The Dream Diary of Terry Bumfist

A recording of a conversation between Terry Bumfist, Squeezer to the Stars and all-round man of talents and dreams, and someone at Concrete Octopus:

Terry Bumfist: What’s this £34 in my bank account?

Concrete Octopus: Your fee.

TB: I wrote fucking shit-loads of my dreams down for you twats. This is robbery.

CO: It’s not robbery. We agreed to pay you by the sentence. You wrote thirty four sentences in your submission. We even included the sentences in your intro and outro.

TB: Right.

CO: Right?

TB: You want another one?

CO: Another what?

TB: You know what. Don’t act the gibbon with me. A dream diary.

CO: We are always happy to acquire journals of the ephemeral.

TB: By the sentence?

CO: By the sentence.

TB: Right. Expect an email.

CO: I always do.

TB: Who am I talking to?

There is a click as the call is cut. Two weeks later there was no email, we received a ketchup-spattered sheaf of foolscap papers via Dread Portal Post. It was inundated with the unmistakable crawling script of Terry Bumfist, Squeezer to the Stars etc. The script was given to J. K. Hauser to decipher. J. K. refused. J. K. was threatened with having his tab cut off at the Dust Bowl Donkey, the only public house within earshot of the CO offices. J. K. relented.

“Are you sure this is ketchup?” J. K. asked.

“No questions,” replied whoever is mysteriously representing CO in this rather long introduction to the second instalment of Terry Bumfist’s (Squeezer to etc.) Dream Diary. “Just decipher the damn thing, and have the copy in before the printers dematerialise for the season.”

J. K. did as ordered. We think. It’s not like anyone was checking his work. I’ll be back at the end to wrap things up. Enjoy the ravings of the greatest squeezer the world has ever seen.

***

Alright. You fuckers. By the sentence? I’ll give you. By the sentence.

September 3rd. Innsbruck. Austria. Mountain squeezing season.

I only remember one dream from this trip. Sasquatch brown sky. Butter knife sun. Dead clouds of something rotting. I was walking down Central Avenue. I was glistening. I was covered in butter. Or, made of glass. I had a saw with a blue handle in my hand. I was squeezing the fuck out of it. I wanted it to turn into some kind of mineral. The pressure was making me erect. I wanted to get rid of it. The saw. The teeth were biting into my hands. Not that I cared. Skin like the shell of an asteroid. I went to put the saw in a box outside someone’s house. The box had some sticks in it. The owner of the house was a balding man, middle-aged. He was gay and lived with his partner. He was watching me. I asked if I could put the saw in his box. “It’s a good saw. It works. I don’t know why I’m throwing it away.” He said I could put the saw in his box. I asked if he’d moved in recently and he said he had. He was worried that were no facilities around for his children. I said that it was very different growing up in post-war Algeria. “There were playgrounds everywhere. “Too much wildlife in Algeria,” he said. “They had really good slides.” The man’s partner went into the house. I was thinking they were a nice gay couple. I wondered if they had adopted. I spoke in great detail about sandpits in Algeria. Playgrounds full of sand with wooden forts in the middle of them. I explained how there were buckets on chains at each corner. You filled a bucket with sand at ground level. You then climbed the fort. Once inside you used the chain to pull up the bucket. With enough sand you could build a sandcastle. We both laughed about wooden castles full of sand-castles. Then I woke up.

September 18th. Mechanicsburg. Pennsylvania. Private squeezing session for Rikki Rocket.

This dream was very short. I was looking out of a window. I could see a beach. Yellow brick road sand. Void sky. On the beach there was a shape shifting beast. The beast seemed friendly. Yet dangerous. At times it looked like Falkor the Luck Dragon from The Neverending Story. The film from the 80s. Not the book by Michael Ende. I haven’t read the book. I only mention it for the sake of confusion. When it didn’t look like Falkor from the film it looked like a fish. Or, a lion. Sometimes it melted into bones and other viscera. Then it would reshape. Another fish. Another big cat. It was dancing in and out of the waves on the beach. It was now a terracotta pebble beach. Not the Pebble Beach. Just a pebble beach. Terraced row red. The beast wanted me to join it in some way. I wanted to join it. I knew the beast was trustworthy. I also thought it might be a trick. My hands were telling me it might be malevolent. My hands have this eighth sense. It’s from the squeezing. Was the beast pretending to be friendly? Was it taking shapes that I found to be non-threatening? I went to climb out of the window (remember the window?) I stopped myself as I was half out of the window. My leg hovered in the air. I watched the beast frolic. It beckoned me some more. The beast spoke to me. I do not remember what it said. Then I woke up. It was a very self-contained dream and incredibly vivid. It felt like a real dream. I may have met some kind of dream apparition that has a life beyond me. It was trying to tell me something. I think it wanted me to come join it in the sea. It was very seductive. Ultimately I was afraid of it. Choices made in fear are always wrong. Was I wrong? Did I miss out on something profound? Or, did it just want to fuck me? It was a sexy beast. Which doesn’t take away from the beastliness. Beast from Beauty and the Beast is pretty sexy. I regret not fucking that dream beast.

(J. K.: There have been a few dreams in my time that feel very real and feel like they are windows into a world beyond this one, or a world that is apart from ours that I am visiting. I often feel in dreams that I am in places that exist beyond me and my being, places that exist in some way that my present being can only slightly comprehend. I am sure I have dreamt of this beast that Terry encountered. For me it was not on a beach, it was on another threshold between worlds, dancing between the steppe and the forest. The steppe shone with reflected sunlight. The forest was dark yet emitted a comforting feeling, like a beckoning womb. I did not hesitate in joining the beast. We fucked for eternity. When I awoke I sat up in bed, grabbed my notebook and wrote Eight Ecstatic Canticles for Otlotlogglo. I didn’t sleep for three cantonic cycles. The collection was published in Argentina and is currently in its fifth printing. Without those residuals I would surely have died by now. Terry should have definitely fucked that beast. Who knows the stratospheric heights he could have squeezed to by now?)

September 27th. Juba. South Sudan. I am not at liberty to discuss. Let’s just say not every squeezing is going to change the world, but this one might have.

Sudanese nights are sticky. My dreams were fitful. The one I remember, I was in a queue to get on a bus. I have never ridden on a bus in my life. The place we were going was a luxurious French château. It had really nice gardens. There were lots of people. I swung around the gardens on my hands doing acrobatics. I was swinging through windows. I had these gloves on that protected my hands when I swung from doorways and chandeliers. I never wear gloves. They never last. My hands are too powerful. I was having a good time when this man who was dressed like he hung on a street corner selling drugs attacked me. I managed to ward off his attacks with deft moves. I said that I didn’t want to fight. The homeless drug pusher said he didn’t want to fight either. I swung out of the window to escape. When I was swinging around the garden a few people said, “There’s the gloves guy.” I was having a real good time swinging from things and I woke up covered in vomit in a cage. I fucking hate South Sudan. It took me ages to squeeze my way out of there.

(J. K.: I am of the mind that the person Terry describes at that party was myself. I had a dream late September that I was in a French Château and there were a lot of very pretentious people in costumes that didn’t fit the bodies that bulged underneath them. I was feeling self-conscious as I was dressed in my usual clothes. There was a man with huge hands swinging around the party and knocking everyone’s drinks over. He tried to knock my drink over and I protested. He attacked me, pinned me to the floor and spat in my mouth. He then said that he would squeeze me to death if I didn’t give him some drugs. I didn’t have any drugs as I had taken them all and he proceeded to squeeze the life out of me. After that I was a ghost haunting the party and it was much more fun than being the only person there who was underdressed. A few people complimented me on my ghostly form. I didn’t see the man with huge hands again. A few people mentioned that they had seen him passed out in a fountain and that he had soiled himself. The police eventually turned up and took him away.)

***

So ends another instalment of Terry Bumfist’s Dream Diary. What a ride, readers. What a ride indeed. I would like to thank J. K. for transcribing all that. I’m sure it is accurate and in no way tainted by J. K.’s tendency to write whatever he happens to be thinking about at the time.

We would just like to mention that the French château that appears in the above dreams is actually Waddesdon Manor situated in Buckinghamshire. It was built by the Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild in the 1870s (not him personally, just his money). It is now managed by Conoctopticon Industries and was hired out to CO in late September for a social mixer.

Present at the mixer were entire writing and graphic design staff of CO, as were a few hundred hangers-on, bureaucrats, industry veterans, chancers, Conoctopticon honchos, film people, politicians, magicians, cult leaders, trans-dimensional apparitions, lost souls, and a whole host of caterers, merchants, and apothecaries who had set up their stalls in the gardens. Both Terry and J. K. were in attendance. They got into a bit of a kerfuffle which was quickly broken up by Zebedee Forestroke, the Batang! player. J. K. was only mildly ruffled but Terry had to be taken away by security as he later tried to squeeze Moist Pope Vinegar Stroke in the wine cellar. Vinegar Stroke was very gracious about the whole affair, while Terry had to be locked in a pit.
It is rather worrying to know that both Terry and J. K. have difficulty telling their dreams and reality apart. I will have to monitor their V-waves carefully. For now, we leave you to contemplate the meaning of Terry’s addled outpourings translated by J. K.’s hallucinatory perspective. Further offerings from Terry’s mind will be forthcoming.