Yellow
C. Tucker II
November 11th, 2005
To whomever it may concern: I have been asked to sit in the back of this murky-smelling, fruitfly-infested, windowless room within a room within a room to write down my most recently experienced dream. I am writing this foreword to clear up that any dream I might have described in the guidance counselor's office probably came off as psychotic or legitimately insane or batshit or however else you adults classify our little adolescent brains. I want to make sure that anyone who is concerned about my mental health can be assured that I'm perfectly normal, and that I don't end up in the back of ambulance from slamming my head in an oven door or locked up in a padded cell where college interns spoon-feed me creamed corn or something. I don't want that to happen to me. That doesn't happen to normal kids.
"Your son has some problems," you guys would tell my parents. "We would highly recommend taking him to see a specialist," one of you continues, ripping a piece of eyes-liable-to-melt-out-of-your-sockets-from-the-sheer-color yellow paper to write down what looks like an address. A stupid address. Numbers I'll never remember.
I threw out the address while my parents were sleeping.
It wasn't that hard.
And I'm still here.
Read this and tell me I'm normal.
It starts out like a film. There's a title card. Credits, names, but I can't read them. For all I knew, they could have all been the same name. All I know is that I was the director. I'm always the director. There's a desert, and giant fruit, and a tiger clinging onto a tree, and all the names are flashing by too fast for me to read, and there's a Nickelback song playing, and I do not even like Nickelback.
Then I'm in a car. I don't know how I got here, but I'm racing, racing, it's loud and fast and I try to lift my head from the headrest. It doesn't budge. I'm paralyzed and I can't steer the car. The car looks blue but I know it's red. There's dinosaurs outside the tracks and they're battling over some yogurt, and I do not even like yogurt. My fingers glued stiff to the wheel, I'm swerving until I hit the foot of a giraffe, I hear someone ask, "Will the real Slim Shady please stand up?" and I'm burning in an explosion of blue and green flames.
At this point, I vaguely remember seeing some Russian characters written on the walls of my bedroom. I do not even speak Russian. I may or may not have been awake. I think I was balancing on the barrier between consciousness and unconsciousness, because everything in my room was completely normal other than the Russian writing. My head ached and my eyelids were webbed together by some sort of gunk that kept them in this semi-open state. Everything's a blur, like I'm looking through one of those transparent sheets that teachers use to project dry-erase writing onto an overhead, but someone didn't erase the marker too well. When I saw my sister give a triple suplex to my guinea pig, I was pretty sure I was falling farther down the side of unconsciousness.
My dreams seem to have horrible transitioning sequences. When I start making my films, the scene transitions will be the most amazing thing your eyes will ever see. My dreams are irrelevant in this field, for I am now in a carnival in Peru. I hate Peru. The tents are the same grotesque yellow as the lost paper the address was written on.
Now, everything slows down. I'm pretty sure I was still in Peru, even though I really, really didn't want to be, but I was in a bathroom. It looks a lot like my own bathroom. There's a line of light bulbs above the mirror but two out of seven of them are burnt out. There's a lot of people in the bathroom. Most of them are in the mirror. They're not on my side of the universe. The person in the foreground of this group of people happened to be a friend. But he didn't look like himself. I knew it was him. I wished it looked like him. He said, "Bummer your toaster's broken," which is completely and utterly out of character for him. He doesn't use the word "bummer" and he's not much for sympathizing about broken home appliances, apparently, though, I was inhumanely furious that he broke this news to me, so I took this bright pink hairbrush out of the sink and threw it as hard as my dream self could, at the mirror. The mirror shattered and the broken shards disappeared, and then he was in front of me. He was a lot shorter than he is in real life, but he had the right face. I knew that face too well. He looked pissed with me, which was pretty understandable considering I broke the barrier between our universes. I always wanted to break that barrier between us, I could remember it in my dream-logic memory that it was my goal to break the barrier. We lived on different levels of reality - his side of the universe had a lot more color. Things moved, and there was energy. My side was dull and calm. Nothing moved except for me and him.
Like I said, he was pissed. He was wearing gloves and he never wears gloves. He looked like he was getting ready to kick my ass and I didn't want that to happen, so I took the hairbrush from before, which was now a sickening yellow, and I threw it at the lights so that not just two out of seven them were burnt, but all of them were destroyed and there were sparks everywhere, and suddenly I was fighting my friend in another ring of flames, but these were the correct color. I felt licks of heat at my skin as I fought him. He knew boxing and I knew martial arts and it looked like the Simba VS. Scar scene from the Lion King. I was Simba and he was Scar even though in real life, I would probably be Scar and he would be Simba, but I knew I was Simba because I was winning. I was on top of him, and he had blood and bruises on parts of him that I didn't even touch, and I whispered to him, "Hakuna matata," and I threw him off the cliff even though that isn't what happened in the Lion King.
I was in my bathroom again, and everything was just perfectly okay. Nothing was burned like it had been before. The mirror was okay and the lights were all on again, and he was on the other side of the mirror as he was before. He wasn't dead. He came back. And he told me something in German, and I do not even speak German.
Then, he held out his gloved hand. He had bruises on his fingertips, bright purples and reds like they were fresh off the beating. I grabbed his hand and he pulled me into his universe, and no one else was there, and we were sitting in a theatre at that split second, and My Life: The Movie was playing, and there were guinea pigs and red cars and animals close-up with a wide-angle lens and Peruvian flute bands and laser eyes and someone was cutting off my balls and taking my money and stealing my power and duct-taping me to a flag pole and I was fighting someone in the snow and I was played by Tom Hanks and it was directed by Clint Eastwood and myself. Those were the only names I made out in the credits. There was also some really hardcore screamo music playing, I don't remember what song it was, but I really wish I knew so I could put it on my iPod.
It's really not to say that this dream - film - cinematic dream… cinedream, had a happy ending. The movie we were watching never did end, and somewhere along the way I remember the following things: macchiatos, Brokeback Mountain, someone named Joe, a deer getting skinned, and a shark, amongst other unexplainable things. I woke up and came here to write this paper, and there's a spaceman across the room from me, doing the same thing I am, so I'm not sure if I'm still dreaming or not.
Tell me I'm normal.