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Rocket dream

In order for the world to be saved, four people, including me, had to be fired into space aboard a small 1950s-style rocket ship. The idea was that the rocket would just keep heading out into space forever, and that we would simply die. It wasn't a happy prospect, but we all understood that it was vital work.

As it wasn't important that we stayed alive, the rocket hadn't been equipped with air tanks, food or insulation. Not long after we left earth's atmosphere, the temperature dropped to below freezing, which seemed to kill the three other passengers.

I realised that I'd been hoping for a reasonably quick death, but now it looked like I was going to be around until the oxygen ran out or I starved to death, which was an incredibly depressing idea. 

It was horribly cold, and outside the only window there was only black, empty space.

Notes for Freudian Interpretation

This was the closest thing to a nightmare I've had in ages. That same night, I also had another zombie armageddon dream, but I could only remember a snapshot of it -- a crowd of zombies shambling through a ruined Tollcross. I assume I was anxious about something or other, but I'm not sure what it could have been. 

I know where the zombies came from -- an article on zombie films in the Guardian's G2 section that I flicked through while I was waiting for the barman in the Cameo (in Tollcross) to get my order -- but the rocket ship is a little less obvious. I suspect it was influenced by a passage at the end of the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which I read that night, in which Mina Murray is on a sort of spaceship heading for the moon on some vague but important mission, and passes by the frozen corpse of Professor Moriarty, still clutching the lump of anti-gravitational cavorite that whisked him up into the sky at the end of the first volume of the League and seemingly doomed to float through space forever. If so, I would appear to have given myself the noble attributes of the heroine combined with the terrible fate of the villain. Perhaps I'm seeking to excuse myself from doing something that I ought to do but don't want to do, and have created a scenario in which my good intentions result in a horrible death as a way of justifying my lack of action. Sounds a lot like something I'd do, frankly.

Dalek dream

The dream: I was in a supermarket, standing near two men whom I vaguely recognised. A small child went up to them and said, "You must be the fathers of Grant Morrison and Pat Kane." He was wrong, though -- as soon as he said that, I instantly realised that they were Grant Morrison and Pat Kane. I also knew that both of them felt bad about having grown so old that they could be mistaken for their own fathers.

They went upstairs to a small cafe, where they discussed the project they were working on, which was the plot outline for the new season of Dr Who. They both agreed that the Daleks had become terribly unfrightening since the series was brought back, and that overuse had more or less finished them in their present form. "Remember the old days of Dalekmania back in the 60s?" said Grant. "Those Dalek comics were so colourful and fun, with their strange Dalek-shaped spaceships and assortment of weird Dalek attachments, and that big, bulbous-headed emperor Dalek." Pat Kane saw where Grant was going, and realised that the only way to make the Daleks interesting again was to recreate them in a sort of crazy pop-art style. This was going to be the best season of Dr Who ever.

Notes for Freudian Interpretation: My, this is a nerdy one. You might not be familiar with Grant Morrison, but he writes comics. I was a big fan of his back in the 80s, when he wrote such great scripts for 2000AD that I suspected he must be Alan Moore using a pseudonym, but he turned out to be an actual, real-life person in his own right. I haven't read anything by him since the DC series,  Doom Patrol, in the 1990s, but the day I had this dream, someone had told me that they'd really enjoyed his recent 12-issue run on Superman, which, apparently, returned to the series' classic, 50s/60s mythology and tone.

One of the things that interests me about the Superman revamp is that the creative team are all Scottish. Not only that, but one of them (the colourist, but still) was a couple of years ahead of me at high school.

I like Pat Kane considerably less than I like Grant Morrison. In the 80s, I couldn't stand the band he was in, Hue and Cry, but I also found special reason to dislike him in his stupid decision to resign from the magazine he wrote for, The Cut, because they refused to stop publishing a Grant Morrison strip called The New Adventures of Hitler, which he didn't like because, it seemed to me at the time, he was a humourless, unimaginative, pompous dullard. I think I might have been right, too.

The day I had the dream, I'd heard Pat Kane's wife (a journalist) talking about AC/DC, who she didn't like. She was proud that her husband hadn't written anything as morally reprehensible (by which I understood her to mean "fun") as AC/DC's "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap", and I told her that I bet he wished he had. But she couldn't hear me, as she was on the radio.

If I think about Grant Morrison, there's a chance I'll be reminded of Pat Kane, and if I think about Pat Kane, I'll definitely be reminded of Grant Morrison. The day I had the dream, I thought about them both, which is why they showed up in the dream later on. I don't think that Daleks featured in the day at all, but I could be wrong. However, I entirely agree with dream-Grant that they were better in the 1960s comics than they are now. Look at this old Dalek annual, for example -- it's got dinosaurs and everything!

Bit-part Actor Dream

I was watching an old black-and-white horror film from the 50s when I noticed that one of the women in an early scene was a bit-part actor called Sally Yarnell. I knew she was in the film -- she was the reason I was watching it, as I was trying to track down all of her brief cinematic appearances for a blog post I was writing on her career --  but I'd been led to believe that she appeared only briefly in a much later scene. It turned out that she had a pretty big part (in the scene, if not in the film as a whole). She was playing the young wife of the hero, who was in deep theoretical discussion with a man who would later be revealed to be a mad scientist. As she listened to the two men talking about some scientific procedure, she realised that the mad scientist's theories had horribly evil implications (she caught on much faster than her husband). The camera drifted towards her, cutting the men out of the frame as it pushed in on her face, which wore an expression of increasing terror. Then she fainted.

It was a great performance. What an actress!

Notes for Freudian Interpretation

Another Unsung Joe dream, just like last month!

The film that I was watching was a dream version of The Black Sleep, a terribly stiff and unexciting cheapie horror. The poster would have lead 1956 audiences to expect a wonderfully lurid ride, with a green Tor Johnson leading an army of mammoth monsters who were rising from the depths of a black hell! However, the monsters don't really show up until the last reel, and, even then, they're not mammoth, and there's only four of them, and, up until that point, there's just a lot of people standing around talking.

Great poster, though.

Sally Yarnell really is in the film. She plays one of the monsters -- that's her on the left of the poster, like a strange pink growth emerging from the side of Tor Johnson's head. As you can see, her monster credentials appear to be based mostly on premature hair loss. (I told you it was a cheapie.) I first came across her in a Robert Mitchum film in which she can be seen for about two seconds. She played a pianist, and you only saw the back of her head -- it struck me as being just about the most anonymous role an extra could get without actually being just a blurry out-of-focus blob in the deep background, so I looked into her career to see what else she'd done. The Black Sleep, which appears to be her highest-profile performance, is almost the last one in her IMDB filmography before a decades-long break from cinema.

There's an awful lot of guesswork and supposition involved in working out what happened in someone's life when all you've got to go on are a few unconnected facts, and I'd assumed that she'd quit acting because she was depressed that, after 15 years in Hollywood, the best role she'd managed to get was that of an alopecia-afflicted ghoul who appears for a few minutes at the end of a rubbish B-movie. It seemed to be a reasonable assumption, based on the little information I had.

Her story seemed a little too ordinary to bother about at first, but I kept her in mind in case I ever managed to dig up something interesting about her. The newspaper archive site that I use for research updates hundreds of pages a day and, if you can't find something interesting about a person the first time you check them out, you can drop in some other time to see if anything good has cropped up. In Sally's case, when I checked up on her again after a couple of years, it had. It turned out that there was a much more depressing reason for her early retirement than I'd assumed, which was that, just after she'd appeared as a balding monster in The Black Sleep, she'd been in a horrible car crash that had torn off her scalp.

It's an awful thing to happen, and the ironic twist must have made it just that little bit more terrible for her to bear. However, as you'd imagine, my first reaction was, "Wow! That'll make a good story!"

I feel a little bad about that -- only a little, mind -- and, whenever I scan one of her old films, examining the faces of the female extras to find her, it occurs to me (only fleetingly, but enough to register) that I'm only interested in her because of the terrible thing that she had to go through rather than for any merit she might have had as a performer, and that that's not very nice of me.

So I'm grateful to this dream for letting me off the hook by coming up with a brilliant scene for her and allowing me to feel good about myself again for acknowledging her as an actor, not just a tragic victim. Good old subconscious -- I'm a nice guy after all!

Unsung Joe dream

I was living with some 1930s film people in their 1930s house. I could tell that they were 1930s people because they and their house were in black and white. I was in colour, of course.

We were all doing various tasks together in the kitchen when a man who I thought was the uncle of one of the others in the house tripped and fell forward onto the searing hot metal plate of the range. After lying on it for a couple of seconds, as if paralysed by the shock, he slowly and seemingly without pain turned to face us. One side of his face was terribly burned.

I knew I had to tell people about this. Without stopping to think or to ask how he was, I rushed out of the house. I wasn't going to fetch a doctor; I was heading for an internet cafe.

When I got to the internet place, which was in a modern high street -- all colour -- I realised I didn't have enough money to pay for a session. The minimum charge was 28p, but I had only 26p. I searched all of my pockets, and discovered a 2p piece. I entered the cafe and paid the guy...

Notes for Freudian Interpretation

I have a work anxiety dream every now and again. Usually, the dream will involve me being unable to report the parliamentary proceedings properly because something has gone horribly wrong. These dreams fall into three main types: the "Please shut up!" dreams, in which the members of Parliament all start speaking over each other so that I can't hear what anyone is saying; the "Who the hell are you?" dreams, in which I realise with horror that I don't recognise a member who's speaking; and the "Oh my God!" dreams, in which a riot breaks out in the chamber and I have the impossible task of desperately trying to write down every weird thing that happens.

This dream, although I'm sure it's a work anxiety dream, doesn't fit in any of those categories. That's because it's not about my work in Parliament; it's about writing The Unsung Joe, my other blog. The dream is an obvious dramatisation of the process of researching the private lives of old, unknown movie people with the aim of finding out some interesting, tragic or funny facts about them, and then writing about it on the internet.

Imagine the type of character who'd have a work anxiety dream about writing his blog! Shameful.

I should point out that the anxiety about The Unsung Joe comes not from the act of writing the blog, but from my recent decision to rewrite it as a book, which was suggested to me by a literary agent who got in touch last month. The prospect of undertaking a serious piece of hard work, rather than posting stuff whenever I feel like it, is a little daunting, and is exactly the kind of thing that you'd expect would cause ripples of disquiet in your subconscious, which might result in a dream in which not only is the task of finding out interesting stories as easy as simply hanging out with a bunch of people, but, even though it might at first appear that you simply don't have the necessary resources to complete your work, you'll find that you do, if you try hard enough. It's one of those pep-talk dreams that Freud was always on about.

It's nice to know that my subconscious has faith in my abilities, but I can't help but note that it won't be doing any of the actual work.

Three Choices Dream

What would you do if you and a group of Iraqis had been picked up in the street by Saddam Hussein's police and were being interrogated by a terrifyingly violent policeman, and all you had on you was the cigarette lighter that you'd hidden in your sock?

It's an excellent question, which my dad, my big brother and I were discussing in my dream last night.

My immediate idea was that I would use the lighter to set fire to my trouser leg, which would give me an excuse to get up and rush around the room, whereupon I would be able to take advantage of the panic I would have caused to slip away, unnoticed.

My dad agreed with my basic idea, but not with the approach. He said he'd set fire to the burqa of the woman sitting next to him, because that would cause more panic and make it easier for him to escape. Also, he wouldn't be on fire.

My big brother said he'd set fire to the desk.

As they discussed the merits of the three courses of action, I thought how similar the scenario and our reactions to it were to what happened during the famous attack on New York City by Albino King Kong, which had taken place a few years before. If you recall, Albino King Kong had been spotted wading across the Atlantic towards the city, and the people of New York had only a few days in which to come up with a way of preventing him from carrying out his plan to rampage madly around the island of Manhattan until he'd flattened all the buildings south of Harlem.

The population divided around three options. The first was to set fire to Albino King Kong before he got to the city, but it was generally thought that his fur would be too wet. The second was to set fire to the city before Albino King Kong got to it, which was thought to be sensible because, if the place was going to be destroyed anyway, it would be much better, safer and fairer if the citizens did it themselves. The third option, which was suggested in the middle of the night a few hours before Albino King Kong was due to arrive, was to go to the apartment of the evil man who was controlling Albino King Kong, get him out of bed and set fire to him. This was done, because it was obviously the best idea. As the man, still wearing his pajamas, was burned by the mayor and other elected officials, Albino King Kong, many miles from shore, toppled slowly into the sea, smoke pouring from both ears.

Notes for Freudian Interpretation

Often, it's obvious to me where certain elements in my dreams have come from, and I generally like to be able to have a lot to say in the notes for Freudian interpretation section of the post, but I'm completely at a loss this time, as I'm sure that nothing in the dream had come up during the day (although I had spoken to my dad, and we'd mentioned my brother, who had been promoted to acting sergeant of a police station near where I work).

All I can say is that this was one of those very exciting dreams that leave you with a satisfied feeling and the conviction that they'd make a brilliant film, which is a firm belief that you hold only until you write it down...