Dreams – Josephine Frances K

Dreams

On trial period at a supermarket. Fired for stealing Singaporean Kit Kats. On my way out, I wanted to buy a plastic bathmat, but then saw a woman giving an in-aisle demonstration and explaining its use as a contraceptive.

An aggressive evil pig was charging at us then running away. Up a hill then into a small valley. Somebody had to stop its reign of terror. I managed to catch it, and realised just how evil and unlike other pigs it was. It put one leg on me which was so heavy that it started to sink into my leg flesh.

An email spam bot took my face and mapped it in 3D. The bot sent a deep-fake porn video to practically everyone I’ve ever met, under a misleading title, so it was widely watched and they all thought it was me.

Greta Thunberg writes an autobiography about how she overcame severe drug addiction. Her publishers turn the book into a 1km tall narrow cardboard tower and the pages are sculpted into a spiral staircase inside. If you care about the environment you have to descend to the bottom at great personal risk.

Special patch of ground where a dead man is buried without a coffin. It stops his body from decomposing fully. After 100 years, a team cuts around his body’s outline and lifts him out of the ground with the layers of soil like a piece of cake. They bring him back to life, and he attends a party to celebrate the successful reanimation. One celebratory cake is gourmet with thin layers of cream, fresh fruit, wafer and sponge. The other “cakes” are slices of a velvet couch the party planners found on a roadside, and an extremely leathery dried up Panettone.

I cloned our cat Silvia then accidentally spilled a kind of poison on the clones. I put the clones in acid baths to try to wash the poison off. Two cats drowned in the baths, and the three survivors were brain damaged and covered in horrific wounds, missing half their faces. I realised the clones needed to be put out of their misery, so lured them with bacon, then stabbed them in the necks. Silvia solemnly watched the whole process. I didn’t know what to do with the cat corpses. I began receiving purple envelopes in the mail with letters that read in nice calligraphy “I know what you’ve done” and “It’s a shame, you would’ve been able to claim a $5,000 inheritance from your aunt if not for this”.

In a car with my mum and sister. Mum was driving. She turned a blind corner, and a truck was headed straight for us. The moment before impact stretched out to about three seconds, and we experienced telepathy. There wasn’t any time to say “goodbye” and “I love you”. It was more like each of us being able to hear the others thoughts along the lines of “we’re about to die” and “this is it” and “there’s no way out”.

Reunited with rhythmic gymnastics club, although none of the girls were the same people I knew. We had a levitation competition, where we all floated to the ceiling like helium balloons. I could see the others struggling to stay up and I was determined to prove myself. I knew I was going to win, like I used to in “wall sit”. After I outlasted the others, Kim Dotcom’s wife bullied me for wearing the wrong shade of foundation in high school. We all pointed out that most of us did that, and so did she.

A popular NZ poet wrote a think piece about “upstairs downstairs cafes”. She sabotaged me at a hospo job interview by telling me to climb down a ladder, and I landed in the lap of another interviewee in the middle of their interview. Meanwhile, I was waiting on the outcome of a job interview I’d done the week before. I got an email saying I narrowly missed out and someone else got the job, and they named her in the email. I waited around at the library-supermarket for her and tore books and groceries off shelves that she’d have to clean up.

I was stranded in a marsh maze with approximately 30 of my peers. We knew we’d be there for a whole year before being rescued if we couldn’t find our way out. All we had to live on were packaged chocolates scattered throughout the marsh, and we spent the days foraging for these. On our final day before being rescued, we assembled all different kinds of Kit Kats into 1m long rods. I was the one responsible for handing them out. One by one, I let my peers choose which chocolate rod they wanted. Some were normal kinds like hazelnut, but others were pizza or lemongrass flavoured. After being rescued, we resumed our degrees in soccer studies at Elam Art School. Our assignments centred on finding ways to integrate soccer into everyday life.

Living in a 30cm x 2m room in a garden beside a murky pond in Brisbane. I rifled through someone’s stuff in a drawer they’d left in the room. Hoped to find a pearl choker but only found necklaces made of large translucent glass beads. The room wasn’t wide enough for me to stand front-on, but I still liked it. In the main house I talked to the flatmate I had a crush on. He suggested we do a raunchy ballroom dance set to a fishing show theme song. The dance would end with us pressed up against each other. I could see it happening in his mind’s eye.