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Another dream. No action in this one (against zombies or otherwise) I'm afraid, and the weird neighbors living in the apartment downstairs could potentially explain this one. They always cook these elaborately prepared meals. I know the planning is elaborate because I can hear and more importantly smell them cooking for hours at a time. Some odd ginger/saffron aroma starts filtering in right after kickoff and by the two-minute warning of the fourth quarter; it's grown stronger and mutated to some sort of unexplainable curry flavor. They're serious about it. I know.

So how does this pertain to my dream? Well, in my dream I was sitting and watching TV, as is par for the excitement level of most of my dreams. I was watching a sort of hybrid between a cooking show and a sitcom. The chef would come on and everyone would clap and he'd be dressed as a postal worker, except he'd have a huge sauté pan in his bag instead of mail. And he'd go up into the audience and ask for someone's wallet, then take it down, squirt some olive oil on it and flambé it in the pan. The credit cards would sizzle and sputter and the leather would kind of shrink and darken, and the entire crowd would start cheering and whooping and holding up signs that say "burn, baby burn!" and "Flame = Good!"

Here's where it gets weird. As the wallet sizzles on the stove, the chef ducks under his counter and comes back up wearing overalls. He says something like "let's pump it up!" and the crowd roars louder, frenzied by whatever's in the air over there. The chef then grabs these knobs on his stovetop, huge round metal temples on the smooth Formica surface, and turns each one with great effort, the lights in the studio glowing a brighter and brighter red. Suddenly I notice that there's smoke coming from vents on the side of my television. I'm still calm, noticing the smoke blowing out more as a hammock-stricken businessman on a sunny Sunday afternoon noticing a crow land on the fence of his backyard than a man whose TV's on fire. Flames don't spread though; the vents continue to unleash smoke that somehow doesn't haze the room. I see it, just as it acted in the cartoons of my past, slither and lasso in thick wispy tendrils from the vent to my nose.

I smell it vividly. It smells of the steam shooting up from a baked potato that's just been split open, a huge gob of butter quickly yellowing and melting into translucent streams. It smells of paper in a new book. It smells indescribably like the color purple. I close my eyes to pay more attention to my nose and when I open them again I find that I'm awake. There were no smells in my apartment when I sat up and sniffed out for them, but that doesn't mean that sleep didn't pull a slight-of-hand trick and keep me asleep a few hours longer than the lingering blink that it felt like. If I was actually friendly with my downstairs neighbors I might've gone down there and asked if they had been cooking, but to tell you the truth I kind of like the thought that they weren't. First I feel the snake bite, now I smell the weird Arsenio Legasse TV smells. I'm sure that I'm not alone or special in any way. These dreamtime sensory impulses are just one of those things that are so common that they don't need any notice. I'm kind of giddy though, now that I'm in the club of the sensual elite. Maybe my break-up with Bianca triggered it? Lord knows a year of uncomfortable sleep on the edge of a ratty mattress built for one, followed quickly by record lengths of depression-sleep can knock a few things around in my head.

I did ask my roommate though, who said he didn't smell anything. Although, I really don't trust his nose anymore because he claims that his room doesn't stink either.


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