Let me say right away – I hadn’t taken any substances, but today I had a terrible dream. It started with some thugs coming to our apartment and saying they needed us to deal with a problem at a local laboratory. So, my dad and I went. And it was chaos outside. I distinctly remember driving through our neighborhood. At first, everything seemed normal, but then we saw a moose on the right, and I told him to slow down. At that moment, a bear with cubs approached from behind, and I started tapping on the window to tease her. Naturally, she lunged at the car and almost broke the window, but we drove away. Then, the transformations began, like in a psychedelic trip – my father started to look like a wizard from the Quarter, the world around us began to turn gray, and gravity rotated 90 degrees (although it didn’t affect our car). But the elephants, grazing in the local kindergarten, fell onto the fence with their backs and somehow shriveled up disgustingly, as if something had sucked the moisture out of them. The sky began to darken and turned into space. My father said it was time to go home, and we accelerated. The whole world began to flicker like a strobe light. I jumped out of the car right in front of the entrance to our building and sharply, decisively pulled open the front door. Behind the door was all-consuming darkness.
I woke up with a terrible heartbeat and jumped out of bed. The cat was howling hysterically in the room and was defecating profusely on my carpet.