Recurring nightmares have plagued this man for as long as he can remember. While others are curling up for a good night’s sleep, Jared Smollen (AKA Kirby) dreads putting his head on a pillow for fear that he will spend yet another night as a pink cotton candy-colored blob in the hellish demon pastures of his “Dream Land.”

“It’s gotten pretty scary at times. At the start, I’m just flying around in the clouds or waddling around, then suddenly an enormous Penguin monster is trying to kill me with a hammer.”

Smollen, a graduate of Vanderbilt University, already had several vague hypotheses for why these dreams recur:

“As I understand Freud, dreams are just small concerns of the day made into images that point to deeper desires and fears… But, I work in a bank. I can’t imagine what goes through my mind at work that would make me dream of a tree with a boner nose making me swallow apples and spit them back at his face. My subconscious either wants me to experience the most cartoony version of Lord of the Rings… or the most homoerotic version.”

Smollen continued by stating that these fears were either more “existentially terrifying” than the first reading of a Camus book, or his mind was trying to tell his body something it has known for quite some time.

“Sometimes I dream that I die over and over and over the same way. Those are the worst nights. I can’t figure out how to maneuver around these large creatures that want to kill me, and I have to just keep getting hit with a hammer or the stuff coming out of the tree’s mouth until I wake up. I like to think of that tree or hammer as my fear of death… That, or my insuppressible longing for phallic objects…”

We visited Jared at Citi Bank where he was even more candid with us:

“I don’t understand how the economy can be doing so poorly, but people still get fatter. Every rosy-cheeked chubby lady I talk to probably has a better job than I do. Sometimes I wish I could go all Buffalo Bill on these people and wear their fat faces as a suit, and do their jobs. You know, just do what they do for awhile. I don’t care which: chef, knight, ninja. Whatever they do, I just want to live as my mortal enemies for awhile.”

“I’ve also had asthma my entire life, and sometimes wake up in the middle of the night because I think I’m not able to breathe. That must be the reason I dream of endlessly sucking in air all night.  Or it could just be another gay thing.”

When we asked about other dreams, he responded:

“Recently, I’ve had this weird dream where I am in this Thunderdome-ish fight with a few other people who are trying to knock me out of the ring, and the audience is complaining how ‘cheap’ and ‘unfair’ I am as I float safely back into the ring no matter how far I get knocked off.”

Additional reporting from Hardcasual’s own Daniel Wilbur.