Leaving work, a passing joke about surgery awakened the memory of last night’s dream: I performed a casual sort of surgery on the neck of a friend, a musician.

He was pausing with me prior to playing a gig in a nearby locale, and for reasons not recalled, it was necessary to carefully flense two half-inch wide, seven-inch long, half-inch thick strips of fatty flech from the back of his neck.

Surgery completed, we were flummoxed by the suddenly-noted lack of dressings. Time dictated that my friend had to depart for the gig, and so he did, wounds undressed and bleeding.

The images in the dream seem to have erupted from one or more long-forgotten documentaries on whaling and sealing, and the vision of the bloodied, fatty flesh clearly reflects this.

Naturally, given the likely source of the imagery, there was only one proper denouement to the act of the flensing.

With a sense of compulsion and horror even within the dream, I ate both ribbons of human flesh