TRICK OR CHEESE?

I can’t be sure it was the Yak cheese my friend gifted me from India that induced the all-too-vivid nightmare I experienced in the early hours of this morning, but it probably didn’t help.

Looking back on Halloween now, I can see clearly how my subconscious was primed for the Jodorowsky-style dream that invaded my mind without warning. Arriving at the gym yesterday afternoon, I was greeted by one of the managers dressed in a Scream outfit that looked more like Laurence Olivier playing Othello in blackface at the National Theatre back in the 1960s. Watching him struggle to eat his lunch—momentarily forgetting he had a net covering over his Scream mouth—made us both laugh, but already the surrealness had begun, and there was more to follow.

As I returned home to prepare some fresh dough for pizzas for guests who had invited themselves over to watch Rasputin: The Mad Monk, the classic Hammer horror from 1966 starring Christopher Lee, I found the sealed packet of Yak cheese in my bag, which I had completely forgotten about. Wondering how it might taste on pizza, I set it aside with my more conventional ingredients, including passata, mozzarella, and mascarpone, while glugging a glass or two of red wine.

I delivered the fresh, hot pizzas to my guests as they laughed at the kitschy Rasputin on-screen and decided to spare them my Yak cheese experiment and try it privately in the kitchen. Would this be my own Rasputin-style assassination attempt, poisoning myself with food as Yusupov had tried with tea and cyanide-laced cakes? Biting into the island of nutty, yellow, melted Yak cheese on my pizza, I awaited an instant collapse but found myself forming an involuntary grimace of dissatisfaction instead.

Then, washing the funky smelling sock cheese down with more wine, I returned to watch Rasputin’s inevitable final demise. Later, as my guests dispersed into the Halloween night, I tidied up, packed myself off to bed, doom-scrolled on X for five minutes, and watched a Dodgers fan partially blow his hand off after setting off a firework in the streets of New York after beating the Yankees.

Falling asleep with red wine and Yak cheese pizza swilling around in my belly—and images of a murdered Rasputin and a Dodgers fan’s blown-off hand—it’s amazing I slept relatively soundly through the first half of the night.

But then, waking up in the early hours, I reached for some water and settled back down.

And that’s when the true madness began.

The Dream

I was sitting in a modern, Japanese-style house in isolated woods when Kanye West appeared, wearing a Mishima-style bandana and holding a MacBook that was Bluetooth-connected to speakers filling the entire space we shared.

Eager to play his latest album, he began commentating and rapping over his beats and production, explaining that it was all about ritual and that I would be the only one to bear witness. This was to be a one-time-only experimental art performance. As he played through the tracks in sequence, Mr. West grew increasingly manic, throwing himself against the walls and banging his head on the floor, which made me more and more nervous as blood began to splatter like flecks of red paint around the room.

With the music sounding more sinister and intense and blood continuing to pour from the artist's self-inflicted head wounds, I looked around to call the police but found no phone nearby; the sense of entrapment was overwhelming. With one final, devastating blow of his head against the brutalist, zen-like concrete floor, Kanye appeared to have finally killed himself. A tremendous sense of guilt washed over me—I felt I had done nothing to prevent his suicide, which reminded me of Alexander McQueen’s rumored plan to die on the catwalk. But just as I was about to leave, Kanye rose like Rasputin, insisting on playing me the second half of his album, which became even more intense and psychedelic. He angrily demanded to know why I wasn’t jotting down everything I was witnessing in my notebook.

Writing, listening, and watching this horror unfold in real time, I eventually succumbed to the orchestrated ritual. When the final track reached its crescendo, I looked up from my notes to find that he had vanished like a phantom, leaving no trace.

Stumbling outside into the dark woods, I collapsed onto the twig-strewn ground and looked up at the night sky, feeling my heart beat faster and faster.

Then I woke up, feeling a mix of disappointment that I’d never hear this masterpiece album again and relief that the Yak cheese pizza hadn’t finished me off.

And that's when I realised I had the perfect name for the album: Rapsputin!