mazirian

Hot off the neurons: I had a dream that makes me worry about my subconscious. I was on a soccer field for the first event of the annual Pentathlon: atlatl. I was standing next to the target. Also on the field was F.O., who you may remember from an earlier dream was the guy who nonchalantly beat Ben from Lost to death with the hood of his truck. F.O. is a fellow Penathlete. So while I was setting up the target, he fired off a spear, impaling me against the target--a sort of half stuffed scare crow. I screamed and fell to the ground rolling around in pain, clutching the spear.



I looked up and saw F.O. make a face like a Maori warrior. He started doing some kind of dance, stomping his feet like a sumo wrestler. I knew he intended to stomp on my head and I tried to move, but was pinned by the spear. I started panicking at this point, but not too much to notice for the first time that he was wearing a kilt and speaking in tongues with a Scottish accent. Further, under his kilt he had strapped a bundle of dynamite with one of those big brass analog clocks that are the iconic alarm clock in old cartoons. I started shouting at the top of my voice: One weird dude! One weird dude!" repeating that over and over until I finally woke up.



I classify this dream as a hot chilies induced, Class II (bad) Nightmare.

Also, here is the stupidest atlatl image ever:

Hot off the neurons: About once every two years or so I have a dream involving a girl, LG, I went to high school with. I don't really understand why she shows up in my dreams: although she was pretty I didn't really have a crush on her, we weren't close friends, and we rarely even spoke. And yet, other than my two best friends, I don't really ever have dreams about anyone I went to high school with.



The Mall of America had been stuffed into the bloated hull of a cruise ship and then shoved out to sea in the hope it would never return. That's where it looked like we were. There were werewolves on the cruise ship along with with droves of the the sort of people I imagine buy passage on these floating eyesores. The werewolves were the main problem, but there was also a vague sense of urgency related to a limbo competition that I don't recall the details of.

LG and I were fleeing from one particular werewolf for most of the dream. The thing was unshakable. We tried any number of crazy things to get rid of it, including—most memorably—LG spraying it in the face with some kind of aerosol that she ignited by furiously snapping her fingers.

The dream ended when we were forced to the bow of the vessel and had to make our final stand. The vessel was being tossed by large swells, and as the bow rose up with each wave we would float up high above the deck. The situation soon became precarious and we drifted away from the ship entirely and then out into and among the waves, where we were cast about by them and flung up into the air over and over again. It was the most marvelous flying dream I have had in a long time.

I had this dream two days ago and it was one of the more vivid dreams that I've had in a while owing to all the Nyquil I was taking at the time.

Hot off the neurons: I was standing outside a door with a plaque on it that read "Sonic Society HQ" and I entered without knocking. The room beyond the door was totally unexpected. Every available surface was overflowing with unicorn related paraphernalia: there were unicorn sculptures, unicorn posters, unicorn paintings, stuffed animal unicorns, unicorn lamps, unicorn mobiles, unicorns painted in black velvet, bawdy re-imaginings of My Little Pony with little pastel unicorn ponies, and various other unicorn knick knacks, oddities and miscellanea of all manner and description. Each offering was accompanied by a small handwritten note from the fan who had offered it up to Jack and Shannon.



Jack and Shannon were seated in a corner of the room talking. The corner, I noted with some relief, was relatively unicorn free, but it also had a sort of retro, 1960s vibe to it—I distinctly remember an overabundance of shag carpeting. Without thinking, I sat down on a nearby bean bag chair and tried to join the conversation, but a brief look of annoyance flashed across their faces and Jack said, "Ok, folks, it looks like we've just been joined by former charter member, Brad Bowman. We'll be back right after a quick break while we figure out what to do with him."

A huge wave embarrassment crashed down on me as I realized that Ihad just interrupted a live show. Shannon fiddled with a bunch of knobs on some WWII era electronics, grumbling under her breathe. The noise of Dick Dynamo's briefcase could be heard in the background.

I heard a muffled voice shouting and realized that it was Sam Mowry. I noticed that it was coming from a small speaker sitting on a director's chair, but a small pillow was on top of the speaker and muffled his voice too much to understand what he shouting about.

"Quiet him down, will you!" Shannon shouted at Jack, who casually threw another pillow over the speaker.

Jack grabbed me by my shirt and led me back out the door, rushing me down a hallway with tall sunny windows on one side. Looking out the windows I saw for the first time that we were high up in some mountains that I somehow knew to be the Andes. There was a flurry of confusing activity involving llamas that I don't recall clearly, but the dream culminated in a scene in which Jack and Shannon and I were standing on the top of a mountain ridge looking down an incredibly steep slope covered with impossibly large mushrooms: massive clumps of portobellos, six feet across, were dotted with tree sized morels, and there were cascading meadows of giant shiitakes that waved back and forth seemingly of their own volition. At this point, I noticed, with some alarm, that Jack and Shannon were wearing ski jackets and had goggles on.



Jack was the first to leap down the mountainside, skipping gracefully across the tops of the portobellos, followed by Shannon who let out a "wheeee...." before disappearing down the slope behind him. I was drawn to the shiitakes for some reason, and that turned out to be my undoing. The cap of the first shiitake I landed on snapped off and I fell down amid their stalks and started sliding on a slimy underbed of enokis, cloud ear and spores. I careened down the mountain, bumping off outcrops of lobster mushrooms and clammy clumps of oyster mushrooms before finally coming to a rest on an open scree slope composed of small, white button mushrooms. Jack and Shannon looked down at me, shaking their heads.

It was Jack who spoke first: "Dumbass. You haven't listened to the show for months and you never signed up for Sonic Gold."

As they walked away, I heard Shannon say to Jack, "I can't believe he tried to surf the shiitakes, what a loser."

N.B.: Later in the day after I awoke from that dream, I signed up for Sonic Gold.

Hot off the neurons: A recent dream was influenced by the mutiny that kicked off the final season of Battlestar Galactica. I was in the midst of the mutiny, accompanied by Lily Allen, and we were trying to get to a bathroom (although I suppose they'd call it the head on the Galactica). I should probably stop right there, but I must set forth some further details if only to purge them from my mind.

Although the woman accompanying me looked like Lily Allen, she was instead, according to her name tag, jenniferrodgers. This, it turns out, was a case of a name bubbling up from my subconscious just as Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff did a while back. I looked up the name after I awoke and discovered that she's an artist and illustrator who's work appears in some books I've been reading lately. So, apologies to you, jenniferrodgers, for dragging you into this dream.



I rushed with Lily/Jennifer through the corridors of Galactica, gun fire echoing around every corner. Wounded crew fled all around us, blocking the path to the closest head. We struggled on and eventually found a W/C, its doors blown off their hinges, smoke drifting out and lights flickering inside. As I entered, I realized that I was not wearing shoes or socks. This wouldn't have been so bad except that there was shit everywhere and puddles of urine on the floor next to each urinal. [I've had this bare-feet-filthy-bathroom dream before; I just hate it.] I must have evidenced some reluctance to go into the head, because Lily/Jennifer looked at me in disgust.

"For fucks sake, just think about how Galactica's recycling system works," she shouted over bursts of gunfire. "All that piss gets recycled, and all that shit does too. It all goes right back to Galactica's water tanks." She pointed to a water bottle I just then discovered I'd been carrying the whole time. "When you drink that, you're effectively drinking Saul Tigh's crap. What difference does it make if you step on his crap!?"

Once or twice a year I have a dream that I am sailing one of the boats I used to work on in improbable circumstances. Last night I dreamed that I was sailing the Schooner Edna along the rain flooded streets of downtown Portland, Maine.[1] The immediate dilemma was that I needed to get pilot the vessel out into Portland Harbor, but the traffic—by which I mean cars—was too heavy to cross commercial street. Also, DiMillo's—which was now a sort of sinister Mississippi paddle boat with giant stacks belching out black smoke—was blockading the Harbor Line.



Ultimately, I did manage to get the vessel out to sea, and the scene shifted so that the schooner was somewhere off Big Sur. Various events unfolded on board of no real importance. A woman I used to know (we'll call her JP) was there and for some reason it was necessary for us to swim ashore. There was an extended scene where I was coaxing JP to keep swimming—she was not exactly a triathlete when I knew her.

We landed on a beach and hiked up the seaside cliffs into a thick wilderness. Somehow, during the hike, JP turned into a hot female version of Indiana Jones, complete with whip and hat. I tried to make conversation, but every time I did she looked annoyed with me and eventually even pulled a machete on me (which, in real life, I sort of deserve).

By the time we crested the cliffs it was clear we were on some sort of expedition to retrieve a mysterious artifact, and so, naturally, we entered a cave. JP lit a torch and by its light we could see that the walls of the cave were painted Lascaux-style. But something was odd: I looked closer at the caves and realized that the paintings did not depict animals but lisp code.

Jen stuttered in awe: "It's the language of the ancients!"



N.B.: Speaking of the language of the ancients, I wish lj-compose mode was just a little bit smarter. Maybe I just need to update it. (Edit: I take it back, lj-update is smarter than I gave it credit for).

Footnotes: [1] Zip Kellog, librarian, Maine canoe expert and all around cool person once told me a story about how he went paddling down Forest Avenue after a heavy rain storm.

I dreamt that I was having dinner in some sort of cafeteria with Serge. We were bent over our cafeteria trays arguing about something. Apparently I got pissed off, because I grabbed his head and slammed it down on the cafeteria tray and began sliding the tray all over the cafeteria. Serge's head then took on a Katamari Damacy like effect—food, plates, forks, knives, sugar dispensers, and then chairs, tables, soda fountains all stuck to his head and rolled around the room.

Somehow, while I was rolling Serge's head around, the location changed to an old New England house and Ben from Lost was trying to kill me. I had to leave Serge's head in a room in order to flee from Ben. Things went badly for me and soon I was exchanging punches with Ben just outside the front door of the house. At that point I noticed my friend F.O. (whose name is withheld on account of the El Salvadoran death squads on his trail) standing outside his picturesquely antiquated pick up truck. He shook his head disapprovingly as he strolled to the front of his truck and opened the hood.

F.O. called out to me, "come on, you wimp, bring him over here!"

Picking up on the tone in Frank's voice, I began to feel a bit embarrassed that I couldn't take Ben in a toe to toe fight, but I wasn't about to try and prove myself given the psychotic look in Ben's eyes. So I began a measured retreat to F.O.'s truck. As I neared the truck, F.O. casually reached out, grabbed Ben by the hair and thrust his head into the truck's engine compartment. As if the whole thing was planned, I immediately took the hood of F.O.'s truck and began banging it down on Ben harder and harder. As I did so, Ben's body began to crumple and slowly disappear into truck. When it was over, F.O. casually closed the hood of the truck, and drove off, waving, a cloud of thick green smoke pouring out his tail pipe.

[Hot off the neurons!] I've been reading Lovecraft all week, which resulted in a strange dream. I was in Hell. It was a subway station in Boston with no exits and all the passageways leading back to the center of the station and all the bathrooms out of order. That's almost hackneyed, but fortunately it gets better.

I found a fungus growing on the walls of the subway station and somehow I knew that if I ate the fungus I would be able to dream my way out of the station. This method of escape worked and soon I found myself flying over a spectacular shining city. This part of the dream was definitely inspired by reading Celephaïs. Later I would wake up and wonder "where the hell did that come from?" It was one of those moments where your dream mind comes up with something so much more amazing or witty or beautiful than anything you've ever conceived of while waking, that you have to wonder if you have secret capacities or if you just recall the notion that you saw something amazing rather than the actual vision itself.

In any event, I landed in this city, which turned out to be ruled by Cheech Marin of Cheech and Chong. He was in a public square where droves of cheering people had gathered. Cheech was on a giant glass throne borne by slaves and attended by dancing nymphs throwing rose petals in the air. I quickly understood that this procession was headed to the "golden throne", which in fact was a sort of royal toilet, and that this was Cheech's Public Bowel Movement Procession.

I woke myself up laughing.

Hot off the neurons: I had a series of really bizarre dreams last night, the only one of which I can recall with clarity involved Jennifer Aniston telling my wife's parents that I was a "jackass" and not good enough for their daughter.

[Hot off the neurons:] I dreamed that I was having dinner with a telepath. (I actually know this person in waking life and had just discovered that they were telepathic in the dream, but the details of that are not important here.) The telepath was eating salad. Each time she took a bite she frowned. I asked why.

"This lettuce was sad and miserable," she said. "And these tomatoes..." She winced.

"What the hell are you talking about?"

She explained that the emotional state of an ingredient in its final moments is preserved and is reflected in the taste of the food it used to create.

"Except for chickens," she said, shaking her head. "Chickens are a bunch of mindless zombies."

I just nodded, like I knew what she was talking.  Oddly, it didn't occur to me in the dream that it was strange for lettuce to have an "emotional state."

Estoy cansada del mar duro
y de la tiera misteriosa

[I am weary of the strong sea
and of the mysterious earth]

…

Estoy cansada de las gallinas:
nunca supimos lo que piensan,
y nos miran con ojos secos
sin concedernos importancia.

[I am weary of chickens:
no one knows what they're thinking,
and they look at us with dry eyes
and consider us unimportant.]

—Pablo Neruda

[Hot off the neurons, with explanation here at audiodramatalk, and with apologies to Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff, whoever he is:] I dreamed that there was a horrendous rumbling noise all about my house: sort of like the San Andreas fault ripping a new one mixed with a fireworks display and crashing surf. [Upon waking this was revealed to have been a malfunctioning baby toy that my cat activated in the middle of the night.] I was alone in bed and immediately began to wonder where Stephanie was. I found her in the bathroom where she had taken our daughter's pink "bubble fruit" toothpaste and squirted it into some sort of esoteric symbol on the floor of the bathtub. Our daughter's rubber duckies were positioned at presumably significant locations in the symbol. Needless to say it was a disturbing sight.

"What the hell are you doing!?"

"I'm summoning him," she yelled over the roaring noise.

"Who!?"

"Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff!"

"Who the hell is Mark Yoshi—" I yelled as I chased her through the house to the living room "—moto Nemcoff!?"  By this time we had reached the backyard, where a tremendous helicopter had landed: it had four whirly twirly rotors set above a large flying saucer like body; a gangway had been lowered onto and completely crushed my favourite lawn chair.

"He's taking me away, Brad," she yelled over the roar of the helicopter's swooshing blades.

"Who is taking you where!?"

"Mark Fucking Yoshimoto Nemcoff!"

"Right, who the fuck is that! That's what I've been asking!"

"He's going to make sure that Fox never produces another show like Fringe ever again!" [We don't watch much TV, honestly, but we did recently suffer through an episode of this bit of Fox's propaganda campaign against science and reason and good dialogue.]

[There was more, but, much like the above, it isn't worth bothering you with.]

Somewhat hot off the neurons: The night my daughter Ingrid was born, I dreamed that I was in a town right out of an old west movie. There was a dirt road running through the town and a bunch of stores lining the road with raised wooden walkways in front of them. The memorable thing, however, was the primary form of transportation in town: a conveyance the rear-end of which was a motorcycle and the front end of which was a live steer. The rider held onto the steer's horns like handlebars. Its front legs galloped along, as the engine whined and rear wheel spat out mud and dust propelling the frantic half-bovine along at breakneck pace. I have a vivid image of the look of fear in the steer's eyes.

From the dream archives (and dedicated to nef):

A while ago I dreamed that I was sitting in a bar eavesdropping on an insanely long winded discussion of sports. I don't need dreams for this kind of thing, it happens all the time. I don't really follow professional sports, at least not the ones on television in the U.S., and this fact has often made me a conversational outcast. Back in the dream I was fed up with that. I had had enough. I resolved then and there to become a sports fanatic.

The dream skipped forward and I found myself in my room, which was not my room in the real world, but some amalgamation of all the rooms I have ever lived in on my own, except my walls were draped with memorabilia from two different sports: Sumo and Cricket. There were posters of (presumably) famous sumo wrestlers, there were grass stained cricket bats, trophies with bowlers mid-throw and a bunch of random paraphernalia that, I have no doubt, are not in any way associated with either sport.



When I woke up from this dream, I was really excited to make it a reality. I decided that I would, in fact, learn everything about sumo and cricket and when people launched into their drivel about who traded whom or who threw or hit what where and when, I'd riposte with details on the latest sumo match and bore them into submission by recounting cricket matches. This enthusiasm lasted only about a day before it crawled slowly onto a mental back burner where it evaporated into the idea equivalent of a milk stain. Occasionally, however, I still check the torrent sites for recordings of grand sumo matches. (By the way, when searching for torrents of sumo, one pr0n torrent always turns up entitled Girl Sumo School! Wtf?)

Preliminary

Yesterday I managed to piss off my friends (e.g., symmetrian ) and my family (e.g., my daughter) and as recompense my brain delivered this disjointed nonsense to me. Hot off the neurons:

Part the first

I was at a "let's learn to embalm" party. Well, I was at a party and I was apparently there to learn how to embalm things. It was all a bit strange. I even felt uncomfortable about it in the dream. The party was BYOC—bring-your-own-carcass. I had brought a thing that was not quite a deer and not quite dog and not quite a cross between the two of them, and yet this is the best way to describe it. It had hooves and I had drained it of blood and scooped out its brain by way of preliminaries to the main event.

The first step was to put our carcasses into metal trash cans filled with acrid smelling bubbling liquor that. As I did so, mine begin to move and wobble. "It's alive!" a woman next me cried, and everyone gave me deeply disappointing glances, as if to say: "Don't you know better than to bring a living thing to an embalming party? Jeesh!" The host came over to my trash can, shaking his head and grumbling and I started shouting protests. "But I took out it's brain!" "It doesn't have nay blood for chrissakes!" And my personal favorite: "It wasn't alive this morning!"

Part the Second

I had a subsequent dream where I was watching events unfold in which I did not participate at all. I was watching a cowboy rope a steer. First, he cast his lasso over the thing's head, but then he abandoned the rope, so the steer ran free with the rope dangling from his neck. The cowboy then picked up a blue disposable plastic cup and walked over to the side of the field where he held up the cup. As he did so a strange figure dressed in an orange jump suit and having a head a bit like the Jack-in-the-Box mascot came to stand on the periphery. Somehow I knew that the steer had some style of sympathy with this stranger and that it would trust it. The stranger in the jumpsuit then raised a similar blue plastic cup and beckoned to the steer. When the stranger did so, the steer wandered reluctantly to the cowboy and allowed the cowboy to pick up the rope and lead the steer away. I saw variations of this scene at least three times and the dream began to repeat faster in smaller increments until I was finally awoken. Sometimes I seem to get caught in repeated loops in dreams; usually it occurs when I go to sleep worried about something.



Ah, the brain.

Hot off the neurons: I dreamed that I was in Argentina. I somehow knew it was Argentina, but I'm fairly sure Argentina doesn't look like it did in my dream. It looked like Norway—or at least how I imagine Norway to look based on a visit to Sweden. So it probably, in fact, just looked like Sweden. There were fjords, that's all I know. I was walking with Stephanie on a high promontory overlooking a fjord. We were walking along a dirt road and we came upon a wagon that was parked along side the road. The truck it had been attached to was gone and the wagon was tilted up so we could see its bizarre cargo. There were three rows of nine heavy wicker baskets. Each basket was about three feet by two feet and completely filled with a big giant head with an ugly wrinkly face. I am pretty sure the image for the heads was pulled off whatever memories Spirited Away left in my head.


As I approached the heads, one of them opened its eyes and started mumbling. I couldn't hear what it was saying and I kept listening trying to understand it and completely failing even though I somehow knew it was just mumbled English.

The scene then changed entirely and I was now in a desert area near a café—some kind of truck stop like you might find in Nevada. Somehow I knew an atomic bomb was detonated here every ten minutes and the next blast was imminent. Large blast shields were erected all around the cafe and I knew I had to seek shelter behind one quickly. But, as I was running to the closest one, I saw a helpless cat wandering around. I dove towards the cat, and as I did it leaped up into the air to meet me. I grabbed the cat mid-air and stuffed him into my jacket before landing and rolling in the dust behind one of the shields just as the atomic bomb went off.

The event itself is sort of hazy. I don't think I dreamed about the actual explosion; I just sort of skipped through to a scene of dust and small fires littered around the desert. That was when I noticed Matthew McConaughey laying on a lawn chair. His hair and baseball cap were smoking from blast. He looked at me and shouted: "I just figured out the Andalusian Pantyfish Conjecture!" (With apologies too lord_whimsy.)

Hot off the neurons: I dreamed that my primary form of transportation was a swiveling desk chair. I drove it to the wedding of my friend, Sarah. I had moments of cognitive dissonance when I needed to signal a turn, but had no turn signal with which to do so. Anyway, at the wedding I got so drunk that I collapsed in the aisle just as she was walking to the altar. She stopped when she reached me and bent down and whispered in my ear: "Dummy, you forgot to request a specimen title policy for the foreclosure auction this month."

And she was right. Thanks, Sarah!

Hot of the neurons: I dreamt that there were computer problems at work that involved cat5 cabling growing out of control in the walls. I was "hacking" the cables to pieces with a machete and pulling them from the walls. Because it was messy work, I was wearing jeans. It became apparent to me that I needed pesticides to deal with the cables, and I left the office to procure some. My dream didn't cover buying the actual pesticides; instead, it just switched scenes to the point where was I returning to the office. We had an office manager who was, bizarrely, Michelle Forbes—who I always of think of as Miranda Zero—and she sighed when I walked through the lobby.

She said: "You know, there have been a lot of complaints about your appearance lately. I'm not supposed to tell you, but we just sent a letter to your father."

This completely threw me for a loop. Sure I was wearing jeans, but I was ripping these cables out of the wall and it was messy. Did they really expect me to ruin an expensive suit? I argued with her for a while before demanding we take the matter to the managing partner. I stomped angrily down the hall to the managing partner's office. I could hear the cat5 cabling writhing in the walls and I kept looking at the can of pesticides, which had all sorts of inscrutable writing on it that I couldn't look at closely because the letters moved and swirled and generally made my head ache.

I enter the managing partner's office, Michelle Forbes close on my heels, and the partner is, for some odd reason, John McGinley. I start raving at him. How dare he write my father about my appearance without even talking to me first. Then I realize he can only communicate by moving his eyebrows, and I say, "Damn you and your stupid eyebrows." He responds by scrunching his eyebrows up emphatically, then raising the left one once and the right one twice. I have no idea what it means.

I storm out of his office and go to my own, intent on sending a series of series of angry email messages about the affair, but the cat5 cabling has completely overgrown the place and I can't even get to my desk. Somewhere along the way I've lost the can of pesticides and now the whole trip to the store has been wasted. I started shouting in the hallway, screaming into my office, which makes the cabling writhe only harder and I realize it's feeding off my anger. I begin to suspect that the cabling somehow engineered the entire situation for the purpose of making me angry so I could feed it. Just then I catch a glimmer, through the cables, of my new air conditioner (which is, in waking life, located in my apartment) and there is a "holy" light beaming on it.

From the dream archives: I had a dream that was narrated by Rod Sterling, or, at least, someone that sounded a lot like him. This was the highlight of the dream.

[Scene opens in the hallway of my office, near the water fountain.]

Narrator: It was a time when men were men, women were women, and regular expressions were regular expressions.

[L., a paralegal at my office, exits the lady's room and approaches me, a disgusted look on her face.]

Narrator: [Mumbles inaudibly.]

L.: The bathroom is so disgusting here. I just cut a hole in the wall and took a crap in there instead.

Narrator: [sotto voce] Egads.

[L. notes the scared, astonished look on my face.]

L.: Yeah, there's chickens all over this place, didn't you know that?

Me: Chickens?

Narrator: [mumble mumble] Yes. Chickens. [mumble mumble]

L.: Yeah. That's what you call a turd someone's hidden in an office. Jeesh!

Narrator: Oh. [more mumbling.]

From the dream archives: I dreamed that I had purchased a fancy new server. Not just some desktop, but a big honking chunk of retro-iron from back in the day. It was huge. It shipped in a big wooden crate. I was at Points South and unpacking the thing with austonianb. He was wielding a pry bar and enthusiastically ripping planks off the side of the box. We eventually got the thing out of its crate and we noticed a large—for lack of a better word—bladder attached to the side of the server. Inside the bladder was a large lump of pink flesh. Long thin tendrils extended from the flesh through a hole in the bladder. As we stared at the thing, a bit of blood dripped on the floor. It was seriously disgusting. I recall the enthusiasm on austonianb's face draining away. Then he picked up a sheet of illustrated instructions that showed how the tendrils were intended to be attached to the server's CPU. Suddenly a realization hit him and he declared: "My god, it's meat cooled!"

Hot off the neurons: I had a long bizarre dream, much of which is lost to me, but which ended with a series of scenes in which I rode as a passenger on the back of a giant seat turtle that flapped its way through the sky of a twisted metropolis. I can't describe the city other than to say: please go read (well, look at) The Arrival by Shaun Tan. The high rise buildings in the city had giant gaping toothy maws into which we flew the turtle. Flying through the mouthes, we passed into some form of wormhole that brought the turtle and its crew to a different city constructed in the same style. The guy driving the turtle was beating the thing on its head like a madman. It seemed to be the only way to bend the turtle to his will, but I just felt horrible for the poor turtle. At some point we flew through one of the mouths and landed in a room that contained what appeared to be a model or small scale replica of the city we had just been flying over. The driver pointed at a tiny spec meandering through the small buildings of the model and I realized he was pointing at us! I squinted and I could see myself riding on a tiny turtle through the model city.