Galus and the Horrible Adventure

Bill Galus and I were driving around outside Springfield and took an obscure road. The road ended at the top of an alpine meadow. The air at that height was otherworldly, and the ordinary world was far below, a misty panorama. On top of the height was a house, abandoned and neglected. We entered. In the first room we saw Playboy magazines scattered around and — what Bill didn’t see — the putrescent corpse of a woman, lying on a sofa. In the next room was another sofa with something covered by tarp. I asked Bill to take a look and, sure enough, there was another corpse of a woman, this one even more decayed. We realized we were involved in one of those murder mysteries you read about in fiction. We would have to somehow summon the police.

Going back outside we took in more of the hilltop. There were farm buildings around the house, one of them a chicken house that, with Dwin and Mickey (in another dream, I think) we had once snuck into by crawling beneath the floor, and we had stolen a chicken. 

There were people walking around the grounds, Amish-like people in appearance, but zombie-like, walking slowly in groups. Something suggested to us that these people were cannibals, that in this rarefied atmosphere bodies decayed slowly, were good eating for a long time. While we were peeking at these inhabitants from around corners, a group of them came up on us and captured us.

A little  boy — he seemed like a negro — picked up a gnarled Thomas Hart Benton-esque negro’s foot that I’d seen lying on the ground, and took a bite of it. It was oily and well-browned, like a piece of broiled chicken. The cannibals hauled Bill off, but I managed to get away and evade them for a while. I found my camera and tried to take pictures — for legal evidence — frustrated at the time-consuming difficulty of changing lenses. But then the inhabitants caught up with me.

During some part of the dream, my boss Bruce, the mortician, was present and was trying, with a sort of lascivious enjoyment, to repair one of the corpse's wounds by stuffing it with tufts of its own pubic hair.

Explanation of Symbols:

The alpine hill with a building is like a place Mickey and I saw on a hike a few weeks ago.

The day before I had seen Playboys for sale at a yard sale and had an urge to buy some. Also, I have found pornography in abandoned buildings, left there by boys, presumably.

I had recently seen Kathy Howell lying on her sofa, like the corpses were lying, but far from an unappealing body (and I indulged in a fantasy about her). 

The day before, Janet Oursborne and I had seen a sports car convertible with a tarp over the passenger seat, and I said, "that's where he keeps his women." 

I recently read an article about a black painter who paints Benton-esque distortions of people.

It sometimes occurs to me to think that perhaps sex without love is decrepit.