh, he's spent so long looking at
himself that he's left a permanent imprint of his beard in the mirror!'
Chuckling and relieved, spimcoot toddled over to the small library which stood beside the fire in
case emergency fuel was needed in winter. He glanced over the familiar, useless volumes:
- Unarmed Gesticulation by Veronique Plastique
- Crashing Boredom; A Novel by Sundae Sunday
- No Trousers for Miss Blandish by Feathers Deluvian
- Feng Shui for the Homeless by Prof. T. F. Gnit
- Mein Kampf in Foto Romanz printed by The Gutther Press
Why had they joined that book club? Oh yes, cheap fuel for the fire. With relief he found what
he was looking for: Uneasy Dreams Made Easy by Mimi Mee. He'd had a surprising number of
convoluted dreams during that brief seven hour nap, but of all of them; the polo match on the giant
artificial hill in that boys' dorm. the large unisex lavatory which had really been a lift plunging
its users to their dooms; the Orkney Isles episode with the three prostitute magpies in
preposterous wigs (one for sorrow, two for joy, three for menagerie trois); the one which had
disturbed him most was making Lauren Bacall laugh while he was holding a ball of elephant dung in
one hand, and one of giraffe in the other. What could it mean? Consulting the book he learnt that
dreams about boats mean travel; dreams about death mean change; falling means uncertainty;
flying means freedom unless there are pylons involved; seasickness means boats; snakes mean
death; xylophones mean Patrick Moore. But not a word about amusing a screen goddess with balls
of animal poo.
spimcoot tossed the book onto the fire, his satisfaction dimmed only by the fact that it wasn't
lit. Fine, he'd interpret the thing for himself. Sometimes his dreams were the result of real time
physical stimuli: such as when he'd dreamt he was being attacked by a giant moist wipe and woke to
find he'd spilt his gin and tonic into his lap (the hours he'd spent licking it clean). But certainly
neither elephant, giraffe, nor Ms Bacall had defecated on him during his sleep. Other times a stray
thought or something seen during the day would reappear in dream form as if to tie up loose ends.
But he couldn't connect Lauren Bacall and the dung to anything he'd seen or thought of recently.
What could they represent, therefore? He often dreamt of missing trains and equated this with
missing opportunities. This wasn't to say that the dream was a message, simply that the feeling of
missed opportunity was uppermost in his mind (and that he had a tawdry taste in metaphors).
Dreams are not significant in and of themselves, but what we make of them is: it's a random way
of reaching our true feelings similar to flipping a coin then feeling disappointed at the outcome:
the true emotion buried beneath apparent indecision is revealed.
So. He was making jokes while holding a lot of s**t. Insecurity at his own sense of humour,
then? But the jokes were working. Perhaps this was why, eventually in the dream, he'd broken into
the dung and started to eat it, as if to take back those feelings of insecurity. The dung had been
crusty and reminded him of rusks. What childhood things may lurk there spimcoot chose not to
probe. Perhaps this one was better left meaningless: the best things in life always are.
