Blog 2006

Inspired by Winsor McCay’s Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend comic strips, a collection of which my brother gave me for Christmas, I have undertaken a series of psychonautical investigations involving eating Welsh rarebits before bed, the results of which are compelling enough to justify the inclusion of casein among the many substances documented in the Vaults of Erowid. While my endeavors haven’t exactly been good science—I’ve also been taking vitamins that contain high doses of B12, which reputedly enhances recall of dreams—I have come to believe in the psychic potency of rarebit. The night of my first experiment, my sleep ranged from the paralysis and dopplegängerism and hypnagogic rush of non-REM night terrors to the lucidity of early morning REM nightmares. The second night’s series of visions concluded with me facing a currency exchange automat in some side chamber of the student union of a Big-Ten-ish research university, the seats of whose indoor sports amphitheater were covered with sleeping tourists who had read in a travel guide that one could spend the night there for free. The automat dispensed giant, high-value Dutch coins, and a sign posted next to it forbade its use by Turkish citizens, whose government had outlawed the images with which the coins were cast.

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Hilary has been applying to graduate school, and she sent off half of her applications last Friday. Early this morning, she was awoken by a supernatural and seemingly external voice that whispered, Go look at your resume. After a moment of the sort of shock and inability to move that one quite reasonably would feel after such an encounter, Hilary got up to check a copy of her resume, and she found that she had in fact failed to correct one of Word’s autoformatting helps, whereby a date was stuck onto the end of line rather than the beginning, a small enough error, though one fears what message the goblin will bring next.

Here is Hilary’s most recent painting, “Live Free or Die”:

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Hilary’s brother, Asa, lives in a rented house in rural Vermont. Yesterday, he and a friend heard a rustling coming from the upright piano. They peeked behind it and saw a rat. Asa ran out of the room and came back wearing heavy welder’s gloves. He kicked at the piano, and the rat jumped out and rushed back and forth confusedly, stopping only when a sheet of paper was dropped on it. Asa picked up the rat, who bit into the glove and didn’t let go. He walked the rat out to the chopping block and cut it in half with an axe.