• I'm watching a preview for a horror movie. The psychopath, played by an annoying popular actor, kills his victims in a giant, cheesy lasagne. They are laid out on the sauce, covered with cheese, then isolated from the others with giant metal cookie-cutter type things.

    Apparently they are baked in two stages, one of which is just enough to get them disoriented and the cheese all melty. They try to sit up and escape, but it's hard to move when covered in melted cheese. The villain laughs at them from the tub of ricotta where he's been sitting. Sharp implements: scissors, a paring knife, a scalpel - go hand to hand, people trying to cut the strands of cheese that hold them down. The bad guy laughs at them and snatches them, leaving them right out of grasp, and makes the victims watch him cut himself on his hand, around the thumb, across his palm, up his arm. The cut is rather deep: it's supposed to be a macho thing. He leers at them in a threatening and badly-acted way. Blood mixes with ricotta in a not-unappetizing way. I'm not interested in the movie.


  • I'm walking down an urban street edged by abandoned gardens, stealing ingredients to make pickled cukes. I keep dropping cucumbers: they're large, and i can only hold two under each arm, dropping one each time i reach for something else. My pockets are stuffed with garlic. Who grows mason jars in their garden? Apparently, that's popular here.


  • The old gypsy woman does amazing tricks with colored string. She's really a man but wears a dead woman's face and jeans. She can make the string say words and make pictures hang in the air and light up. Her daughter kills children.

    I have to watch the old woman entertaining a young girl (maybe 13) while her daughter prepares to kill her. I can't do anything. The old woman can't find any string, she looks everywhere as the girl gets restless. Finally, when the girl isn't looking, the old woman picks up the chicken, tears its intestine out, and drops it over the side.

    She pops a tiny egg out of the intestine and passes it to her husband while she untangles her new pink and blue string. He does sleight of hand, making a tiny yellow live chick from the egg, then cracking open the live chick (making it dead) and extracting a smaller yellow wooden chick from inside it. Then a wooden alligator appears, to eat the chick.

    The old woman's face is on crooked. She starts the loop of "string" spinning and makes star patterns, rabbits, and poems appear in the air. It's really fantastic. The girl is criminally disinterested - so much so that i catch myself thinking that maybe if she can't be amazed by this she deserves to die.