A Surrealist's Worst Nightmare

I grasp a champagne flute as I saunter around my art exhibition at the Met. Everybody who’s somebody is here for the grand opening. Dealers, collectors, curators. My Surrealist paintings cover the walls. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding roughshod over a planet-sized baseball. A pinball machine with skyscrapers for flippers. The interior of an office building in which everybody who works there has a lampshade and lightbulb for a head.

There’s no in-between when it comes to my art. You either love it or hate it. The people who love it say that I’m the next Salvidor Dalí. But I’d prefer to be the first Susan Albert if you don’t mind.

“If you step back and look at the pinball machine just right, it looks like a human face.”

“Well… I guess it does.”

Two elderly women stand in front of the pinball painting. Their observation is spot on. The flippers are the mouth, the ramps that you shoot the ball up into are the nostrils, and the two bumpers at the top are the eyes.

More than any other movement, Surrealism is about perspective. Surprising your subject. Juxtaposition. Non sequitur. Random shit. It’s about bridging the gap between our physical world and the unconscious and producing a new reality: surreality.

I take a sip of champagne. Seeing all these people here gawking at my art makes everything worth it. The years at school, the thousands of hours spent perfecting my craft. Even the nightmare that inspired all these works. I still get goosebumps whenever I think about it. It was so vivid that I thought it was the real deal. Apart from that one, I don’t think I’ve ever had a dream in my life. It was as if Mr. Sandman was making up for lost time.

Somebody pats my shoulder. It’s the Met’s Curator of Contemporary Art. His golden mane of hair reminds me of a horse. A horse wearing a suit and tie.

“Congrats on your latest triumph,” he says. “One of these days you’ll have to tell me how you came up with these.”

“If I told you, I’d have to make you disappear.”

He almost spits his champagne out. “Ha! Well, all artists have their eccentricities. At least tell me what you’re working on now.”

I can’t do that either. Because I’m not working on anything else. I haven’t had any other sources of inspiration apart from the nightmare. I’m running on empty right now. Was this all a one-off? Am I just a one-hit wonder?

I shrug my shoulders and walk towards the painting of the Four Horsemen and the baseball. That’s how the dream started. I can recall every detail with perfect clarity.

#

Every joint in my body hurts as I wake up. My mattress feels as hard as a rock. Did I fall asleep on the floor? Maybe I rolled out of bed. I open my eyes. My mouth falls open when I see where I am.

“What the hell…”

I’m not in my bedroom. Instead, I’m standing on what looks like a massive baseball. Giant signatures are scrawled on it, but none of them make any sense. One of them reads “Pipsqueak Shit”. Another is written in capital letters and says “ABCDLMNOOOOOOOOOO”. A cloudless sky is above me. I know this is all a dream, but it’s so vivid. I slap myself across the face. I close my eyes and open them. Nothing changes. Looks like I’m going to be stuck here for a while.

That’s when I notice a smaller planet orbiting around the baseball. There’s an orchestra performing on it. Each musician is seated on an ostrich that has its head planted in the ground. The maestro conducts with a lit candlestick. They’re performing the Prelude to Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold. The music dies away as the planet disappears over the horizon.

“This is like Wonderland or something. There’s no rhyme or reason to this place.”

I walk along the baseball. The signatures continue. “AdolfAdolfAdolf” is written in big, loopy letters. I have to bend over to read “In the beginning, there was a petting zoo” in tiny, lowercase letters. After a while, I make it around the baseball. “Pipsqueak Shit” greets me again. Damn it. I’m stuck. There’s no way out of here.

THUMP THUMP THUMP

Suddenly, the entire planet shakes under what feels like a hundred pairs of stomping feet. I turn around. Four horseback riders are bearing down on me. I squint my eyes. Something doesn’t look right about them.

They’re all stick figures. Stick figure riders mounted on stick figure horses. What’s more, all of them are wearing dunce caps. Each one has a letter on it: D, C, F, and W.

It hits me. They’re the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Death, Conquest, Famine, and War. And they’re chasing me on a baseball.

“Oh no… oh no oh no oh no…”

Panic overwhelms me. I take off running. The hoofbeats grow louder. Adrenaline floods my veins. The planet with the orchestra comes by again. This time, they’re performing the Ride of the Valkyries. How fitting.

I didn’t know it was possible for my lungs to burn during a dream, but they are now. The horsemen are gaining on me. In no time, they’re going to catch me. There’s nowhere to hide. I try jumping up in the air and flapping my arms around. Unfortunately, I haven’t gained the ability to fly in this dream.

“Shit I’m dead I’m dead I’m dead dead-”

Something sits on the ground in front of me. I dash forward. It’s a trampoline, no more than a few feet in diameter. I look behind me. The horsemen are seconds away. I don’t have a choice. I take a deep breath before jumping on it. I shoot upwards. It’s as if I’m skydiving in the opposite direction. Drool leaks out of my mouth. The sound of the wind in my ears is deafening. I can’t stop or change my direction. It’s like I’m being shot out of a gun.

The baseball is long gone. All I see around me is the sky. Eventually, I start to fall. There’s a cluster of sparkling lights below me. I’m heading right for one of them. It looks like a ball of some sort.

CHING!

I smack into it and bounce right off into another ball. CHING! I go back and forth between the two like a pinball. I lose all sense of direction as I bounce around in the air. My stomach feels like it’s jiggling around in my chest. Eventually, I fall in between the bumpers. When I look down, I rub my eyes to make sure that they’re working properly.

There are two skyscrapers floating in the air. In the freaking air. Why aren’t they falling down? Maybe because there’s nothing to fall down to…

I bellyflop onto one of them. The impact sends a jolt of pain through my body, but I don’t think anything’s broken. Dream physics at work. Immediately, the skyscraper whips upward, sending me flying. Wind rushes in my ears. I knock into one of the bumpers, which sends me hurtling back down. Nausea overtakes me. The human body was not designed to handle whiplash like this.

When I land on the skyscraper again, I hang on as hard as I can to an outcropping. The building swings up, but I manage to stay on. Is there an opening that I can enter the building through? I push myself to my feet and walk along the exterior of the skyscraper. I hold my hands out at my sides to balance myself.

Bingo. There’s an open office window. My heart leaps. I grab onto the ledge and ease myself in.

Gravity rights itself. Now I’m standing right-side up on the floor. It looks like a regular office suite in here. There are cubicles everywhere. I start pacing around. My stomach flips over when I see the people working here.

“Oh my God…”

They’re all wearing lampshades on their heads. Some of them are lit up. They all look the same, as if they are interchangeable, replaceable cogs in a corporate machine and not individual, flesh-and-blood humans. I can feel the color leave my cheeks. This is the very thing I sought to avoid by becoming an artist. There isn’t a better hell than the one I’m staring at right now.

My feet almost crumple beneath me as I book it across the suite and barge through the glass doors leading out into the elevator lobby. I bash the down button on the wall. The elevator can’t arrive fast enough. I can smell my own sweat as it drips off of my armpits.

A woman walks out of the office suite with a violet lampshade on her head. I hold back a scream. How the hell can she see where she’s going? Evidently, she knows that she’s in the elevator lobby and that I’ve already called one up. She swipes through her cellphone as she waits. Her lightbulb isn’t turned on.

The doors open. We walk in. The doors close. My heart feels like it’s about to fail. The woman doesn’t look up from her phone. My palms feel moist with sweat. The elevator descends.

“You’re not one of the chosen.”

I recoil in shock. The woman just talked to me. Her lightbulb is lit up now. Even though she doesn’t have a head with eyes, I can tell that she’s looking right at me. I couldn’t speak now if my life depended on it.

The moment that the doors open, I leap outside. Jumping over a turnstile, I sprint down an escalator and push against a revolving door leading outside.

The smell of urine and garbage fills my nostrils. The sidewalks are crammed with people. People without lampshades on their heads. There’s a traffic jam at the intersection in front of me.  I’m being serenaded by a melody of swears and honks. Am I back in New York City now? What street am I on?

Something drips onto my arm. It feels cold to the touch. I look up. Even though the sun is shining down, it’s snowing outside. The flakes look as big as peas. Nobody else is looking up at the sky, as if it’s just another summer day in the Big Apple.

Suddenly, the ground falls out from under me. I fly through the air. Flakes of snow shoot up from the ground and go in every direction. It’s almost like I’m back inside the pinball machine…

WHAM! I smack into an invisible barrier. My bones feel like they’ve shattered. And now I’m rocketing back towards the ground. That’s when it hits me. I’m inside a snow globe. A life-sized snow globe of New York City. There’s no way out of here. I slam into the top of the globe. A crack appears in the glass. Molten panic washes through me. A finger hovers over the top of the globe. It casts a shadow over the entire city. It starts poking at the glass.

“NO! STOP! YOU’RE GOING TO BREAK IT!”

The owner of the finger doesn’t listen to me. The crack looks like a spiderweb now. Each hit sounds like a cannon going off. In no time, the finger breaks through. Glass shatters everywhere and rains down.  I duck and cover my head with my hands. Shards litter the streets. Miraculously, I don’t get impaled. The finger disappears. Then the snow globe flips upside down. I fall towards the broken section on top.

Now I know why they say to never look down. There’s an open mouth below me, but it doesn’t belong to a human. I’ve never seen so many teeth in my life. Row after row after row. Waiting to devour me.

There’s nothing I can do. I’m going to be eaten. Gravity pulls on me like a string. I fall into the mouth. Darkness blankets my vision…

#

I polish off the rest of my champagne before going over to the bar and taking another one. I welcome the tingling feeling in my veins. It reinforces the fact that I’m still alive.

The rest of the grand opening passes in a blur. My legs feel like jelly as I walk through the cavernous atrium towards the exit. I call a ride. It should be arriving soon…

The moment I step outside, I drop my phone. It crashes to the ground. My hands fly to my cheeks.

“Oh… oh no…”

It’s snowing.