The dream began in Rohan.

King Théoden dead, Éomer and I—his sister Éowyn—solemnly attending his funeral. Within a sanctum hewn from the rock (with perfectly smooth and rectilinear walls of silver), we bore his noble, potato sack-wrapped body to his tomb. Tears streamed down my face. “Bring forth his sword, that he should be clad in splendour even in death,” called the Elven guard. I wasn’t entirely sure why his sword was a Civil War cavalry saber, but we put it alongside the corpse.

“Why the fuck are there pterodactyls in Rohan?” asked Éomer, and indeed, looking up, I could see the great beast circling above, crying the sorrowful cry of the pterodactyl, mourning our common loss. It looked a lot like Mothrakk, though it wasn’t bombing us with fire.

Then the slivery walls of the sanctum melted away and there, on the barren Arctic ice fields, began the shark chase. A single, massive, malevolent shark stalked us, sporadically breaching the ice and swallowing members of our Hawaiian tour group whole. His cold dead eyes watched us as he passed, his sickly white flank the length of a full city block. Watching the great beast, I tripped in my flight, and fell, and knew that I was doomed. But looking up, I saw an apparition: Kevin Bacon walking towards me, across the frigid waters.

“How…how are you walking on water?” I asked.

“Do you doubt the will of Kevin Bacon?” countered Kevin Bacon.

Actually, he was just walking on a shallow puddle, but the illusion was convincing. And with a wink, Kevin Bacon ran into the sunset, distracting the great shark so that I might live. I took refuge in the half-submerged ruins of an ancient civilization—had they been a sea-faring race, or were they simply victims of continental drift? Regardless, to my horror, I soon realised that my shelter was in fact the spawning grounds of the great sharks, and I was surrounded by female specimens of the species, smaller but no less aggressive than their male counterparts. Teeth gnashed, the sea boiled, the predators circled ever closer. I was frozen with hypothermia and terror. But I could end this nightmare, I knew. I had only to disconnect from this Avatar—which would subsequently be torn apart, of course; a great financial loss—and I would wake up elsewhere, away from this cursed place. I calmed myself and attempted to disconnect…

40 years later, a research expedition was gathering to investigate the disappearance of the Avatar, and of Kevin Bacon. They set out, their pack mules burdened with scientific gear, finally arriving at their first port of call: a Vulcan temple in the middle of Central Park. The expedition’s lead researcher, Neil deGrasse Tyson, pored over several recently-excavated artifacts, including a strange tomb covered in ancient Chinese writings and ideograms. He noted a particular design, three circles encompassing various writings—two circles set inside a deeply-cut rectangle, the other without. Pointing out the design to his scholars, he asked them for a translation. This is what they gave him:

“You are quiet and mathematical.”

The moral of the story is that taking Buckley’s right before bed is probably the best idea I’ve had this year.