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Dinosaurs and spiders!
Oct. 23rd, 2003 03:43 pmBehind the house where I grew up in Ohio a gravel-covered alley dead-ended into a grassy area, as wide as the alley, that extended the entire length of our street from that point down to the sewage-filled creek that becomes, at some point, the Hocking River. It wasn't a particularly scary alley, but I remember now, writing this, that I used to have a recurring childhood nightmare that a tyrannosaur chased me down its length, lit by a streetlight; for some reason I never turned left or right into the safety of one of the numerous neighboring houses, but always ran straight, certain that I would end up as a pile of glossy bones the way that one guy did (in my memory it was John Amos, although I don't think that's right) in that one dinosaur movie from the 60s, you know, the one where they're brought back to life by lightning (although watching it ca. nineteen-seventy-whatever my friend Trent and I were at first upset at the lightning, thinking it was hurting the cool dinosaurs lying there on the beach), which is also the one where the caveman flushes the toilet; or maybe I'm thinking of another one.
In my dream last night something mundane was going on when I became aware that that strange sound I had been ignoring was in fact the bellowing of -- was it a dinosaur-sized dog? no, it was a T-Rex, the Tyrant Lizard King, somehow, against all probability, loose in the neighborhood. Forced to accept that the thing was actually there, I began to run for cover, finding, in the end, a set of narrow stairs with a low roof leading to some sort of disused underground bunker, in which I crouched, hoping that there were no black widow spiders there, that I had not chosen the death of a small bite over that of a large one.
I had not been there long when the dinosaur, it seemed, had passed me by, unable to approach my hiding-place because of a narrow alley on the one hand and the Pacific Ocean (now where did that come from?) on the other -- but what was that there in the web that I was now realizing was right at my head?
I never found out, because at that moment, in the waking world, a cat noisily chased a plastic bat ring over my no-longer-sleeping form.
In my dream last night something mundane was going on when I became aware that that strange sound I had been ignoring was in fact the bellowing of -- was it a dinosaur-sized dog? no, it was a T-Rex, the Tyrant Lizard King, somehow, against all probability, loose in the neighborhood. Forced to accept that the thing was actually there, I began to run for cover, finding, in the end, a set of narrow stairs with a low roof leading to some sort of disused underground bunker, in which I crouched, hoping that there were no black widow spiders there, that I had not chosen the death of a small bite over that of a large one.
I had not been there long when the dinosaur, it seemed, had passed me by, unable to approach my hiding-place because of a narrow alley on the one hand and the Pacific Ocean (now where did that come from?) on the other -- but what was that there in the web that I was now realizing was right at my head?
I never found out, because at that moment, in the waking world, a cat noisily chased a plastic bat ring over my no-longer-sleeping form.
