Six Ten-Second Dreams

Elvis was tied up in a chair when a bottle exploded. His wife's face was covered with glass shards. It wasn't his wife, it was a man. We were all reduced to the level of animals.

Elvis's daughter was possessed with insane fits. This is what convinced him there was a spirit world.


He fell in love with a dwarf. And he asked the dwarf, "How come everything makes sense, but at the same time doesn't make sense at all?"

There were four questions, but this was the first and most important.


My friends and I are traveling across the Midwest when we find a Shriners' Lodge and decide to go in. As we file through the door, a man hands us the little round Shriners plaques that you sometimes see stuck on cars. On the back of the plaques is a drug that immediately begins to work on us.

Inside, the building looks like a church, except a swimming pool takes up the entire floor. Instead of being white, pasty and fat, the Shriners are dark men who wear nothing but swimsuits and fezes. One of the men is standing in the pool, dispensing more of the drug from a floating tray. Suddenly I am frozen as I stand on the cold tile, for I know the secret of the Shriners, which is also the secret of the Midwest.


Mina said, "I had a dream about you."

I said, "Don't tell me," because I knew it meant something horrible, but she told me anyway.

She said, "I dreamed about your house. No one was there. All the doors were banging like drums."


I realized that everyone has one Tru Luv and that you know immediately when you see him or her. I was looking out the window at people passing on the boardwalk. A man stopped and looked through the window at me. Except for his clothes and haircut--which were from some other era, perhaps the 1940s--he looked ordinary. We stared at each other, knowing that we were each others' Tru Luv. Then we walked on because there was nothing to say.


A demon child is running around the room. She has all the answers.

"Wait, wait, wait," I say, "I have an important question." The demon child stands at attention.

"How come there has to be evil?"

The demon child wrinkles her gray face and waves her hand at the sky. "Ever think that maybe He is?"

Dreamed by: Pagan Kennedy

More Pagan Kennedy can be found at http://www.channel1.com/users/pagan