I dreamt that I was out and about in the city and was seeing small (roughly goose-sized) pterodactyls everywhere, just casually, they way you would see birds. (I saw birds, too.) I thought, How can people doubt that there are still pterodactyls around? They're right there in plain sight! I saw them clearly and in a perfectly ordinary way and was confident that I was not hallucinating or anything.
Then I woke up from this dream-within-a-dream. I was in a very large bedroom with two queen-size beds, one at each end, with a wide space between them. From the ceiling above my bed were hung, on what looked like fishing line, hundreds of little pterodactyls made of hard plastic, in all colors and representing the whole gamut of pterosaur species. The other end of the room was similarly decorated, but with white origami cranes instead of pteros.
I remembered that I was visiting my parents. They must have specially decorated the room for my visit. I understood that the bed with the paper cranes was for my brother Luther, who was not present. (Later I commented to my mother that "'Director of Birds' just has a different feel from 'Director of Flying Reptiles.'")
I got up and told my mother about my dream and about how once I woke up I realized where the dream imagery had come from. "But didn't you notice the pterodactyls when you arrived?" she asked, seeming hurt that her work had not been appreciated. "I guess not," I said. "I probably just went to bed without turning on the light." (In fact I had no memory of arriving or going to bed.)
My parents now lived in what they called a retirement community but looked more like an extremely luxurious resort. They were dressed in their Sunday best, but instead of going to church, they wanted to show me some of the entertainments the place offered. The first of these was the foil game.
We were each given what looked like a sheet of aluminum foil, about a foot square. Although it looked like foil, it was as limp and supple as silk, and I figured it must be some sort of chain mail so fine that the individual links were invisible. Each of these had an image on it in subtle relief, and somehow it stayed on the foil no matter what you did to it. You could wad it into a ball and open it again, and the relief image was still there.
My parents wanted to start playing, but no one had explained the game to me, and I had no idea what to do. They said I could just figure it out as I went, but I kept insisting on an explanation. Finally, my mother demonstrated. Her foil image was of part of a woman's face, and she found a stone statue of a woman that matched it perfectly and placed the foil on that part of the statue's face. That was the object of the game: to find something in the community that matched your foil image and place the foil on it. The community was really enormous, and I worried about getting lost, but in the end I decided to give it a go.
My foil had a Buddha's face on it, and above the face it said, in capital letters, "MR. DEE EE." After some exploring, I found in the community a very ancient stone temple, somewhat reminiscent of Angkor Wat, and up at the very top of the building I spied what I was looking for: a Buddha's face and the inscription "MR. DEE EE."
The trouble was how to get up there to place my foil. I tried various ways of climbing up the building, but the stones kept crumbling under my feet. Finally, I gave up, saying that I was doing serious damage to this ancient monument and that it just wasn't worth it. Could we maybe do something else instead?
"Okay," said my mother. "Maybe you'd like to try a fake séance."
"Is there any other kind?"
As we were walking to the fake séance place, my father said, "Now, you're going to be 'possessed' as part of this, but don't worry about it. None of it is real."
It took three people to participate in a fake séance. It was me and two other people my age, not my parents. We had to climb up some stairs to a high platform, on which was a sort of flexible rubber pedestal supporting what looked like three vertically-oriented sleeping bags made of foam rubber. Each person stood in one of these bags, with only the head protruding. This set-up, it was explained, was so that we could move and thrash about while in a trance without any danger of falling or hurting ourselves.
To begin, we three leaned in toward the center of the set-up, so that our foreheads were touching in the middle. We were told to relax. After about a minute of silence, one of the other participants murmured, "Bark, Peter." There was another silence. Was someone supposed to bark? I tentatively made a soft barking sound, like a very polite dog. Then I felt some spiritual force welling up in me from the pit of my stomach -- the promised "possession," apparently -- and I began barking in earnest. I then entered a full trance state (another altered state within an altered state). I was talking and shouting and flailing about but had no consciousness of what I was saying.
When I emerged from the trance, I was informed that I had "won" the fake séance. I had delivered a most remarkable and varied discourse, and the audience loved it. I also learned that while I was entranced, a supercomputer had been generating in real time a video to accompany what I was saying, which was displayed on a cinema-size screen for the audience. Apparently I had done impressions of several famous people, including Al Capone and Elon Musk, which together with the visuals from the computer were utterly convincing. I had also discoursed at length on the movie Flight of the Gargoyle, and now several members of the audience expressed an interest in seeing it even though (or perhaps because?) it was unspeakably evil and abominable and had been banned all over the world (cf. The King in Yellow).
After the performance, an elderly couple came up to me. They were impressed with how knowledgeable I had seemed to be about virtually everything, and they had several questions about things I had said in my trance. Unfortunately, I was unable to remember anything I had said and couldn't help them. The man then mentioned that he and his wife had been trying to learn more about the history of jazz.
"Ah, the book you want for that is --"
"What? Don't tell me you know about the history of jazz, too!"
"The book you want," I continued, "is by a Portuguese guy whose pen name is L-A-E-T-H."
"Laeth."
"Right. I can't remember the title right now. I think it might just be called The History of Jazz. Anyway --" (The book I was thinking of was Sketches of Alice, which is not in any way a history of jazz.)
"And it's a history of jazz?"
"Well, it's hard to classify. It's utterly unique, really. But I think you'll find --"
At this point I was interrupted by the guy who ran the fake séances, who presented me with a book-length transcript of what I had said during my trance, illustrated with stills from the computer-generated video. Exactly what I had wanted.
I started to flip through it. I noticed that the first line had been mistranscribed: It said "Bark Street" instead of "Bark, Peter." Most of the transcript was in English, but one section was in a language I couldn't read but which looked from the characters used to be Icelandic or something similar. I had spoken in tongues, apparently.
About a quarter of the pages were entirely black. The director explained that this was the free transcript. If I wanted the unredacted version, I would have to shell out 40 dollars. I was about to pay but then realized that I had forgotten to exchange money and only had Taiwanese currency. Both of my parents took out their wallets and began counting out an improbably large number of banknotes. I saw that this was because the American currency had been completely redesigned. It was now in Monopoly-money colors like most other countries and was in strange denominations like the 47-cent bill.
Later, I was sitting with my father, and he asked if I had tried various remedies to stop snoring. I told him I hadn't bothered. He said that he now smoked marijuana to stop snoring and that it was very effective. (This is totally out of character for my real father, a strait-laced Mormon for whom even caffeinated soda is an illicit drug.)
"And do you know why I do it?" he said, becoming animated. "Because I finally realized that our religion is more!" (cf. More More More! in "Half under the sea")
"You mean that thing about Mormon meaning 'more good'?"
"More. Just more. Further light." (a Masonic phrase also used in Mormon ritual)
"Famous last words."
"Achilles."
"Goethe."
Later, my father got up on the stage and did a routine about how some prominent fringe Mormon (Denver Snuffer maybe, or someone analogous) "isn't going anywhere" and the church needs to adapt to incorporate such people. As he spoke, the computer was generating holographic "costumes" for him which kept changing. At one point he had green hair.
And then I woke up.
