{"id":71,"date":"2013-01-07T06:30:21","date_gmt":"2013-01-07T11:30:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tmcamp.com\/yesod\/?p=71"},"modified":"2013-01-08T17:27:24","modified_gmt":"2013-01-08T22:27:24","slug":"the-fuzzy-pink-octopus-spider-monster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tmcamp.com\/yesod\/the-fuzzy-pink-octopus-spider-monster\/","title":{"rendered":"the fuzzy pink octopus spider monster"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the first dream I can remember \u2014 obviously, it\u2019s not the first dream I ever had. That\u2019s long gone now. But this is the earliest one I can remember...<\/p>\n

...we\u2019re driving in the car, my two brothers and me. Out mother is behind the wheel. We\u2019re on our way to the grocery store. My older brother Scott sits up front, talking to our mom. My brother Jim and I are in the back seat, holding our pet rabbits. They are white, a perpetual look of panic in their pink little eyes.<\/em><\/p>\n

I realize somehow that something is not quite right with the rabbits. I see a vision within the dream, a flashback of our side yard where the hutch is kept. I see a wispy apparition flowing through the air towards them. It is pale pink, long snakelike arms or tentacles trailing through the air, reaching out blindly to tap along the fence like a blind man seeking out an open path. It is covered in stringy hair, pale pink and white, a gaping black hole of mouth and wild, insane red eyes.<\/p>\n

Hate pours off of it, clouding the air with ribbons of red, like a drop of blood in water. The monster finds the hutch, bends back the cheap plywood lid, and drifts inside. The rabbits explode in a frenzy of stamps and squeals, then go silent.<\/p>\n

Somehow this spider, this octopus, this monster has split itself into two. It shifts form, taking the place of the two rabbits \u2014 are they dead? did it eat them? \u2014 it becomes them, impersonates them . . . only recognizable by its hateful red eyes staring out from the two imposters.<\/p>\n

These same eyes looking up at me in the backseat of our family station wagon, the lengthening ears becoming long snaking tendrils filling the car, reaching out in the golden afternoon light to wrap around my mother\u201ds throat, my brother\u2019 arms, our faces, muffling our screams...<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t have an exact date for this one, but we had the rabbits when we lived at the house on Peppertree in Dublin, California. Which puts it sometime in the mid 1970\u2019s. <\/p>\n

I was probably six or seven years old. And the horror of those tentacles waving in the car haunted me for weeks. I still feel a pang of it even now.<\/p>\n

As silly as it sounds, a shapeshifting fuzzy octopus spider monster is really pretty terrifying. Especially at that age.<\/p>\n

Years later, I saw it again: There\u2019s scene in the movie Poltergeist<\/a> where a malevolent spider-like creature prevents the mother from rescuing her children...<\/p>\n

\"20130106-112241.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

That\u2019s about right. Dye it pink and you\u2019ve got the creature from my dream, more or less.<\/p>\n

(I\u2019ll ignore the question as to why something from my dream in the mid 70\u2019s would show up in an 80\u2019s movie. Sometimes it\u2019s better not to know. We\u2019ll chalk it up to coincidence.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the first dream I can remember \u2014 obviously, it\u2019s not the first dream I ever had. That\u2019s long gone now. But this is the earliest one I can remember... ...we\u2019re driving in the car, my two brothers and me. Out mother is behind the wheel. We\u2019re on our way to the grocery store. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wp_typography_post_enhancements_disabled":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[119,120,117,115,116,108,82,121,111,118,110,122,109,112,114,113],"class_list":["post-71","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dreams","tag-1970s","tag-1980s","tag-afternoon","tag-brother","tag-driving","tag-monsters","tag-mother","tag-movies","tag-octopus","tag-peppertree","tag-pink","tag-poltergeist","tag-rabbits","tag-spider","tag-station-wagon","tag-tentacles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tmcamp.com\/yesod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tmcamp.com\/yesod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tmcamp.com\/yesod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tmcamp.com\/yesod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tmcamp.com\/yesod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.tmcamp.com\/yesod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":100,"href":"https:\/\/www.tmcamp.com\/yesod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions\/100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tmcamp.com\/yesod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tmcamp.com\/yesod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tmcamp.com\/yesod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}