Gary Panter blog

As a youngster, I had the same bad dreams over and over:

One recurring dream induced panic and fear by demonstrations of extreme contrast. Various scenarios would be superimposed and develop simultaneously.

On one level would be a chess board with abstract game pieces that appeared variously as colored triangular flags or complicated organic accretions. The pieces moved by themselves and left dotted lines that traced their momentary progress.

Loud voices would be talking about me and what might happen to me.

The light would get really bright, until it was painful and blinding, then it would dim into undifferentiated blackness.

A choir would be singing; speeding up until incomprehensible, then slowed down to white noise static.

The amplitude of the choir would slowly become unbearably loud then fade to near silence.

This was the most awesome of the repeating dreams.

As a tot, I had recurring night horrors:

The house was surrounded by soldiers, marching back and forth, on guard duty. The sun was setting. I went to the window and spoke to one of them. "Is that a real gun?" I would ask.

Then he would shoot me.

As a kid, I suffered from a series of recurring nightmares:

I was a jet fighter pilot in a dog fight with a Halloween Witch on a broom. She shot me down and I crashed in an open field. Out of the shattered and burning wreck of the plane I would climb, only to confront the witch. As I sought to escape her grasp, more and more and more fingers would sprout and branch off her hands, giving her a horrifying advantage in the chase.

As a child, I suffered from a series of recurring dreams:

I was a pirate, named Captain Kidd, sailing around the world in search of the fabled Magic Ant Eating Penguin. When at last I found the Magic Ant Eating Penguin, he used his magic to turn me into a pile of sawdust. Then, the Magic Ant Eating Penguin mistook me for an ant hill and pierced me with his long, sharp, pointy, beak and I would slowly deflate like a rubber tire with a maddening, ever diminishing, hissing sound.