Nocturn Core (Abridged)

It was early summer, and a bunch of obnoxious, red bugs had flown north from Mexico to reproduce in our humid climate. Everywhere I looked, I saw them… They crawled on my skin – especially the arms – and my laptop screen. I killed them, of course, but there were always more waiting to occupy the surface of my body. Sometimes they bit me, too. I was really starting to lose my peace of mind with all these buzzing bugs around me. I read through comments on my dream journal. I noticed that most of new ones were from the same person… His avatar was one of those red bugs! I sighed when I realized all but one of his comments were obviously spam. I erased those. His semi-legitimate comment consisted of a series of images and an accompanying narration. He posted this on my “Your Dreams” page. The comment described dreams of American ships churning out swastika-branded cheese wheels. They created these on top of some kind of tower in the middle of the ship. A rotating blade cut the swastika shape out of the bottom of the cheese as it rested atop the tower. I watched this happen as though I was flying over one of the ships. I was confused when I noticed the blade was tearing up the enormous cheese wheel… The cheese became stuck to the blade and eventually clogged up the whole system.

The comment continued with a description of WakingNomad sleeping on the floor of a wooden shack. I saw myself on the floor, too, but I wasn’t covered by a blanket. Nomad burst aside, jumped to his feet (at this point, I realized he was naked, but he didn’t seem to care), and started shouting about the wonders of life. I slowly sat up. As my vision left the image, I saw this was the end of the comment. I decided I wouldn’t trash it. Unfortunately, as I scrolled down, I saw an advertisement for microwaves that I hadn’t put on the page… I realized he must have put something in the comment to cause this to appear. I temporarily marked it as spam while I scanned the comment text and removed the advertisement. Once this was taken care of, I restored the comment and replied, briefly explaining what I had taken out.

The dream jumped. My parents and I drove around a shopping center. It looked like the one on the way to Nicole’s school. Whenever we came to a store we considered stupid or poorly managed, we pushed a button on a remote control to change it to another store. We only left two stores in the whole shopping center unchanged. The first was a huge laundromat run by Janet Jackson. Even though my mom does all of her laundry at home, she seemed to like this place… We changed it a few times to see what would happen, but she eventually asked me to change it back, so I did. The second was a clothing store run by someone named Hyu Chan. I got the impression that he was meant to be the Hyu from Dreamviews. A sign posted on the door warned us that only Hyu Chan was permitted to drop the “Chan” from his name – so if I called him Hyu, he would be furious. The man had buck teeth and bug-eyed nerd glasses. My dad walked over to the suits and criticized them, instigating Hyu Chan’s rage. He asked my dad to leave. I picked up a brochure on Hyu and found his website (www.hyu.co.eu or something like that). It was essentially a fan site for the company he worked for. As Hyu Chan admitted in his self-published brochure, it was a bit strange for him to create his own version of the company website, but that was how he chose to express his pride in his work.