Masters of the Universe

“You were doing a wile bit of shouting during the night. What were you dreaming about?” This was Herself enquiring as to why I was jumping all around the boudoir writhing and roaring, as if the man with the cloven feet and the forked tail was about to rip me down into Dante’s Tenth Level of Hell.

I admitted that I hadn’t the foggiest and it wasn’t until I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom minutes later that it all came flooding back.

In my mind’s still bleary eye, the dream had started with me encountering a girl with whom I used to go to school. As surprising as that was (I hadn’t seen her in decades), all of a sudden we were being chased by zombies and all I had for defence was a sub-machine gun, which must have been lying handily nearby.

The rest of le rêve was spent attempting to evade the undead while mowing down as many as possible via my Tommy gun. In one memorable incident, a zombie had me by the neck and was trying to sink his dirty dentures into my jugular and for some reason, my gun had jammed. Just when I had given up all hope of surviving and had resigned myself to never again seeing another sunrise nor witnessing my daughters’ marriages nor even returning the library book which at this point is four years overdue, another toothy fiend entered the fray.

Sporting a small, metallic saddle and helmet not unlike something Battle Cat would have worn when ferrying He-Man around the grounds of Castle Grayskull, Waffle sprang at my adversary and grabbed him by his tattered sleeve, pulling down and away so as to dislodge the ironclad zombie grip from my throat.

“Get him, Waffie!” I shouted. And then Waffle was dragging the zombie away to the edge of a cliff (a cliff which had seemingly appeared from nowhere).

“Letting go the monster, the Waff backed towards me, all the while snarling at the original toothy fiend. But the zombie was determined. The zombie was hungry. The zombie came rushing forth.

The deranged former human surged towards me, slavers hanging from its gaping maw, its eyes cold and dead and fish-like. It’s torn and bloody arms reached towards me as it moaned. I backed up against a tree, helpless and exposed, impotent and bereft of hope. Enter the Waff once more.

Like an XL Bully souped up on a mixture Clenbuterol and Red Bull, Waffle went headlong into the zombie’s bloody midriff, knocking the brute off balance and ultimately, over the edge of the cliff, where it tumbled head over feet to a jagged, rocky shoreline below.

“No wonder I was roaring in the night time,” I said around a mouthful of foaming toothpaste. “Wait til you hear this…”

After I had relayed the hitherto un-recounted tale, Herself drew me a long, withering look. “No more horror films for you,” she added.

Later that very evening, I was just about to watch the next episode of ‘Kingdom’ (a South Korean TV show featuring – you guessed it – zombies), Waffle started whimpering and twitching in his sleep in front of the fire.

I was just about to call out, “Right, dog!” then I remembered the Hairy Fool’s rescue of the night before. So, instead of roaring at him as I habitually would, I crossed the living room and sat on the rug beside the quivering form.

“Let sleeping dogs alone,” one of the little humans suggested but I paid them no mind.

In my soon-to-be-bleary mind’s eye, Waffle was dreaming of his own action adventure, most likely featuring a constant stream of strangers walking past our house.

Or mayhaps he was merely chasing the garden’s resident Blackbird. For all I knew, in his dreams, I might be He-Man and he Battle Dog and we might be raging against that pestilence of zombies. Whatever the case, he looked more than a little agitated in his reveries.

Without saying a word, I laid a hand on his side. At the very instant of contact, Waffle leapt into the air as if I’d plugged him in to the mains.

Just as quickly, following a shake of the head – banishing the dreams no doubt – Waffle sat back on his haunches, tail a-wag and tongue lolling.

He semmed to say, “Thanks for that, He-Man. Now, what about some snuggling.”

I gave his ear a quick scratch. “That’s enough, Battle Dog. I’m away to watch Kingdom. See you in my dreams.”