Great Beasts of the Weird World

Many years ago, I had the strangest dream of my entire life. It must have been when I was about three or four years old, and I'd made my first rudimentary forays into the internet. I suppose this affected my dream. The dream began with me sitting in my room. The old sofa, a weird light cream colour—or was it off-white?—was where I sat, the street outside cold and wet. Perhaps my immediate surroundings were all that existed. Even in the dream, I recognised the familiar feeling of boredom in the pit of my stomach.
Back in these days, all we had as a television was a silver box with a screen. I remember the sound was tinny, the image a little staticky. But it was all I had. So I sat, and I looked. The faint voice that my television had—as, of course, all televisions had—said, "You may begin." So I flicked through the channels, sorting through shows such as "Happy Branbo" and "Meddlers" and "Geogno Philson" and other such familiar names, until I happened upon one particular channel. In my youth, I watched documentaries non-stop. So when my dream-self scrolled far enough to reach the channel known, rather plainly, as "Documentaries" on the television, I was taken aback. The inherent response of a child whose interest had been sufficiently piqued, such as myself, was to flick the TV on, turn up the volume, and sit mesmerised for the duration of the show.
There I was, sitting in my tiny room, a young boy, and the programme I'd landed on was a little thing called "What is History?" It was an animated show, with a cartoon series about the history of the world and its many civilizations, and with a live-action component in which a young man and a young woman would sit down in a classroom-like environment and, well, do a bit of history. I'm sad to say that my memory of this is rather foggy, and besides the logo of planet Earth and choice phrases such as "beluga whales in a stew", much of this engaging and educational show is now entirely beyond my recollection.
But what I remember very vividly is the next show. Unfortunately its name escapes me, but I think it was something to the effect of "Great Beasts of the Weird World". It was billed as a nature documentary, with images of lions, chimpanzees, ogopogos and what I can only describe as a wet pool noodle with a tin opener strapped to the tip.
This program was, as you can imagine, highly educational. There were plenty of photographs of animals, usually in rather distressing situations. And, of course, no program would be complete without the voiceover of a guy called Derek who told us what these beasts ate and "who they'd like to mate with". I remember seeing the same thing on almost all the educational channels. Derek talking about a group of "man-eating lemurs" while a series of stills displayed various lemurs munching on some poor person.
For whatever reason, the rest of the duration of Great Beasts of the Weird World was done through voiceover by someone entirely different. One particular section focused upon the rare, beautiful and—date I say, quite hatcherent eel. After this, the vast ocean, stormy and somewhat brumous.
Then it appeared.
Emerging from the water was a giant organism, covered in armour, which was (in typical fashion) clutching a 1700s galleon, and what I think is quite surprising in retrospect is the fact that it was named "Michael the Dragonfish". This most glorious of God's creations proceeded to wrench the galleon in half, and from the ship's interior, there poured a yellow liquid. Instinctively, I knew that the ship was actually a type of gargantuan crab, and the liquid, clumpy and suspiciously like coronation chicken as it was, was actually the crab's liquefied "haddock gland".
With a burst of static, the camera switched to my own living room. It had turned into a desert, with the sand blowing, and the sand and the sand and, Christ almighty, the sand! It filled my room like a maelstrom of underreactive gunpowder. I was forced to seek an uncomfortable shelter behind my sofa, now dark brown, and as soon as I did so, the show cut elsewhere.
The next shot focused on a middle aged woman who, inexplicably, was messing about with a red bicycle, moving it backwards and forwards with an unnaturally strong finger of one hand, while with the other she rubbed a very long string that was attached to a large and rather inelegant box. She was clearly a happy woman. Even her face, which bore signs of a lifetime of toil, bore a sort of contentment that I didn't see so much as a child. But of course, this being a completely earnest nature documentary, would not last for long.
A young child in a red shirt and yellow shorts ran up to the woman, proclaiming, "The bird is out!"
"Bird?" the woman responded, a look of mild confusion on her face.
"The bird. The bird is out," the child insisted, holding up his hands in protest.
Immediately, the woman's demeanour changed. She seemed angry all of a sudden, her face twisted into a comically intense scowl. "Don't tell me that," she barked. "We don't have bird, boy!"
"But you have bird!" the boy insisted.
"No we don't!" the woman shouted back. "I haven't bird!'
Ignoring the boy, the woman began to aggressively push and pull the bicycle back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and now the boy ran away, crying. The camera, taking on a slight staticky feel, zoomed in on the hill behind them. A large oak-like tree with big red fruits was the only thing visible at first, until a bipedal form appeared, charging down the hill and towards the woman. It was a terror bird, its plumage black, red and white, and when it leapt at the woman it let out a screech, ka-kwaaa!, and it knocked her off her seat—which hadn't existed until that moment—and onto the ground, off camera.
And with that, just as quickly and as strangely as it had begun, this most peculiar dream came to a totally random conclusion. In the years since, I forgot about this dream altogether. I forgot about the eldritch machinations of beings, real only within my subconscious, that downed ship-crabs like burgers. I forgot beluga whale stew. I forgot terror birds attacking women fucking around with bikes. I forgot everything about this most bizarre of dreams.
Until this week.
This week, I was talking with friends about dreams. At one point, while trying to think of interesting dreams to tell them about, I recalled this event. And the rest, as they say, is history.
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