Sometime between 3:00 and 5:00 am I was awoken this morning by the bizarre half-sounds of Alpha Blondy’s “Cocody Rock” irregularly wafting into my bedroom from downstairs. I say “half-sounds” because there was a box fan blaring slightly-warmer-than-room-temperature air in my general direction, which had a muffling effect. It’s the same sound that has a happy way of buffering the bubbling early-morning sounds my children make sometimes when they arise to play with Legos or stuffed animals in the living room.
In this case, the muffling effect was not quite desirable. The music was blaring, some part of my subconscious could tell, such that it became integrated with my dreams; however, it was not quite loud enough to fully awaken me for what seemed like hours. I have a memory of hearing very strange music in my dreams. Plus, just feeling hot and sweaty didn’t help things. The cumulative effect of the strange environment was that I felt delirious, feverish, insane in my sleep. Why was reggae blaring? Why did it sound so far away? Why could I only hear the occasional few words from the chorus—the higher notes? Why did the familiar songs sound so strained? My subconscious decided things must not be right and adjusted accordingly in my dream storyline.
In the dream, I found some kind of long, slim brown thing stuck on the palm of my left hand, near the fingers. It wouldn’t come off. I got a short knife and cut it off my hand. To my surprise, more emerged from my palm, and I realized with horror that I had just severed the head of a tapeworm that was evidently living in my hand and arm.
It regrew a head very easily and snaked out of my hand until about a foot and a half of it was flailing around looking kind of angry. When the tapeworm’s head flailed close to mine, it was exaggeratedly huge and nasty-looking. It had two teeth, but the mouth opened laterally, and the teeth were on either side of the mouth rather than top and bottom. The worm snapped its formidable jaws at me and rolled its hideous, transparent eyes. Up close, the worm looked white and grey. Back when this whole thing started, it had been dark brown, like a string of seaweed.
I waffled about what to do. I kept the thing at arm’s length—or I tried—and thought about cutting it again. But I knew it would just regrow a head. Maybe I could cut it again, and again, and again, until all of it had snaked out of me. Surely it couldn’t regrow as fast as I could cut. But this was a gruesome matter to consider.
Fortunately, Alpha Blondy interrupted, and brought me out of my crazy other-world where a tapeworm was wriggling out of a hole in my hand and threatening to bite my head off.
I mumbled to River, “Why is Alpha Blondy playing downstairs?” He was, unfortunately, in deep sleep. Without responding to me, he got out of bed and went down to investigate. The music stopped. He returned to the bedroom. “What happened?” I asked. I had horrible images of little elves spinning discs on our stereo system in the middle of the night. Worse, our own children doing same.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Your iPod was playing.” I remembered I had left it face-up on the couch. We have two kittens running loose in the house. One of them must have run across it. I wondered how many songs had been playing, and if the kittens were able to mess with any settings by accident.
“What was the next song?” I asked. “Were the songs on shuffle?”
Like it mattered. River was already back asleep.