Everyone has fantasies. Dreams. Some may dream of going on a safari deep in the grasslands of Africa. Others might want to dive the Great Barrier Reef. Still others may aspire to fly to the moon or, if they’re really ambitious, be the first to go bipedal on the red dust of Mars.
How generic.
Me? I have two dreams. They’re both different and very specific. The first is to be a survivor in the zombie apocalypse. I want to live in a world where guns are gold and Benjamins are great for starting fires when the generators run out of fuel—a time when social norms take a backseat to survival like a woman’s desire to keep her hair primped before a catfight. Our will to survive is raw, baby, and norms only act to keep our minds from really realizing that fact. The zombie apocalypse brings us back to basics—where surviving takes priority, and at all costs. It creates the need for our Neanderthal roots to kick in from some suppressed area of the brain instilled since creation when all of a sudden the unprepared 99% of humanity are being slaughtered by the brainless before the people who are at fault for the outbreak can even begin to accept the fact that they have singlehandedly initiated humanity’s extinction event. But not me. No, I’ve got it all planned out like an ultra-conservative, gun-toting, religion-clinging, SUV-driving, backwoods-dwelling, redneck hick stockpiling enough munitions to arm a militia the size of Vermont for when the infection begins. But I digress.
On to my second fantasy, which is much more interesting, I think, and is actually relevant to the story I am about to tell you.
I want to get abducted.
You believe in aliens? To be honest, I don’t know if I really do, but I do know that I want to. I think most people want to believe as well, because let’s be honest, if those saucers come down over New York City, no one’s going to work. People are either fleeing to the remotest places our little planet has to offer, or sitting stupefied in front of their television sets watching the world’s collective, Uh Oh (And Stephen Hawking’s, “I told you so.”). I, however, don’t fall into either of these categories. In vivid contrast, I will use whatever means necessary to get my sorry self to “them.” Why? I want to board the ship. I don’t care if I have to infiltrate the damn thing like Ethan Hunt in the CIA headquarters’ vault. Hell, if I have to break some alien law to be captured as a prisoner, I might just have to do that. Maim one of them? Break a window? Scream fire in a crowded spaceship hallway? I don’t know. But I’ll try them all if I have to. I don’t care if they don’t want me there—I will be there, and they will take me back to where they’re from. If they kill me, so be it, I tried. Go big or go home is the saying, but in my book it’s ‘Go big or go under’ (six feet under, that is). No, I will not go away, take me to your homeland or I will commandeer this vessel and attempt to do it myself. Or something along those lines.
At any rate, I’m telling you about my fantasies, because what happens in the true (as in “not false”) story below was nearly a direct fulfillment of one of the two. And since you are obviously not fleeing from hoards of the undead during the culmination of the zombie apocalypse, you can probably make a guess as to which I am referring.
*DISCLAIMER*
If you are currently fleeing from the undead during the culmination of the zombie apocalypse, then you don’t need to read any further. You have much more important things to worry about, and reading this is not one of those things.
I was attempting the breaststroke at the time, though I was never quite able to get that frog kick down. It’s bad enough that Homo sapiens aren’t really designed for aquatic excellence—the average six year old can beat Phelps in a foot race if Mike’s in the water. I do consider myself a good swimmer, however, and the scissor kick works just fine for me. Nonetheless, for reasons I cannot recall, I was attempting to do the proper frog kick like an Olympic trial depended on it, and when I came up for air—just before plunging back below the water’s twinkling surface—I saw it floating just above the Organ Mountains.
Our rectangular pool is situated to where one side is perpendicular to the Organs, the Organs being plainly visible from almost any point in our backyard. It isn’t uncommon for their jagged face to reflect New Mexico’s dramatic sunsets, which often result in hues of orange, yellow, and even purple and red. So despite being acclimated to seeing God’s beauty in that form, I was taken aback nevertheless when pink showed up in the direction of the Organs—specifically above them—and in the form of a blimp. The balloon was the largest part of the vessel (probably twenty times the size of the Hindenburg), and the bottom was only about the size of what would normally hang below your garden-variety hot air balloon. Eerie, right? I thought so, and so I stopped mid-stroke, wiped the water from my eyes to take a second look, and just caught the top of the pink blimp descending below the Organs’ pipes, like the sun escaping below the horizon.
It’s weird when you see something you know isn’t real. Like when you might’ve looked to your left while driving, could’ve sworn you just saw a roadrunner the size of the Holiday Inn, and after a second glance found that your brain tricked you into thinking the shadows and lines from a building off in the distance were the true culprits for the outline of the Jurassic bird. You thought real roadrunners were fast. Imagine if that thing were real. They aren’t, of course, but our brains still posit images like that all the time. We all possess a “blind spot” (an area where we literally cannot see), yet it doesn’t appear in our every day vision because our brain “guesses” what that little area would most logically look like according to surrounding details and whatever the other eye is seeing. But sometimes that guess is wrong. Our brain wants to make sense of the world—that’s what it means to be human—and sometimes the subconscious comes up with conscious nonsense instead of sense. It comes up with a pink blimp instead of pink mountains or pink clouds. At least that’s what I was thinking when I was treading water in my pool that evening.
So I thought nothing of it. I got out of the pool, dried off with nothing, because I forgot to bring a towel, and walked up the steps to our backdoor with a trail of flat-footed footprints behind me. The image of the blimp was fresh in my mind when I went into the house, but then it occurred to me that a shower with the steamer on sounded extraordinary. An ominous pink blimp? Eh, I want to inhale hot steam in a scalding shower.
The steamer was in my parents’ master bath, so I opened the bedroom door and saw my dad standing by the TV, which was in a cherry wood armoire in the corner across from the bed. He was dressed in blue scrubs and an operating room disposable coat. And he was wearing a hat. And a surgical mask. And gloves. And his face wasn’t my dad’s face at all. And he looked borderline angry.
What the hell?
You know when you’re going down a flight of stairs just a tad too quickly, miss a step, and then you get that sensation that feels like your stomach is slamming into your diaphragm in a way similar to when you go down the death plunge on the wedgie-inducing, shoulder blade-skinning water slide? Well that was the one that hit me when I realized that the person standing in the corner of my parents’ bedroom was not my dad at all, but an alien.
In that moment of recognition, my adrenal glands squeezed, kicking my sympathetic nervous system and adrenal-cortical system into overdrive. I was basically like a pregnant mother poised to lift a car off of one of her children, except it wasn’t a car I was worried about; it was a hostile E.T. (“E.T.” being short for the general expression, “extra terrestrial,” not the name of the Reeses Pieces-loving, homesick raisin). And by the way, that fight-or-flight response is, if you ask me, convenient. It gives you options. You can decide to make like Lucky the Leprechaun or just go apeshit on the guy. Whichever you decide, you at least have a fighting chance of surviving. But as for me, my feet stayed glued to the carpet and opted to do neither. Not that it mattered in the end—the E.T. glided towards me faster than what I imagined to be a fitting speed to either escape the room or bite his hands and feet off, so I didn’t feel so bad when he pinned me on top of the bed. I couldn’t put up much of a fight anyway, because apparently my adrenal response must have malfunctioned or accidentally induced a massive estrogen secretion. And neither of those sorts of things can be fixed by a tap-rack-re-acquire routine either.
The E.T. then proceeded to cover my eyes and place his surgical mask over my nose and mouth. Despite his smothering, however, I could still breathe. In fact, air was rushing in like the mask was a lifeguard giving mouth-to-mouth. Then everything started getting fuzzy. I’d felt this before. I’d felt the same thing when I went under to get my nose fixed. It was incredible. And what was even better is I knew exactly what was happening.
I was being abducted.
What other explanation could there have been? Well, I suppose there could’ve been others, but at the time, I knew. I knew precisely what was happening and I was almost giddy inside, my body feeling like it was sinking into a sea of cotton.
It’s finally happening, I thought, one of my greatest dreams is coming true.
I wish I could explain in detail what happened next, but I was unfortunately unconscious at this point. If I had to guess, I’d say that the alien had me beamed up to his pink blimp, and then he and his compadres flew me to their home planet for whatever it is they do to their abductees. And they sedated me because otherwise I might’ve been able to figure out how to get back to Earth or maybe tell others how to get to their home planet. Just a hypothesis.
The next thing I knew, I was lying down in a white room on three white cushions in an open plastic cocoon, facing forward, and in front of me was what appeared to be an arched window, but without glass. Behind the half-oval opening was just another white wall, and at the base of the window was a sill. A long cylindrical glass sat on the sill, which was filled with a liquid that looked like fruit punch. A label with black and yellow lines was wrapped around its center.
The room itself was mostly white, with the exception of a control pad at the top of a small platform to my left. On the control pad, which sat diagonally as if on a music stand, appeared to be a touchscreen of some sort with fast food labels on it. At the top was McDonalds, on the right was Burger King, and in the middle was Sonic. At the bottom, however, was a snake coiled up with its forked tongue stuck out to the left. Its tongue was very long, probably half the length of the snake.
They must have taken me here in the pink blimp, I thought (and previously hypothesized). How else could I have gotten there? I was on their home planet, this was something else I was sure of, and so the only means by which I could’ve gotten there, obviously, was the pink blimp I had seen while swimming. Sound argument if I’ve ever heard one.
Looking back on it, I don’t know why I didn’t get up and I don’t recall being restrained either. Even so, I was very captivated by the fruit punch in front of me, hoping it wouldn’t fall from some invisible nudge. I was very worried of this, actually, and as my eyebrows rose to the point of blending with my hairline, I raised a hand to block what I knew would happen. I had no good reason for doing this, but I knew something before without reason, so it must’ve been so that I knew this as well. Once again, a sound argument if I’ve ever heard one.
Anyway, I was right again, and the juice spilled. Well, it didn’t spill so much as it leapt out of the glass. It did so in an arch, like water out of a hose, and landed in my mouth, which I opened. I mean, who wouldn’t just gulp down any old foreign drink after being abducted? It tasted like fruit punch (right again), and before I had time to wipe away the peripheral splash damage, another glass—just like the previous one—appeared where the other had just been. This one had a yellow liquid in it, however, and it too leapt out of the glass like a spring-loaded snake and tasted like lemonade.
This went on for about three minutes. A series of ten glasses sat on the sill, each liquid shooting out, one after another, but it wasn’t until the fifth or sixth that I noticed the stormtrooper standing behind me.
No joke.
A bona fide imperial stormtrooper in all white plastoid armor was standing there, holding a legal pad—E-11 blaster at his side. After each successive glass, he would scribble something down on a new page, tear it off, and get ready for the next glass.
Finally, a glass wrapped in a skull and crossbones label containing a murky white liquid stood on the sill.
It’s venom—probably rattlesnake venom, I thought.
Aha! A trick! I didn’t open my mouth for that one, no, I turned my head, allowing it to wash over my face and drench the cushions beneath. After the toxic shower, I looked up at the stormtrooper, rattlesnake venom beading on my eyelashes. He smirked and proceeded to tell me that the test was over. Satisfied with my efforts, I followed him out of the juice room. We walked through three dimly lit hallways all oriented in the same direction. At the end of the last hallway, I could see light bursting in through a pair of windows centered on push-open double doors. The stormtrooper, which had been about five feet ahead of me the whole way prior to this moment, began to walk towards them at an incredible rate (probably three times as fast as I), but his legs were moving the same speed as mine. He moved just like my abductor had done in my parents’ bedroom—almost gliding as if on skates.
I started jogging to catch up, but didn’t make it in time to follow him outside, as the doors shut behind him just before I reached it. Promptly pushing them back open, I expected to see him on the other side, but he was already gone. Now outdoors, I was able to get a better grasp on exactly where I had been taken. There were hundreds of E.T.’s walking in all different directions—all wearing stormtrooper armor. I felt like I had just walked into the middle of a Star Wars convention where only the Emperor’s grunts had shown up, except none of them were human. They were walking too fast. They all looked human, but they weren’t, and I knew.
These were no ordinary stormtroopers.
The building I had come from looked like a massive pigmy hut one would typically see in the African bush. Brilliant disguise. The complex in its entirety was composed of many of these huts (though I was sure the interior was much more sophisticated, probably containing hundreds, if not thousands, of juice rooms). The surrounding landscape was thickly forested for the most part, but I could see a beach beyond the tree line not fifty yards in front of me. The air smelled like pizza.
No one paid me much attention, so I decided to walk to the beach. The trees quickly faded into a desert landscape dotted with creosote and mesquite. Another fifty yards past the desert was the beach where two-foot waves softly curled onto smooth sand. The coast only stretched down for a mile or so and then wrapped around in both directions, which meant we were on some kind of island or narrow peninsula. The water stretched out all the way to the horizon, and in the sky beyond was a moon that would’ve looked eerily similar to Earth’s if just a little smaller. Almost directly above me was another moon, this one probably twenty times the size of the other. Both were grey, but the dark spots on the larger one overhead had tinges of red.
Wooden benches lined the beach at the tide’s edge, and behind one such bench were my two brothers and parents.
They abducted all of us? I thought.
But before I could walk towards them or even call out to them, a stormtrooper stopped me and handed me a plastic Ziploc bag.
“You must find the crab legs in the sand! Comb the sand for the legs, and I will show you what is in store for you next.”
Makes sense, I thought.
It only took me a minute to find my first appendage, which was as long as my own leg. I brought it over to the stormtrooper who was taking notes on my efforts, and told him that the crab legs were too big to fit in the bag.
“Exactly,” he replied, “follow me.”
So I followed him towards the water and stopped beside him at the point of the waves’ retreat.
“I’m going to send you and your family back now. For your time and work, you will be given any human automobile of your choice. What would you like?” the stormtrooper asked.
This was fantastic. However, there was no way I could get something too flashy because the conversation would inevitably lead back to my abduction, and I couldn’t let that happen—mainly because I just couldn’t do time in the loony bin. For one, I’m not good at wrestling (those dudes in white are obviously all MMA fighters), and secondly…I’d be in the damn loony bin.
So I settled for a Mustang, thinking I could sell it and use the extra cash for other things, since I already had a car.
“You ready?” the stormtrooper asked, taking out a handheld electronic device.
“How does it work?” I asked.
“You’ll see. Actually, when do you want to go back? I can send you back at any specific time you want—give or take a few minutes.”
I thought for a moment and answered, “Well I have school tomorrow and I have a couple tests so I guess I’ll just go back in time to go to school.”
Without another word, he placed the device on my chest, to which it clung like a magnet. Before I had time to even try to comprehend what he was doing, I shot off the surface of the planet like a test dummy strapped to a rocket, and traveled through space at what seemed to be very close to the speed light, and then my vision went white.
The next thing I knew, I was in school, walking to class. I spun around, bewildered at how quickly my return had happened. I exchanged awkward glances with a few people who had noticed my flustered demeanor, and then I realized that something had gone wrong. Everyone was in our Wednesday chapel dress: shirts, ties, and skirts.
They sent me back on Wednesday.
Chapel was on Wednesdays. It was supposed to be Monday. But before I had time to think another thought, I shot off Earth’s surface exactly like I had before, and then I found myself standing back on the beach with the same stormtrooper who had sent me off.
So I went ahead and told him about the mix-up, to which he replied, “I’m sorry about that, sometimes these things are a little sketchy. Maybe if I insert an exact time according to your system of hours and minutes then it’ll work better. What time would you like to go back?”
“Well, school starts around eight, so seven would be perfect.”
Seconds later, I lifted off again—my vision going red instead of white this time, and just a few seconds after that, I opened my eyes, closed them again, and realized I was seeing red because of the sunlight pouring into my bedroom. Squinting, I checked the time, which read exactly 7:00a.m.
They got it right. Not bad.
I swung my legs over the side of my pillow-top mattress and stood up.
Wait.
Was that a dream?
No. No way. It couldn’t have been, it was too real. Too vivid. But it had to have been a dream. I just woke up from it—no they sent me back. And it was right at seven like they said it would be.
With thoughts like these fighting in my skull, I began my morning routine by plugging my iPod into a pair of speakers on my dresser and put it on shuffle. The first song that played was “Was it a Dream?” by 30 Seconds to Mars, and right then and there I got that same stomach-tackling-the-diaphragm feeling that happened when I saw the alien standing in my parents’ bedroom.
Of course it was a dream. Everything screamed that it was—especially reason. I mean, let’s be honest, “absurd” doesn’t even begin to describe what happened. From stormtroopers to rattlesnake-venom-juice rooms, the whole charade spelled LSD-induced-befuddlement more than Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland. And by the way, Lewis had to have been on drugs when he wrote that—don’t give me that “no factual evidence of drug use” BS, the story is all the evidence you need. Needless to say, the D-R-E-A-M was ludicrous.
(But just to make sure, I checked the garage for the Mustang I requested)
Yet despite factually knowing that me being abducted was a nonsensical dream at this point, I still couldn’t stop thinking about the whole experience with a sense of wonder. It felt so real. It was just as vivid, if not more so, than I just described with words.
Actually, hold on. Stop reading this after this sentence, go pour a glass of water on the floor, and then come back. Just do it, trust me.
Now that you’ve made a mess, imagine that that didn’t just happen—that you leaving and pouring water on your floor for no reason whatsoever literally did not just transpire. Well that’s what it was like. The dream was just as vivid as reality, except for it being insane. So if you went back to where you poured the water out and found that there wasn’t any water on the ground, then you might have an idea as to what it was like to try to come to the conclusion that I hadn’t actually been abducted.
And you can also imagine how doubts might start to creep in.
What do you mean I didn’t pour the water on the ground—I poured the whole damn glass out. It even splashed me.
What do you mean I wasn’t abducted—I flew back right at 7a.m.—like the stormtrooper said…after I gave him the giant crab leg too big for the Ziploc bag.
I then began to think about Neo waking up from a dream he had in The Matrix. He woke up from what seemed to be an exceptionally irrational experience in which his mouth sealed shut and a mechanical burrowing insect infiltrated his body. And it turned out to be real. No way, right? Yes way. The little insect was real and Trinity had to suck it out with a sci-fi Hoover.
But of course, movies aren’t real. We’re not really living in the Matrix, are we. We’re not really just running around in a temporary world trying to survive without thinking, there must be more than this.
Are we.
In the end, I truly was disappointed that my dream wasn’t real. I mean, I really do want to be abducted by aliens if they exist. No sarcasm. Re-read the little bit about my two fantasies and re-evaluate your consensus if you don’t believe me. Sounds kind of intriguing, if not dazzling, doesn’t it? Smile all you want, but it’s my dream—not yours, and besides, who’s to say that the hypothetical “they” don’t exist, or that they won’t take me? Who’s to say they don’t have juice rooms or giant pigmy huts? And who’s to say they didn’t just forget to deliver the Mustang, brainwash me into thinking none of it made any sense, put me in my bed to make me think it was a dream, and forge memories from the day before that suggest the previous night was normal?
Right?
Don’t squash my dreams with that smirk.
