Nightmare

Last night I had the most intense dream that my sister Lynn and I were fighting the devil inside a corn maze. The devil, as tall as a skyscraper, was walking right over each hedge of corn, looking to slaughter us.

Things appeared pretty bleak, so I suggested to Lynn, “Let’s split up. I’ll distract him while you go find the power switch and turn it on.”

“I’m scared.”

“Oh shut the fuck up... just go do it!” I snapped.

How simply turning on a power switch would destroy the devil is beyond me, but it obviously made perfect sense in my dream-world. In any case, Lynn left to go find and flip the seemingly omnipotent power switch, and I was suddenly daunted by the task of distracting the devil.

I mean, what could I possibly do? Cluck like a chicken? Find a microphone and tell a bunch of Bob Hope one-liners? Cartwheels?

There wasn’t much time for me to ponder this, however, because the devil started to walk towards my sister’s direction. So I did what Harry Potter would have done: I took a deep breath, then ran into the devil’s sight, waving my arms in the air. “HEY!” I said. “HEY YOU! OVER HERE!”

To my surprise, the devil looked androgynous. Not in the Jamie Lee Curtis sense, but in a very RuPaul kind of way. He/she had large breasts, accentuated by nasty tufts of chest hair.

Ignoring the fact that I was sick to my stomach in fear, I ran towards the devil as fast as possible, and then leapt into the air. In my dreams, for some reason, I have this uncanny ability to jump very high (I’ve dunked a basketball many times in my dreams) and this one was certainly no different: I soared at least thirty feet in the air, triumphantly landing onto the devil’s chest.

“What are you doing?” the devil hissed.

And then I grabbed a firm hold of the his/her chest hairs and pulled with all my might, and yelled at the top of my lungs: “LYNN!! NOW!! THE POWER SWITCH! DO IT NOW!!”

The devil started roaring but I refused to let go of the chest hairs.

And then something started to happen. Steam was everywhere, rising from off of the devil’s body. Lynn must have hit the switch, because he/she was shrinking. “Oh dear,” the devil said. “Oh dear oh dear oh dear. There really isn’t much for me to do right now. I’m melting. Really, there isn’t much I can do at this point.”

Soon I found myself in a pool of melted devil skin. As I got up I spat into the pile of devil remains and smiled the most smug grin in the history of smug grins. “That’s what you get, motherfucker,” I said.

I then ran through the corn maze calling out my sister’s name, and after taking a few confusing turns I somehow made it into my sister’s bedroom back home. She was curled into a fetal position on the floor of her bedroom closet, coughing and looking exhausted from the ordeal. “Hey kid,” I said. “We’re okay. We made it. We defeated the devil.”

I gave the poor kid, my sweet little sis, the biggest hug in the history of big hugs, then looked at her again. But something wasn’t right. It was her eyes. THEY WERE RED AND LOOKED LIKE TIGER’S EYES AND SHE WAS SMILING AT ME.

JUST LIKE THE END OF MICHAEL JACKSON’S “THRILLER” MUSIC VIDEO.

I WOKE UP SCREAMING AND SWEATING.

...

“So what do you think that dream meant?” Lynn asked me this morning right after I finished telling her the story.

“Well, according to dreammoods.com: To see the devil in your dream, signifies negative aspects of yourself. It may also indicate feelings of guilt that you have been harboring. It is time to release these feelings. Alternatively, the devil may represent intelligence, cunningness, deception, and cleverness. Also, To dream that you fought off the devil, symbolizes that you will succeed in defeating your enemies.”

“But you didn’t defeat the devil,” Lynn said, clearly concerned. “The devil still lived, didn’t he? Inside me. I’m the devil now, right?”

“Oh. Yikes.”