There was a bit on twitter the other day where someone asked others to describe their weirdest dream in five words. This followed describing favorite books and movies also with the five-word limitation. This prompted me to remember a dream from 1977 when I was sixteen and spending the summer with my older sister,

My niece Heather was an infant and as is the way of infants rarely slept through the night. By a quirk of chance the times that I went to sleep, rather late, synchronized with Heather’s cycles in such a manner that when she awoke in the night it often interrupted my middle of the night dreaming. People dream on a roughly 90 minute cycle and those dream from the middle of my sleep are particularly odd.

I remember bits and pieces of those strange phantasms but this one I think is the strangest. First off I am not in the dream. I do not know how common this is for other but I will occasionally have dreams in which I never appear. In these I am a spectator, much like watching a fully realized film that happens to carry smell, taste, and touch in addition to visuals and sound. In fact I have had dream that really were movies, complete with known actors in some of the parts. This dream had no named actors.

The situation is a newly wed couple. The husband has come home from work and they have seated themselves to the dinner she prepared, a whole roasted chicken. Their conversation slides from loving to sniping and arguing. As the scene progresses it becomes obvious, though I could not say how, that the chicken, the dead and cooked bird centered in the table, is manipulating their minds with its own psychic powers. The couple’s disagreement turns to shouting but on the cusp of becoming violent they recognize that it is not their own will at work but the chicken’s. (My, that’s a strange sentence all by itself.) Before they can do anything about the foul fowl the chicken reveals further psychic abilities and takes control of their bodies, forcing the couple to grab a broom handle and feed it into the kitchen’s garbage disposal. Unable to release their grip on the shaft the pair struggles in horror as they are drawn down into the strangely deadly device.

And that’s where I woke up to Heather’s cries for a feeding. I laid there in the dark waiting for Rod Serling to step out of the corner and begun to post episode wrap up. It would have been nice if someone explained that dream.

There were other weird dream that summer, humanoid aliens with glowing spots in their forehead invading New England but stopped by the alligators and so on but nothing as odd at the mental, mad chicken.