The Gorilla My Dreams

Let me start by saying that I am, by most measurable standards, a relatively stable individual. I sort my recycling. I pay my taxes early–because fear is a powerful motivator–and I have never once licked a streetlamp in winter–despite several compelling dares.

But I also have PTSD, severe depression, manic depression.

It’s not loud—the sort that explodes into rooms like an action hero. Mine is sneakier. It waits until I’m asleep, comfortable, vulnerable, and then, wham—a night terror with all the subtlety of a heavy metal band playing the Hell March.

So, I’ve turned to microdosing.

A little pinch of psilocybin—nothing serious, just a chemically mediated truce with my subconscious. Think of it as diplomacy for the dreams. Just enough to keep the demons politely seated and sipping tea.

Only last night–well, I may have gotten the decimal point in the wrong place. Not by much. Just enough to go from “lucid dreamer exploring the inner landscape of his psyche” to “giant monkey hallucination stomping across the skyline with a woman in his palm.”

Yes. I dreamt I was King King. Not a typo. Not King Kong. That gorilla’s union. I was King King. Bigger. Hairier. Existentially more confused.

As dreams often do, the dream began with a foghorn and a growing suspicion that I had too hairy knuckles. I looked down and realized I was immense. Titanically, cosmically, impractically, a big making Godzilla look like a garden gnome.

And in my enormous, leathery paw?

A woman.

Beautiful. Dainty. In a dress that sparkled like someone had thrown glitter into a wind tunnel. And despite the precarious circumstances of being carried up a skyscraper by a primate with unresolved trauma, looking surprisingly calm.

She smiled up at me. “Oh, King King…you smell like observational apprehension and banana liqueur.”

I blinked. Or possibly, I thundered. It’s hard to tell with dream physics.

“I must climb the Empire State Building,” I declared because it seemed like the sort of thing one had to do. Gravity be damned. Therapy be damned. It was a narrative necessity.

And so up I went, Darla–of course her name was Darla; all dream blondes are–perched delicately in my hand, humming something that may have been Sinatra or possibly just the sound of the universe mocking me.

Then came the planes.

Tiny buzzing things with wings and flashing lights and—this is important—a distinct attitude. Like I’d parked in their space. I roared. Not out of anger but more out of sheer stress. I was still me, somewhere in there. A guy with a day job and a fear of uncontrolled anger who was now getting strafed by biplanes while holding a Barbie-sized blonde and wearing absolutely nothing.

At least, not in the dream.

Because when I fell—when the dream reached its inevitable cinematic climax, and I plummeted from the top of the world in slow-motion tragedy—I woke up.

On the grass. My front yard.

I was lying there, damp and dewy, in nothing but my briefs.

And in my hand?

A Barbie doll.

Not just any Barbie. This one had attitude, with that early-era judgmental Barbie expression, like she knew I hadn’t flossed. Her hair was matted.

But her dress sparkled, just like Darla’s.

For one heart-freezing moment, I wondered if I’d sleepwalked and reenacted King King using lawn chairs as buildings. There was a garden gnome nearby that looked slightly traumatized.

Then came the voice.

“Tom?”

It was Katie. My neighbor. The one with an unnerving amount of calm, well, because she has three teen boys.

I sat up slowly. “Morning.”

She sipped her coffee. “Dream again?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Bit more…cinematic this time.”

“You okay,” she said. “That was pretty dramatic fall you took.”

I looked at the edge of my roof.

“You’re holding Barbie.”

“I think she was Darla.”

Katie nodded like this made perfect sense. “You’re lucky. Last month the Wilson boy thought he was a velociraptor and tried to mate with my rose bush.”

There was a long silence.

“I’m thinking of switching to whiskey,” I said, brushing grass off my butt.

“Wise,” she said and went inside.

That evening, I put Barbie on my bookshelf next to ‘The Psychonaut Field Manual’ and a mug that says ‘World’s Okayest Dream Warrior.’ I brewed coffee. No mushrooms. No unquantified potatoes, peppers, or legumes.

I sat on my back porch that evening, watching the sun set behind mountains, half expecting to see a silhouette of myself—enormous and tragic—climbing the outline of a radio tower.

“Never again,” I whispered.

Barbie didn’t reply. But I swear, she looked a little smug about it.