Inflatable Black Matter

I had a nightmare in the classic sense last night. In my dream I had 8 kids, this wasn't necessarily the nightmare part. We lived on a farm and they went missing one evening. My neighbor farmer noticed a strange lurking figure in the stalks at night and researched him to be something of a diabolical wisp of black matter, inflating what looks to be a big snow suit made for a giant. I tried to puncture his suit with a shot gun but he was not an easy beast to aim at. He returned my kids to me so I thought we were all good, but in reality he had hypnotized my kids to hold me down at a certain point late at night so he could chew my face off. They tried this but I wiggled free and blew him apart with a shot gun after quite a struggle. I had to shake my kids to break the spell of this thing. When they all came to and apologized, we barbequed sausages for breakfast.


Somebody & Me invited us Wood Sugars onto their podcast last so we went a recorded that. It was indeed a blast, and we had such a lively conversation and swell improvised sketches that their may be material for two of their episodes. Pat and Rob of Somebody & Me are great guys and I hope we get to riff more in future. 


I took a shitload of valerian root last night along with melatonin. Usually parking is very easy to find on my street. But not last night, and I got stuck by someone trying to park that was obviously drunk by evidence of the ineffective angles  they kept trying to park at, and repeated, slow, sloppy attempts. My impatience had already started to get triggered on the way, getting stuck in clusters of cabbies trying to solicit drunk bar exiters. At one point I stopped to let some people jay-walking finish crossing the street, as they were standing in the middle of the road. They continued to walk slower than a turtle after a stroke and cars behind me honked. I can have loose fuse when it comes to driving in the city, and last night was no exception, I felt fired up! I was so fired up that I punched the seat next to me.  I found parking a few blocks away after circling some, and I knew I wouldn't be able to fall asleep for some time without the aid of something, preferably not beer as I was looking forward to a night not of drunk sleep. And hence the shitload of valerian root, and the vivid, angry dreams it gave me. 

The Mad Moon Dancing

The following piece appeared in the first issue of XIII Pocket's Seeding Meat. I believe it has all been sold out, printed back in 2008 and only sold via gallery events, theatre shows, etc., but I thought I'd share it here as it recounts a strange encounter I had on New Year's Eve back when I was 8 years old. It's semi autobiographical. If you want a copy of any of the old Seeding Meats hit me up, I may have a few copies leftover on my shelf. I also made a movie when I was 15 of the same title, The Mad Moon Dancing, this was 1997-ish? It was about a mental patient who has hallucinations of the moon coming down and eating him, leading to an escape/chase scene. I did some fairly wild special effects using a sheet of plexiglass to reflect an illuminated moon I made by painting craters on a glass orb normally used to encase overhead lights. It premiered as a finalist at the Maine Student Film Festival as part of MIFF way back. It survives on a VHS tape. If I ever get around to converting it to digital I'll post it here for shits and giggles. Anyway, elements from that little movie poked through in the following short story. 


----------


THE MAD MOON DANCING

By Jeff Phillips

Starry eyed dissonance sprang from his twitching, sweaty lids. The child was fast asleep for some time. Drifting into a slumber well before the stroke of midnight, he missed the ball, the potential kiss of his neighborhood crush. Downstairs, the party still throbbed, experiencing the behavior of wild drunkards become of his parents and their pals. Such a party was not his scene, yet.

Nightmarish visions snatched apart his REM sleep. A black and white mind movie jarred a haunt. Sleeping in an old wood house, the large white/silver disk of the moon's face turned to a rabid, predatory persona and crept up the front steps and loomed on the porch. Peeping in, the moon's eyes sized him up and licked its dusty lips. Petrified, paralyzed, magnetized by a chilly bed.  The front porch quickly rotted out from under the touch of the fleshy moon sand. The house crumbled like cards made from salt.  The moon sand sprayed into the child's eyes, further tightening him with paralysis. With the old house down for the count, the child on the bed paled in weight to the gigantic, rabid, predatory moon which drooled high above the child. Each drip of saliva knocked the child in the face and roughed him up. Lungs drowning. Eyes stinging and cloudy, the moon pounced. Moon teeth seized the child's head, ripped it from the neck. And the child's consciousness bounced back from the surreal to a sweaty, pulse heavy reality. Relieved, shocked, the child picked himself up and traded pajamas for corduroy. He emerged from his room, recovering from the horror of having been eaten alive by the moon in some alternate, brain electric expanse.

He peered down stairs from the balcony, and witnessed his father dancing a strange, baboon-esque jig. His mother laughed and spilled bloody mary mix on the man, Mr. Handraddy's lap. The child snuck his way through the crowd of neighbors and parental friends who laughed and slapped him on the back, jesting with the boy for being up past his bed time. He snuck his way to the mud room, and fished for his boots and coat from amongst the sea of others.

Outdoors, the child found fresh air and fog. A chilly breeze rocked the trees and it looked fitting to the beat of the music blast from the house he left behind. He looked up to the sky and found the moon hidden by clouds. At first relieved by its absence, a fear crept back that it might still be watching, hunting.

The street lay silent. His thoughts went soft with the peace of it for sometime. But soon thoughts and reverberated images from the day emerged in flash form. He remembered his mother chopping carrots for the dip, in the kitchen, listening to public radio. A news cast touched upon the announcement of a man who escaped from the loony bin in their county.  The quiet streets and apparent vacancy did not last in its projection of peace with the alarming bulletin that rested all evening in the back of his mind. The moon in man form escaped the tests and attempted soothing analysis behind white, sterile, padded walls to stalk the streets of this sorry city. Just the child and a loose man inhabited the outer landscape. The rest were engaged with parties and winding down New Year's celebrations. The image of loony bins reverberated a deep, scarring scratch in the child's perspective. Once his older brother told him of a time he and his pals trespassed into an abandoned nut house deep in the thick woods.  A hollow, creepy building. Then sounds, footsteps rustling. When one pal felt the grip of a hand grab at his ankle they darted. Racing to the sanctuary of a car, in the overhead light they found themselves covered in bloody scratches and finger prints in the wet blood.

Overwhelmed and on the brink of wicked tears, the child was on the verge of steering back home to the party, desiring an exit to the safe watch of friends and neighbors. In the distance a figure came bounding and skipping in the spirit of his prior dream. The child was again paralyzed, as though moon sand became a vapor with the fog, and penetrated his eyes. Silent, barely breathing, the figure drifted closer and closer. As it became more visible apart from the fog, what stood a short distance away from the child was a man in the flesh wearing only a diaper.

Almost laughable, the child blurted out, "Its baby New Year!"

The fellow approached and greeted the child. One hand held something wrapped in tin foil. The other extended a hand shake to the child. "Happy New Year," he wished.

The man gazed at the child for a moment, then spoke again:

"Want some salami?"

Not interested, the child shook his head with the gesture of no.

"Want to smell it?"

The strange diapered fellow did not wait for an answer, but went forward with peeling apart the tin foil to wield a thick wedge of spiced meat. He poked it under the child's olfactory organ.  The child shrunk from the encounter, deep, disappearing into heavy fog and lived on, untouched. 

Pseudo Night Terrors

Last night I had a dream in which I found out that I was a ghost. I was visiting a small New England coastal town, met with some friends by an old industrial yard, drank an assortment of Mexican beer without limes and hit rocks out into a field with metal baseball bats. We parted ways as dusk came along. I noticed a general lack of activity on my walk back to our hotel. Some lights went on in various apartment windows, yet I noticed no people meandering the rooms. They looked empty. I thought perhaps ghosts were flickering these lights.


I stopped in at a church because I heard nice organ music. I walked in on a meeting of the priest and various church staff members. He looked at me and accused me of eating all of the communion bread. I denied it. 


I returned to our hotel. My girlfriend was lying on the bed with a cucumber peel mask spread on her face. I leaned in to kiss her hair. She awoke, startled. "Who's there?" 


"Me."


"Where?"


"Right here."


"I do not see you."


I touched her head. "Do you feel me?"


"Yes."


"Can you smell me?" I breathed in her face.


"Yes."


"But you don't see me?"


"No. Maybe I have something in my eye."


"Can you see the picture on the wall?"


"Yes."


"Can you see the piano in the corner?"


"Yes."


"But you don't see me?"


"No..."


------


At one point I awoke from another dream. I had fled to live in rural Maine because I fell victim to identity theft. I received a phone call at my cabin, from the perpetrator, telling me to look across the lake at the other houses. He was in one of them looking at me with binoculars. He laughed. When I awoke from this my girlfriend was in the midst of her own night terror. "Oh my god oh my god!" She shouted as she sat up in bed. She sometimes does this and at the time of it, I fear there is a bug pestering her face. She is not very lucid, partially sleeping still when I ask her what is wrong. She calmly says "nothing" and is very confused why I am asking this.


I got up to pee. Coming back to bed my body blocked the street light and created a shadow. My heart stopped for a brief moment until I became cognizant of the physics of current photon play. 

Gunned Down! Bang Dream!

Last night I dreamt that I was on my way from swimming at a strange overheated, overcrowded local pool house. A black SUV drove by a house and fired away! Just ahead of me. Some folks ducked for cover. A woman emerged from a garage bleeding from the head, a bullet nicked her temple. The SUV came around again for another round of shooting. I made the mistake of giving these punks the bird. They started firing away at me! I ran and ducked for cover underneath a pile of leaves in a backyard, but they drove around to the street on the other side which exposed me and they fired at me as I darted away again to hide in a trash can. I got some bullets to the back.

This morning as I was getting ready for the day, groggy as hell because the vivid dream, or nightmare, must have sapped a lot of adrenaline (I'm certain the brain still fires synapses to gear up the adrenal glands while in deep REM sleep), I thought a little bit about these jerks who gunned me down in my subconscious. I thought about if this were to happen in real life...if I was in a moment of "there's no way out of this" I'd be sure to get a good look at their faces. So I would know who to come back and haunt like crazy. Like throw plates at their head and pull their hair and push them while they're using the bathroom. Retribution can be a bitch. I'd be a petty ghost I think.