Dreamscape
I had crashed my car in the desert while on the way to my sister’s wedding. I had swerved to miss a moose in the road and crashed into a cactus on the roadside. In the back of my mind I felt that something was fundamentally wrong with that scenario, but the important thing was that I find help.
A sign nearby advertised a repair shop. I couldn’t read the letters on it, but it had a picture of my car crashed into a cactus next to a picture of my father with a wrench, so it must be for a repair shop. I started walking up the road in the direction the sign pointed.
As I was walking a car pulled up beside me. It was a green station wagon with wooden sides, just like the one my grandmother drove. The driver was a short, balding man, whom I was sure was a famous comedian whose name escaped me. The passenger was a blonde supermodel type, who smiled invitingly at me. They offered to drive me to the repair shop, though I hadn’t said where I was going. I climbed into the back seat.
After we’d been driving a while the supermodel turned and looked over the back of the seat at me. Her eyes were a pearlescent sky-blue with no pupils, and her mouth was full of serrated shark’s teeth. It was obvious now that I was being abducted by aliens. She leapt at me but I caught her easily; she didn’t seem to have any weight at all. I threw her out the window, which I couldn’t remember having been open before that point. She bounced lightly along the road behind us, like a balloon caught in a breeze.
The driver turned to me and howled. He was orange and his eyes were on stalks, but otherwise he looked the same. I climbed into the front seat next to him and we began to fight over the wheel. We swerved wildly around the fortunately deserted road. Suddenly a voice came from the back seat.
“You know,” said the supermodel, who was somehow back in the car, “with all the possible ways for life to evolve on other planets it seems very strange that there would be humanoid aliens at all. Something just seems off about that.”
“I agree,” said the driver, who was somehow talking calmly and howling at the same time, “I always hate it when sci-fi stories use humanoid aliens; only the human mind could be egocentric enough to assume that aliens look like humans.”
“This whole day has been off, actually,” said myself, or a copy thereof, sitting in back next to the shark-toothed supermodel. “I don’t even have a sister, so why was I driving to her wedding?”
I looked around confused. Though we were still wrestling over the wheel, the car was no longer swerving. It was driving straight down the road at a leisurely pace. We passed the moose standing by the side of the road. It shrugged, as if to say it didn’t understand what was going on either.
“What we’re trying to say,” the howling, stalk-eyed driver said, “is that if you meet two humanoid aliens, then you must be dreaming…”
“… and the real alien already has my mind!” copy-me finished.
I awoke screaming on a metal table. A reddish-purple, cylindrical creature shambled over to me on a dozen interconnected legs. In one claw it held an unrecognizable device, which it held near my face. There was a hiss of gas and then I was falling through a pearly, sky-blue mist.
I was driving through the desert on the way to my sister’s wedding. Suddenly, a moose ran in front of me.
