I was only in bed for a few hours, but it was enough to give me a strange dream.
Somehow, I was back in school. Instead of college, however, I seemed to be enrolled in high school again, attendant with all the issues that implies: crowded, unsupplied classrooms full of ghetto student who didn't want to be there and a few special ed students who should've been in a class tailored to there needs, but here they were.
The strange part of this dream, though, was the assigned reading. It was a book titled
A Gathering of Mushrooms. It was a very large doorstopper novel. The cover was a shiny red, indicating newness. The illustration on the front was of a ball-like object, a couple of hands springing out towards the bottom in a very Buddha-style pose, while a head was starting to form out of the top. Other intricate details were on it, some indicating that the ball was layered like an onion. I don't remember much of the synopsis on the back, only that the book was a "classic", and that "the first two hundred fifty pages are like your typical romance book, a little flat and very over the top, but after that the novel quickly becomes very Cthulhu-esque."
The contents of this book weren't arranged like your typical novel. The first section, the "romance", had the text on the right, with pictures, photographs, and cross references on the left, not unlike some editions of Shakespeare I had to read in high school. The second part, however, was arranged differently: at a glance, you would be entirely unable to distinguish it from
a page in the Doctrine and Covenants. It had the same layout, same font and typeface, two columns with three-columned footnotes at the bottom, chapters were called sections, and also had identical headers and chapter summaries. Even the pages were the same tissue-like quality!
The most bizarre part, though, was the quality of the book. The cover, like I said, was obviously brand new, as though it just came from the bookstore. The pages, on the other hand, seemed like they had just come from an old, moldy library with a bookworm probably. They were all yellowed, smelled funky, felt fragile, and had holes chewed out of them. And the strangest part was how the holes were chewed out around the pictures: they seemed to outline the subjects of the pictures perfectly. If the picture were a portrait of someone, the holes would come up to the person's head, then stop. If of a cliff-face meeting water, the holes would come right up to the cliff face, leaving it alone while going through the water.
The entire thing made me feel uneasy. "Cthulhu-esque" was a very proper way to describe it. I'm glad I didn't get a chance to read it, else my mind probably would've collapsed.
