Of Cats and Comics

Okay so I had a very weird night this morning.

I surface from unconsciousness at around 5:30 am, still confused from some forgotten dream. I was going to immediately slip back under, when I catch this noise on the edge of my hearing. My first thought was, naturally, that it was some Fatal Frame ghost here to devour my soul, but then when I struggle back to awakeness, I realise it sounds more like a television set left on. But I could see my hallway from my room, and there were no flickering lights, and my parents' room was dark.

As I strained my ears trying to identify it, I realised the sound was more like a television left on with people speaking continuously, but like muffled and piped in from the end of a long tube. I curiously wonder if it's a neighbour's set left on, or possibly watching some final Euro cup match, but the dialogue was incomprehensible, and too continuous to be anything from a programme.

So I lay there on my bed, irritated to death about the noise but trying to get back to sleep. About five minutes into the repetitive background soundtrack, the sound gracefully morphs into a cat's long MRRREEOOOOOOWWL and I realise that I awoke to the sound of kitty porn. I mean, sheesh, get a room! Now I understand why cartoons always show people throwing boots at cats at night.

Anyway, I get back to sleep. A couple hours later I'm having another dream. I'm not making any of this up, and I cannot believe how insane my brain gets when it's trying to organise thoughts while I'm in hibernation mode.

The dream is about this game show called "Man Up", which is a mind-over-matter type show and tries to see if their contestants can overcome certain problems by just "manning up and doing it". This episode, contestants were myopics and were challenged to overcome their shortsightedness by not wearing their glasses, and see if their eyesight improved over the course of the game. Their glasses were kept in an easy-to-access location and surrounded by cameras, so that any contestant succumbing to temptation would be eliminated from the game.

There's a mix of male and female contestants, and they were locked up in a house and forced to not use their spectacles for a week. One part my brain televised was a short interview of one of the women, after a day of blurry vision, and the hosts were asking her "Have any of you started dating?" and the woman said, "What? No!" and one of the hosts said, jokingly, "Yeah, because the love triangle would be too big, right?" And they all laugh, but the woman stops suddenly with a serious face and pulls out a huge chart depicting the romantic relationships of all the contestants.

My brain wisely cuts to the next scene, and it's the end of Day 1, and with everyone managing to survive without their eyewear for a day. So in the Survivor-style wrap-up, there is a game challenge for the remaining participants. And the game works like this: they each pick a guy from the two teams and task them to write two four-panel comic strips each. The catch is that when one strip is placed above the other, each column is supposed to be coherent when read downwards.

Still with me so far? The catch is that the first strip has to be about Mr Bean, and the second strip has to be about bananas, and the dialogue in each column-comic, when read, must produce a lie, or a false statement. Also, they are given little pictures on small squares, which they must incorporate into the first comic.

So my subconscious is looking at one of the strips, and it's amazing. The top row shows four men on an island, separated into four panels but it's one of those panorama comics, and the last one is Mr Bean. And this particular guy got pictures of body parts, so he incorporated them into his four men. I remember the picture of Mr Bean in the last panel was eating a banana. And the thing is, he wrote his dialogue under the four cards, so I couldn't see what it was. The strip below was made up of anthropomorphic bananas, each saying some short catchphrase, and I only remember in the last panel the words "You, and me." And I was sooooo freaking excited to see what the downwards colums would read, but I couldn't because they were blocked by the cards, and then, to my utmost horror and disappointment, I woke up.

Scumbag brain,
The Edna Man