Darren Naish is zoologist famous, and I follow his Tetrapod Zoology blog from time to time.  There he’s talked about his hobbyist efforts at increasing the population of frogs.  Since his own pond reached a point where it produced a surplus of tadpoles, he thought to donate those taddies to other people, carrying them hence in buckets.  This had a miserable failure rate, often 100% mortality in transit.

David Cronenberg’s movie ExistenZ featured virtual reality units that looked like a pulsating frog that plugged into your spine via a tooth on a string of intestine, if I’m remembering that right.  These were assembled in a shoddy factory with little conveyor belts of biological chunks.  That movie debuted in 1999, but I had almost the exact same imagery occur in a dream I had around 1987.

I was headed into a factory to observe things for some reason.  To work?  To gain entrance, one had to squeeze a woman’s naked breast one time.  I was about eleven years old at the time, you know what interests were percolating, but this was a cold and impersonal situation.  Was the woman even alive?

Inside the factory, there were conveyor belts of mutated and mutilated bodies and chunks of fish and amphibians, being used for I don’t know what.  The conveyor belts broke down and emptied into five gallon buckets half filled with water.  I looked into one.  I remember almost nothing else about this dream.

This one story factory did not have an especially high ceiling, and was also similar to the one from ExistenZ, but with less bamboo.  Me and my siblings had to walk long distances sometimes in Seattle, which meant passing many faceless little utility buildings that could hold any kind of business.  Maybe they were full of Daredevil ninjas distributing heroin for The Hand.  Maybe they had a bunch of scamway victims paying off their losses with light day labor, threading spiral binding into pamphlets for other pyramid schemes.  The one story faceless warehouse near you – what lurks within those doors?

–