The Most Dangerous Meal Of The Day

Breakfast is the most dangerous meal of the day. Too often we sit to eat our scrambled eggs, hash browns, or banana pancakes, and we don't realize that the inhabitants of our dreams are still lurking behind us, having crossed the misty grey borderland between sleep and wake. Our minds are not solid things; they are gillnets with frayed edges that dreams and nightmares can wriggle through. 

As you sit to eat and begin to chew, if you are not careful, your teeth could begin to fall out, one by one by one, falling painlessly like ivory rain drops and clattering onto the plate and table and floor. Fall out and fall out, until you are swimming in molars, bicuspids, incisors, more teeth than could fit in a thousand gums mouths, as you gasp for air with a mouth of empty gums.

Or you notice a smell of burning toast, and the walls around you are in crackling flames, and billowing smoke surrounds you and all is orange and black and burning and then you hear sizzling like an egg being cracked into a pan of bubbling grease and smell your own blistering flesh as it runs off your body and puddles on the floor. 

Perhaps you were dreaming of being hunted by a pack of starving, long-legged beasts, with slavering jaws of jagged teeth and lolling crimson tongues. You're sitting at the table and jump as that deep baying bursts forth into the waking world, and guttural growls and snarls encircle you and you become the meal. 

There may be ways to prevent these types of oneiric seepage, and sleep scientists and occultists have formed and uneasy alliance to find them. 

Until then, they suggest skipping breakfast. 

THE END