My nightmare

YOU can take it and turn it into a real novella. I can't because I swear, I can still feel my bones dissolving. But if you sell it to the horror movie industry and make real money, I want a big cut. Seriously. After all, I had to live through this, sort of.

Here's what I dreamed:

We're having a party -- a big one--and an univited man comes into house. He's very jolly but somehow we sense he's up to no good. Yet because he's got some clever moves and gets round (he gets into the drop tile ceiling at one point) we don't manage to escape. He injects each person with a big white thing (looks just like one of the tools my dentist uses--to apply glue I think). Anyway he tracks us down one by one and then he leaves. He waves goodbye even.

Time passes and we're worried but none of us get sick or dies. A day? A week? I don't know. But it's okay. Everyone feels great. Also we feel a huge compulsion to go to a really nice house. The man from the party greets us all and life is good. Better than ever been. He’s a lovely guy it turns out. I cry because I can't believe I misunderstood him.

But then he gets really sick and in his ravings says something about food. Other people are getting sick. And when they die, they turn into sacks of goo. Even their bones dissolve and they're big sacks of goo. We try to leave but the compulsion to stay to be around other people is huge. Hard to fight it. We hate going outside. But most of us force ourselves to move because Mike has figured it out.

It's just like some bug or another he's studied, one of those wasps that lays its eggs in a fly. He says we’re targeted as food and we’re being processed for consumption by grubs or something with no teeth. Whatever is going to eat us wants to make it easier to collect the food in one spot so it's give us the desire to stay put.

We’re all ailing except one guy. A really nice guy--I think it was Nick Herold. Sorry, Nick. Then Mike or I remembered he got injected early on. He seems to have lost a lot of his personality. We realize he’s been chosen as the next food gatherer---the one who'll be able to leave and get new food supplies by injecting more people.

So somehow we kill him by pushing him off a deck. We're too weak to do more. After this I spend the rest of the time looking for a deserted place to die. About now the dream goes wonky. Lots of crowds gather, even as we're look for woods or deserted spot to die, fighting the desire to be around other people. I don't feel particularly bad, but I can feel everything inside me dissolving and I can't walk and then I'm having trouble breathing.

I think as I woke up I thought, hmm, it would be bad if I threw myself in a lake. Everyone would get sick then. But I think the dream ended with me outside a house with a pile of leaves over me. Waiting.

It was frightening and icky, but not a real nightmare. Even as I was turning into a big sack of bug food, I thought, whoa, this is a plot isn't it. Like for a story. It seems awfully familiar. Did I steal it from somewhere? Or maybe just from the insect world or viruses. It reminds me of the cleverness of malaria.