I dreamed that Delbert had found a new friend… who was actually an alien. His name was something like Super Tube Face and he purported to know the true history of the human race and even of reality. He looked a lot like Karl C. He had a world-weary, droll attitude suggestive of British humour, and he continually hinted, like Douglas Adams, that this reality was some type of complex joke played on its inhabitants. He always had a clever quip and a quirky piece of advice ready for anyone who wanted it. He became one of Delbert and Vanessa’s closest friends (Vanessa is Delbert’s cousin) and both of them started neglecting us because of it. They weren’t supposed to tell anyone about him, but they did, and eventually I caught Super Tube Face on the phone and guessed who it was. I remember STF saying “Damn that Vanessa for telling you who I am.”
STF always carried a VHS copy of a movie around with him… the title was exceedingly strange, something like How to Care for a Nurse on a Travel thru Space of 1,000 Years, Including all the Little Things. He claimed that to understand the nature of reality all you had to do was watch this movie. It was about an alien race who visited earth in the 1980’s in order to correct the mistakes of humanity and set the species on the right course. From the cover, I thought it was a screwball comedy.
Delbert and Vanessa had watched parts of it, but were unable to sit thru the entire thing. They had a lot of respect for it, though, and were always referring to it in conversation. One time I went into their room while they were watching a clip of it, and it focused on a beautiful blonde woman walking down a street where everything was “going wrong” around her… somehow reality was coming apart. There were deep electronic tones, loud hums and clicks, very similar to certain sounds I’ve heard before in cinema when something “strange” is going on. I was so unsettled by it that I left the room.
Eventually STF sat us all down to watch the movie, and he explained that we had better settle in and get comfortable because it was over six hours long. I protested at this, saying that my mind no longer had that kind of attention span, and after a bit of arguing he agreed to let us watch it in two hour segments. It started out like a “parody video” popular on YouTube… scenes from the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars with other lines of dialogue spliced in. Eventually though the camera panned over and the scene changed to an outdoor café somewhere in New York, where the beautiful blonde woman sat.
Then it became one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever seen. There were bloody walls, deformed babies, faces of my friends swollen into huge pastries, screams of terror… I can’t really remember it all but it became disgusting and surreal. It was reminiscent of David Lynch… and Eraserhead in particular. I jumped up and smacked the STOP button and said, “I can’t watch this with my mental history; it’ll drive me crazy.” STF looked disappointed by this, but said that he understood.
I can’t really remember many more details of the dream: just the alien usurping my friendship with Delbert, his secret knowledge of the Universe, and the horrible movie that he carried around with him. I guess I’ll just let it go at that.