good evening, welcome to the next episode of insane dream theater

on saturday night (actually early sunday morning - i was up until about 5 that morning), i dreamt that i was driving in a semi with david the coal miner from the amazing race up the side of a mountain in colorado. because the company we were working for was somewhat shady (with the ultra-creepy name the Center for Learning and Knowledge, which sounds like a cult to me, but for which a google search reveals nothing definitive) and involved with the illegal processing and transport of nuclear materials, we needed to have something with us to indicate that we weren't being exposed to unsafe levels of radiation. a canary in the mine, if you will. so, we had a reanimated octupus carcass that had an elephant heart transplanted into it. let's repeat that just in case anyone missed it.

a previously dead octopus that had been brought back to life and given an elephant heart.

to prevent radiation sickness.

anyhow. the three of us are in the cab, and the giant (and i mean probably a 20-foot tentacle span and a head about 3 feet in diameter) octopus is seat belted into the passenger seat. it being my first trip to the Center for Learning and Knowledge, i was concerned about being attacked by the frankenstein octopus who was using its giant tentacles to punch out the windshield and catch birds and bugs to eat on our trip. luckily, it was very happy punching out the windshield and eating birds and bugs. until it accidentally got one of its tentacles fed though the grill on the front of the truck and was sucked under the hood and shot through the engine, like those sad little birds that happen to cross the path of the engine of a boeing jet.

we stopped at the rest stop to make sure the truck would still run, and found that the reanimated octopus was chopped up into small bits, and shot into the air and was somehow magically transformed into tiny, living dinosaurs caught in fishing nets. the tourists at the rest stop were catching tiny, cartoon versions of pterodactyls, brachiosaurus, velociraptors and the like, all wiggling around in their nets. yeah, so they were picking up and carrying around baby, cartoonish dinosaurs in their fishing nets, presumably to take home as pets or surreal little souvenirs.

there was more, once we got to the top of the mountain and checked into our motel rooms, which i remember very clearly for their flimsy doors and beds that took up the entire depth of the rooms, and there was something i do not remember clearly that had the pants staying in the same motel, working at the center next door to the Center for Learning and Knowledge, which was a front organization for the Center for Learning and Knowledge. but that was nowhere near as interesting as the first part of the dream.