In one particularly vivid dream, I was at my friend Lee’s house in Charleston, and he gave me a tab of acid. After I took it, he told me it was “special acid,” that I would now see everyone in the same way that they saw themselves. Lee stayed the same, so I thought that it didn’t work, but then I noticed that his cats were suddenly gigantic, prowling around the house like caged tigers. Lee’s friend Conforti emerged from the bathroom and sat down, but he didn’t look like himself, he looked like a tiny little alien, wide-faced and grey-skinned. I looked in the mirror and I didn’t look like myself either. I was a fish-eyed skeleton with translucent skin stretched over the bones and arteries. I was a monster.
I left Lee’s house and headed out to the street. Out in the middle of that street lined with palm trees was a girl with pink hair, tattoos, and shorts that only covered half of her ass. She was sexy more so than beautiful, a girl I imagined I’d get addicted to more so than fall in love with, and she was walking a strange brown dog that looked like a chihuahua mixed with a Rottweiler. I was drawn to this girl in a shamefully sexual way, and I started following her down the street like a creep, taking all the same turns she did and keeping some distance so she wouldn’t notice me. She went into a tunnel, a massive, clear-plastic tube, which led out of the city and into an artificial sort of nature, like a variety of different ecosystems all placed in a row around the sides of the tube. I followed her in, and I found that between me and her there was a family of giant cats— no, cougars— a mama cougar and her cubs. I would have to get past them, but I wasn’t sure how to do it without pissing off the big one. I tried to just walk by, avoiding eye contact, but the mama noticed me. She bore her teeth at me, I looked at her eyes, and she pounced. I struggled with her, punching futilely against her sides, but I was hitting nothing. It was like my hands were made of balloons. I couldn’t even feel the impact of my fists, but then I woke up, swinging my arms wildly into the air above my bed.
Shortly after I woke up I got a call from Michael, my best friend from New Orleans. He was doing summer school at LSU, but he would come in town every other week for some reason or another. Every time he came in town we would hang out, usually at his house, where I served as his entertainment while he smoked weed continuously with his brother Scott. This time, though, he wanted to get stoned and go to the zoo. It was a Sunday, so I was off work. I told him I wouldn’t be smoking with him, but I was down for the zoo. I’d be ready in thirty minutes.
When we were in line to buy our tickets, I noticed a girl with pink hair in the other line beside us. The whole dream came flooding back to me. This girl looked nothing like the girl in the dream, but I remembered what Lee had said about the acid— it would make me see people for how they saw themselves. This girl wasn’t anywhere close to pretty, but she was trying hard to be sexy. Her shorts were too short, showing crescents of ass cheek, and trashy tattoos sporadically covered her pale skin. She was smoking a cigarette, and the smoke was blowing past the studded purse dangling from her shoulder. The purse didn’t seem to fit the image she was going for, but then I saw what was in it— a chihuahua. She was smuggling her chihuahua into the zoo.
I might have written the whole thing off as a coincidence, but an hour later I saw her pink hair again. She was looking into an animal enclosure. Just as I saw her, she turned and walked on as if she'd felt me looking at her. When Michael and I got to that same pen, I looked in and was stunned to find that it was the cougar pen. Inside was a mama cougar and three cubs. The mama cougar looked at me, and I looked right back at her. She didn’t snarl like she had in the dream, but she looked at me for a long time. I nodded to her, then she walked away, disappearing into the artificial cave at the back of her enclosure.
I left the zoo that day fairly convinced that my dreams were revealing elements of the future, but they didn’t seem to be very significant elements. I hadn’t spoken to the pink-haired girl and I hadn’t been mauled to death by that cougar, so why would they, of all things, appear to me in a dream? Was it all just random chance, or was their Godly meaning and design behind it?
My dream the next morning gave me my answer. I was back at the zoo again, but this time I was at some sort of gorilla sanctuary that didn’t really exist there. The zoo had gorillas, but this was a full on gorilla community, dozens and dozens of them. It was a spectacular sight, so I decided it would be the perfect thing to get me some Instagram likes. I took a picture, but when I tried to post it the internet wouldn’t work. I stood there ignoring the gorillas and trying to get the picture to upload until I finally woke up.
Naturally, the first thing I did when I woke up was take my phone off of the bedside table. I opened up Instagram because I was already thinking of it from the dream, but to my surprise I had a new follower, someone I’d never heard of: isabellegorilla. I opened the page and it was nothing but paintings of gorillas, all of them doing doing normal human things, checking phones, reading newspapers, taking selfies. It was easy enough to explain why the dream had apparently prophesied my checking instagram— I probably would have checked Instagram even if I’d dreamt Mark Zuckerberg was trying to kill me— but the gorilla connection was baffling. It was so peculiar it seemed like someone was watching my dreams and having some fun at my expense. For the whole next day I felt that someone or something was puppeteering my reality, but this paranoia gradually gave way to a more rational explanation, the theory that would soon come to govern my understanding of dreams and their connection to the future...
TO BE CONTINUED TOMORROW
