There Be Dragons Here!

In a news bit from the Grand Canyon, it appears that a newlywed couple has disappeared at the South Rim.  (It may have happened at a distantly related dimension that is very closely related to ours…)  Regardless of the location of the story, I, Joshua “The Strange One” Erdahl have had a vision!  It came to me while I was asleep at work.  I have recounted the details in the following anecdotal narrative.  I swear it is absolutely true, and proof that dragons do exist.

 

They stood at the edge of the Grand Canyon, their first trip together as a newly-wed couple.  Their hands grew sweaty in the hot desert sun, but neither wanted to let go for fear the new drawn dream might fail and break.  They looked down the many layers of red brown and grey strata and reveled in the beauty and wonder of the view.  Scott could not believe that he was so lucky to find a woman like Cinnamon.  She was dark skinned with giant eyes which he loved to dive into.  Her curly black hair fell gently at her shoulders and he leaned in to smell the spicy wonder of her skin and her tresses.

They gazed together into the depths of the hollowed out spaces below.  Down at the bottom, the thin hair strand of the river wandered through the dusty landscape.  Scott’s eyes fell on a section that seemed darker than the rest.  “Look” he muttered into Cinnamon’s delicate ear, “the river…”

As they watched together, the dark bend in the river darkened further, and expanded.

“What is happening?” Cinnamon asked in a soft voice.

The sinuous line grew in size and seemed to rise out of the dusty desert below.  It grew and expanded, and moved, a giant serpentine form that defied explanation.

“My god” said Scott.  “It’s growing.”

Their hands, still firmly clasped, tightened until their knuckles, white as bone, began to quiver with exertion.  Below, the writhing shape continued to rise.  Scott saw the faint outline of what looked like wings fingering the shimmering air.

They stepped closer to the edge, hypnotized by the monstrous form rising from the deep chasm.  Scott’s heart sped in his chest, the frolicking thunder of it shaking his thin body.  “It’s alive.  I think the river is alive!”

Cinnamon turned her face toward Scott and looked askance.
Alive?”

“I dunno’!” He shouted.  “Look!  It’s flying!”

They turned their heads in unison to see the giant form, definitely winged, continuing its rise into the hot atmosphere.  Suddenly it ripped away from the continuous line of the river and assumed its own horrible shape.  It swooped up into the air, flipped and rolled showing off the scintillating surface of its elongated body, sparkling in the noon-day sun.

As it settled into a regular flight pattern it wheeled and settled on a course directly toward the newlywed couple.  The two stared with growing intensity at the figment, thinking it could only be a hallucination brought on by the lack of sleep, and heat of the day.  Their eyes locked with the figure and watched with growing horror, stalk-still, unable to move, caught in the growing hypnotic power of the monster.

It registered in Scott that the creature had to be illusion.  There was no way that the reflecting scales of the thing could be real.  Cinnamon, too, thought that there was no way this could be happening and did nothing to avoid the oncoming giant.

1000 yards away and the beast let out a bellow, a cry of victory and triumph then drew in a mighty and horrendous breath.  Turning its giant reptilian head to the side, the monster let out its breath in a fiery cataclysm then aimed forward again, a grim smile flicking at the corners of its mouth.

Scott and Cinnamon desperately held each other’s hands and slowly closed their eyes, hoping to deny the unreality of their peril.  As their lids closed, the heat and the might of the gargantuan blocked out the light of the sun. The whistling howl of moving air buffeted by its powerful wings turned the serene scene around them into a thunderstorm of dust devils and tossed debris.  The monster pulled up and hovered just in front of the doomed couple, its leathery wings flapping to keep it in a perfect hover above the empty space of the canyon.

It muttered what sounded like a human word.

“Mine.”

The mouth opened, and row upon row of giant gleaming teeth glistened, although neither Scott nor Cinnamon would ever see those teeth.  In one swift and terrible motion the animal gobbled the couple, not even stopping to chew.

Before it could have begun, it seemed, it was over.  The quiet vista settled back to its comfortable silence, the sun high in the blue sky with only a few fractured clouds.  The desert canyon placid and beautiful, a sinuous line marking the path of the slow-moving river below was still again.  There was nothing at all to suggest that there might be a dragon that lived here, waiting for unsuspecting victims just stupid enough to stand still as it rose from the depths at lunchtime.

 

Thank you for reading.  God bless the Dragons!

All praise the dragons!

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Avast ye scurvy swabs! Ohhh, crap I’m still channeling Blackbeard….hold on…just a sec, ohhh crap! Clang! Opps. Shit. Bzzzzz.

Hmmm.

What’s that.
Who turned out the lights. Oh. That’s better!

Hi!

Prof. Josh here. I wanted to let our finatical followers of the faith finally find out the fortuitouS and fortunate…message. (Crap, I ran out of “F” words.)

I received a vision! Yes! Fellow worshipers at the Church of Dim! I have heard from a spirit of the higher planes! A voice in the dark came to me. It traveled over the light-years, and quanta-layers of the mulit-verse to enlighten me, to allow others, just like you to hear the greatness from beyond. The truly hopeful and lovely light from beyond. Greater than the power of a Mack truck on Chevy steroids, taller than buildings in Saudi Arabia, surrounded by Olympic sized swimming pools filled with crude. Yes! Lovlier than an English spring rain, or a homemade lasagna. (Well maybe not that, but damn close).

Anyway.

The voice hinted at the bEauty and the majesty that is to come for all of those that seek the way. So listen all ye faithful…yes. Listen.

The voice told me that he, too, was a fellow traveler. He told me, as light poured from the ceiling lamp above me, casting radiant shadows on the faKe hardwood floor that I got at costco…it was a really good deal, by the way… I had a crystal poised delicately on each of my carefully folded knees, tuning the delicate vibrations that radiate through the multiverse. The crystals began to hum, and then I heard it!

Yeah! I heard it! (Can I get an AMEN!) Brothers and Sister! Rejoice! The voice Has spoken and it is GOOD!

RANDY SAVAGE has told me that he made it.

He found his way home!
Praise the Church of Dimensional Images!
Praise the Church!

(And don’t forget to tithe…we will be offering reliquaries of Sacred bones and tumors for the truly faithful at some point….stay tuned…)

PRAISE!

Yes Randy Came to me in voice and told me: “Even a sinner like me can make it to the highest dimension.”

He said, “Josh, I know you and all the faithful have been wonderin’ what its like to travel here, if its hard, if you all will make it. But let me tell you! I pity da fool who don’t try to join me here in the ultimate dimension. (I think he might have been channeling Mr. T when he told me this). And I wanna tell you that anyone that thinks they can beat my record for making it here, I will personally pile drive them into the mat so hard they will descend at least a thousand dimensions! I will chair smash anyone who thinks they can top me! I’m Randy Savage! I may not wrastle on that planE anymore but now I am here…and I’m a’ waiting!”

“Wow” I said. “That’s great Mr. Savage. Can you tell me anything else about the ultimate dimension?”

There was a long pause and then Randy came back. He said, “Josh, go ahead and call me Randy. And, no, I can’t tell you much about the ultimate dimension. If I tell you too much I’ll have to hunt you down and kill you!”

“Really?”
“No. I’m just kiddin’. But I can tell you that the ultimate dimension is called (very oddly) Albequerquenewmexico. All one word. And no, you can’t get here from some stupid sacred crystal vibration crap or spirit vortex shit. You have to work hard to get here. No pansies allowed!”

Well children, I carefully knocked the crystals off of my knees lest I offend the prophet and thanked him for his generous kindliness.

That is all for now.

Keep the faith.

And all hail Randy Savage!

Professor Joshua (The Strange One) Erdahl

A lapse in the dimensions has occurred! Praise be!

A place exists of extreme dimensional power. Power so great, it made my heart race and my teeth ache.

It all started with a trip to the dentist. I sat, sequestered, in a small, floral wall-papered room. On the wall hung a curio cabinet painted the green-color of aged copper to match the fake aged-copper rabbit lamp siting below it. The cabinet was filled with goat figurines. Figures of goats made from porcelain and glass, images of goats painted onto small plates, pieces of crystal carved into the goat shapes. Large, useless tassels hung from every surface imaginable: the drawer pulls, the top of the paper-towel dispenser, the window trimming. Even the strange goat-cabinet had a large tassel suspended from it.

To my left, on the pepto-pink counter top (which matched the wallpaper with sickening accuracy. Perhaps they were color matched?) sat my copy of East of Eden by John Steinbeck.

A masked woman came in, wearing floral scrubs. Perhaps they received a bulk discount on this floral pattern. Or perhaps the floral pattern is evidence of slippage between two dimensions; clearly, the pattern is from a hellish dimension that only the most blasphemous non-believers would be forced to endure. Then, strange and enlightening words came from behind her mask. “You’re the third person in here today reading that book.” All of the nerves in my body stood on end, sending shivers of electricity down to my fingertips; clearly, this room was an area of dimensional slippage more powerful than I had imagined. Who on earth, aside from myself, would subject themselves to Steinbeck as quote-unquote fun reading? Very few people aside from myself would do such a peculiar and outlandish thing. That was the moment I realized that the other two readers this woman spoke of must have been projected images of myself lapsing from different dimension in this powerful, interdimensional space.

Truly, the gods and goddesses are great, and the prophets were strong. Clearly, this was a message from the Ultimate Dimension, telling me that we, the Brothers and Sisters of the Church of Dim, are on the path to glory and eternal life.

Or something very similar to that, anyway. At the very least, I can comfortably say that the followers of the Church of Dim are destined to a fantastical dimension where the floral wallpaper dripping from the power-room does not exist to haunt our most horrifying nightmares. Indeed, a wall-paperless dimension exists, and we are on the path toward it!

 

-Nikki P.

Bathe in the Spirit – or at least just bathe.

Brothers and Sisters.  It started with a vision by Brother Schlosser and grows stronger in our hearts with each day – The Church of Dim, the holiest of institutions, in fact holier than Catholicism by 43%, is a blessing for us all and we will show the heathen world The Truth.  Jesus, Buddha, Mohamed, Ra, Justin Bieber, Zeus – all but messengers leading to the Answer.  We all know how important what we are embarking upon is, particularly because words like ‘truth’ and ‘answer’ are totally capitalized – seems significant, don’t it though?  Yup. ’tis.

We have all had visions of the Truth – now it is time to piece together our great puzzle.  Let our Gods speak to us, though we don’t yet even know Their names.  Listen to Them – They will show us the way.  For now, let us document the odds and ends we do know.

It was communicated to me that:

-Our tithing is only 9% of income, rather than the usual 10%.  It seems Christianity, besides being a false religion, has been skimming off the top for too long.

-Tithing shall apply only to the unwashed.  Founder and Seers are exempt from such taxation.

-Our Gods and Goddesses, although yet to be revealed, shall have powers of great specificity.  Wait. Something is hppening. I am receiving a message.  I am being given our first name.  It is… Redpen, the Goddess of Grammatical Anality.  The Goddess herself is telling me that I missed an ‘A’ in ‘happening’ previously and that ‘anality’ is not really a word.  Thank you dear Goddess Redpen for your anal reminders, we are truly blessed by your presents.  (Yeah, I know Goddess, but giving us the gift of grammatical correction is kind of like a ‘present’.  All right, okay, I won’t do it in the future).

-Lastly, I am being told that in our Holy Book, it shall be said that Sunday is taco night and that all Church of Dim employees MUST wash hands before returning to work.

That is all.  For now.

Dr. Kandy Robertson, Ph. D. on reading.

“Not only does the reader change the text, but in some ways the text changes the reader” (Dr. Kandy Robertson, personal interview, 29 June 2011).

—Prof. Richard Y.

There are an infinite number of dimensions!

Although the statement that there are an infinite number of universes is almost certainly false, from the practical position of human perception, since there is a far greater number of dimensions than are accessible to our limited senses, we feel that this hyperbolic statement is simultaneously accurate and incorrect. But, with the relatively recent development of sciences such as Quantum Mechanics and String Theory, we can now say, with some certainty, that what we perceive is only a tiny fraction of the WHOLE. Brian Greene writes,

“String theory so thoroughly shakes the foundations of modern physics that even the generally accepted number of dimensions in our universe—something so basic that you might think it beyond questioning—is dramatically and convincingly overthrown” (Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe, P. 184).

Although Greene is referring specifically to microscopic dimensions, there is no reason to believe that macroscopic dimensions, at the cosmic level, are also in existence parallel with and sometimes intersecting our own dimension.

—Prof. Richard Y.