Morning of May 17, 2014. Saturday.

There is a town that, if the orientation is relative to La Crosse (which it seems to be in my dream) it is east of where I am presently living in my dream. This seems to be a fictional location but still seemingly on Gillette Street (“Gillette” of course, relative to “close shaves”). There are quite a few people around.

The story is, that worms have all but taken over the next town to the east. These worms mostly crawl up walls and fall on people and “bore” from the back of the neck (being a possible play on someone being “a pain in the neck”, “painfully boring”, and “getting under one’s skin” - and “worm” also sounds a little like “word” - so what I gather from this is - “boring words being a pain in the neck and getting under the skin” which is quite relevant and timely).

There have been a few times in my life where pests almost got the better of me, but not in this case, and of course never in a “real” or life-oriented sense. The worms are known as “Vermicelli Obnoxious”, but when rendered harmless by some sort of special cheese sauce (with some sort of human DNA mixed with earthworm DNA), they turn into macaroni and die as such, yet with a clay-like essence.

I know this sounds ridiculous (even for me), but it really was quite vivid and coherent, though not lucid until just at waking point. A chubby man, reminding me a bit of an unwashed hot dog vendor in a park during an expo (circa 1997) is setting up some sort of “repellent”. The cheese sauce in question seems to repel the worm, so I am not sure how it could kill them if they supposedly always crawl away from it, but such is typical dream “logic”. He checks one larger pot in some sort of outdoor cooking area. The special “repellent” is in a circular pattern, seemingly blocking the apparent space in the pot’s lid from where the handle is attached via screws. He checks the other pot, which seems solid through the lid due to the handle not being attached with screws and instead welded on. For a moment, he seems puzzled, but then leaves it as it is without putting in any special cheese sauce.

I am not sure I trust the circumstances of “saving the town”, but I still volunteer for the dangerous journey into worm territory. Over time, we (the group and I) are walking about in a safer area of the town. However, arguments and name-calling break out. There are three lines of people that remind me of how I was part of a line in the playground at West Elementary with other lines of students for other teachers as we were to return to class. I was part of the last line to return to class (as if it was some sort of punishment) because there was always a particular student that was basically a troublemaker - who tried to claim that this was somehow everyone else’s fault even though he was the only legitimate bully in the entire grade, so the teacher, Mrs. Faison (an older black lady who was my favorite teacher at the time) would walk around until he was “settled” before taking the line of her students into the school (as you can guess, sometimes this took a few minutes or more as he talked to himself, the student in front of him and the student in back of him, saying that he actually was not talking that whole time he was talking - Mrs. Faison showing quite a bit of patience with him, really).

Again, in my dream there are two lines of about eight people each facing each other and oriented east/west, and an additional line, facing south and standing near a sort of park utility building that has a singular awning the length of the building. The whole fiasco of name-calling seems to be related to the first “team” of worm hunters and aid workers or whatever being jealous of the other two teams that actually have done more work regarding direct involvement with more people and “worm attacks” and a higher risk. One male at the head of a line of a team I seem to be in yells something about “showing your feathers” as some sort of metaphor for being “ruffled” I think though I am not sure.

Eventually, the cheese sauce seems to be working and it is safer to go into more previously infested areas of the town. I sit down at a picnic table with several others. A girl, who reminds me of Steve Irwin’s wife (I saw them in real life at a show in Brisbane prior to their marriage and before they became more well-known), is walking around checking out the area nearby and walks back near the table. She looks in my direction and warns people that some of the worms may still be active and stares at me cautiously as I feel smaller, lighter things falling on my head.

I feel a strange knife-like poke in the back of my neck and reach back to pull it out at the same time a fair amount of clay-like “elbow macaroni” falls from my hair as I quickly brush it all out as they all (the worm-creatures) are somehow rendered harmless or dead, most of which are now either pale gray or a sickly pale pink. This was a “close call”, but the one I pulled from the back of my neck seemed to be one of the last worms left in the dangerous “Vermicelli Obnoxious” stage. All the other worms in the town, it seems, have either died or turned into harmless clay-like elbow macaroni. For a moment, I thought I was in trouble, but there was one and only one boring worm being a pain in the neck.

After waking, there is an odd concern about my dream that I did not have in-dream, that being Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Conqueror Worm” - about human mortality and the inevitability of death.