The Bizarre Case of the Black Eggs

I dreamt this last night:

I work on a futuristic chicken farm where hens occasionally lay valuable black eggs. A young woman arrives one day with a trained capuchin monkey who could predict which ones would lay the black eggs (and perhaps even encourage it), much to the supervisor's delight. He sets up a special area for the black egg-laying hens and instructs me to take extra good care of them.

One day, as I am getting ready to close up for the day, I hear a scream from the supervisor's office. I run to it and nearly knock over the young woman with the monkey, who is standing in the doorway petrified. She tells me to call emergency services. From inside the room, my supervisor shouts for me to do no such thing. I peek around the woman and see the supervisor standing over the body of a man from corporate. He says that the regional director had a tragic accident, and dismisses us.

The next day I come in to work see men in scrubs dragging the young woman away. I try to stop them. They say she is mentally ill, and must be put in a hospital. The supervisor keeps her monkey, but gradually the hens stop laying black eggs, and the farm shuts down.

Unemployed, I wander the streets. I have to run away from police at some point (I cannot remember why), and wind up in an urban park where I find the monkey. It brings me to an elderly woman on a bench. The monkey suddenly holds out a black egg to me, and I take it. The woman looks very startled.

I tell her of my previous employment, and of the monkey's sense for the black eggs. The woman says she is the CEO of the corporation to which our farm belonged, and that the regional supervisor who died at that factory was her son. She knew nothing about the monkey or our increased black egg production, and suspects foul play on the part of the supervisor.

When the she learns that the monkey's owner may have witnessed the incident and was committed to a psychiatric institution against her will, she insists that I help her find the young woman. So we set off in the CEO's gigantic airship and head to the hospital, which is off in the mountains for some reason. When we arrive, she buys the hospital to gain the young woman's release.

The young woman, who was certainly sane when they took her from the farm, refuses to speak or make eye contact with anyone. She just sits by a window on the airship with the monkey in her lap, staring out at the clouds.

One day, we dock at a city in the sky (think Cloud City), and the monkey suddenly seems restless. The young woman stands up and starts walking in the direction her monkey indicates. We follow her, and come to a shady-looking warehouse. There, my former supervisor is trying to sell several unmarked crates to another man.

The young woman points at the supervisor. Her monkey leaps up onto one of the crates, pries it open(!) and fishes out a black egg. The supervisor tries to flee, but I tackle him. He says we can do nothing to him because of extraterritoriality or somesuch. The CEO looks up from her tablet and smiles, informing the supervisor that she had just purchased the entire city, and would insure that he sees his day in court.

Some Other Time

I had a vivid and detailed dream last night, the kind that remains plausible even after you wake. With some effort, I recalled a good deal of the dialog word-for-word, and even the names. It went like this:

I stroll through Baltimore City on a balmy afternoon, holding 'Zilla's hand. His gait is strange, but swifter than you would expect a four-year-old to walk. He talks about dinosaurs and robots, and what he wants to eat. I feel more than hear a burst of static as my collective tries to talk to me--but I should have signal downtown.

I look around and realize that we have strayed into the edges of a massive protest. Someone has set up an impromptu stage a few blocks away. 'Zilla squeals with delight and takes off, slapping the control modules at his waist. Suddenly he is no longer toddling, but running faster than a grown man.

"'Zilla! Get back here!" I give chase, but he is small and weaves effortlessly through the mass of humanity gathering on the street. Traffic grinds to a half, blocked off by tractor-trailers and charter buses whose stone-faced drivers hold pro-union signs beneath their cigarettes. I lose sight of the boy, and climb up onto the loading dock of a nearby building to find him. I spot his purple jacket near the stage.

A bus pulls up alongside the dock much too fast as I jump down from it, and I narrowly avoid being squashed, activating my reflex enhancer as I probably should have done when 'Zilla first got loose. I dart through the crowd, dodging bodies and barricades, ignoring hateful glances. The boy is trying to climb onto the stage, but I snatch him up and put him on my shoulders.

Sirens approach as the protesters finally get their antique amplification system working. A petite redhead takes the microphone and exhorts her fellows to remain calm, that they are sending a message, not starting a war. The crowd seems ambivalent. I run as fast as I can, but the police are closing in.

I head for a sleek(?!) SUV near the edge of the police perimeter. One foot goes on the front bumper, the next on the hood, a hop over the windshield and onto the roof without losing stride. I leap from the back of the SUV and over the perimeter, pulling 'Zilla off of my shoulders in mid-air and holding him to my chest like an awkwardly shaped football. The hang-time seems eternal, and when the ground hits me it hits harder than I expect. Warnings chime in my head, but the pain is fleeting. I roll clear of the startled police, stagger to my feet, and keep running.

There is a greenspace half a block from us, and law enforcement seems more concerned with containing the crowd than chasing us. I put 'Zilla down once we reach the gates of the park, abstractly aware that my left leg is damaged. We sit down on a park bench beside a middle-aged woman with ribbons and feathers braided into graying hair. She offers us some food in a soft, unfocused voice. 'Zilla happily accepts an apple from her and climbs onto my lap.

"Such a cute little boy!" the woman coos. "I hope you didn't have any trouble downtown, with the action today."

"We just missed the police," I reply, rubbing my leg absently.

"I'm terribly sorry, dear." She pats my hand. It feels a bit intrusive. "At least you made it to a peace zone. You know why we have these actions, right?"

I almost sigh. "You oppose automization and cyberization."

"It's dehumanizing," she says, shaking her head. "It taints everything. Imagine if you took your son to the hospital and they tried to put machines in him!"

Before I can protest that I am not his father or think to shush him, 'Zilla pulls up his shirt, exposing the baselayer that keeps his implants from chafing. Two ports on the suit expose the control modules. "I already got machines!" he cries. "I can't walk without them. Now I'm like Godzilla!" By way of demonstration, he hops off my lap and lumbers around on the bike trail, exaggerating his gait and saying "boom" with every step.

The woman turns from him to me with an expression of dawning horror. I thank her for the food and, taking 'Zilla's hand, leave as quickly as I dare make my leg move. He waves at her over his shoulder with the half-eaten apple.

Once we exit the jamming zone, I contact the collective, recalling the ones who had gone looking for us when I went off the grid. We arrive back at the shop shortly before sunset. Only two members of the collective are there, one cooking upstairs and the other tidying up the storefront. 'Zilla pulls free from my hand and sprints the last block. I let him.

Amelia steps outside, holding the boy to her with one arm and operating an archaic tablet with her free hand. She is half a head taller than me and dressed in a dark red unitard. "I need to look at that leg," she says. We send 'Zilla upstairs to help with dinner and, locking up the store, go into the back room.

It serves as both a workshop and an operatory, though not legally in the latter case. She makes me sit down and strips the street clothes from me. "These are pointless, you know," she says, tossing my t-shirt aside, "the unitard regulates temperature far better."

"Not everybody feels as comfortable you do in skin-tight metafabrics," I grumble. My jeans go flying, too.

I can feel her accessing my logs from my time off the grid--like the 'static' and the damage notification, it is not mapped onto any existing sense, but has an emulated neural pathway all its own.

She rolls her eyes and pushes me back into the reclined exam chair, finding and unzipping the invisible front seam of my unitard as she went. She runs deft fingers over my exposed skin; my scars look all the paler against the rich brown of her hands.

"I thought you were running a diagnostic on my leg," I say, propping myself up.

She laughs, a single 'hah'. "I already ran that diagnostic. It was just the same old wound again. You really ought to have the whole thing replaced."

"I'm fine," I insist. She picks up my left leg and rotates the injured ankle. Pain shoots through it momentarily, before the regulator blocks it off again. She is tapped into my feed, but does not flinch with me.

"Pain is either signal or noise, baby," she says, "nothing special about it unless you make it special. You can have all the pain you need, and a leg that doesn't give out every time you do something stupid."

"Maybe some other time," I concede. She massages my leg as we wait for the rest of the collective to return home. We say nothing more to each other, either vocally or electronically, comfortable in the quietude of our intimacy.

Hodge and Podge

As explained in Nothing Unreal Exists, I lack a certain confidence in the realness of reality. I do not know the reasons for this, but a few experiences in my childhood definitely reinforced that doubt. This is one of the more bizarre ones.

Six years old, I woke with my face pressed against the straw mat upon which I had taken my afternoon nap. I saw something translucent and huge, taking up most of my visual field (though I could see through it). Its complexity and dynamism led the eye constantly, so that I could not focus on any part of it.

The Hodge-Podge.

It was not any thing that I could (or can) identify, but it looked like chaos and decay. My six-year-old mind compared it to the rotting corpse of a sparrow I had recently found while digging in my grandmother's flower trough. The vision grew more and more intense and menacing. Then, it changed.

A similarly translucent, equally indescribable vision of order and stasis replaced it. Its smooth perfection proved felt as monstrous as what came before. My eyes could find no purchase on its featureless...featurelessness. As a child, I compared it to an ornament belonging to my mother--a wooden bird meticulously covered with pure white feathers, lifeless and unyielding.

Just when the vision of order grew unbearably intense, it changed back into chaos, then to order, and so on. It kept flip-flopping faster and faster, which produced an odd sensation of involuntary movement, like free-falling without direction. Then, it just stopped.

I do not remember what I thought at the time, once the terror left me. When it recurred a few months later, however, I grew anxious. I decided that there was something wrong with me--probably a malignant brain tumor. When my grandmother and parents dismissed my concerns and other symptoms failed to manifest, I gradually forgot about the incident.

Every few years, it would happen again. Sometimes it comes while I lie in bed trying to sleep or wake, but I also experience it while meditating or just sitting quietly. I can discern no warning signs, but always recognize it when it starts--sometimes with one vision, sometimes with the other. Though objectively I know it never lasts more than five minutes, the hallucination suspends my perception of time and feels unsettlingly eternal.

I have tried to explain it away or attribute meaning to it, but nothing seems to stick. If a hypnogogic or hynopompic hallucination, why does it happen while I am wide awake? Did I accidentally ingest some mind-altering substance? Just as the vision defies description, so it defies my other attempts to make it fit into my worldview of the moment.