More than you needed to know

George Lucas dream

George Lucas had released yet another Star Wars film, this one a live-action movie featuring minor characters from the first films. He knew that everyone was sick of him and his ceaseless attempts to wring every last dime out of his franchise, so he'd decided to employ a gimmick to get initial viewers into the cinemas to see it -- it would be released in three half-hour chunks, which the audience would watch in three different cinemas in their towns over the course of the evening. 

I showed up for the first showing and spent a little while trying to get a good seat in the huge theatre where the first chunk was being shown. Eventually the film started, and I noted with a little sadness, though no great surprise, that it was almost indescribably bad. I'd expected it to be a bit rubbish, obviously, but it was beyond even The Phantom Menace's incredible level of rubbishness. The first scene went like this:

A group of cute teenage alien bounty hunters stand before Jabba the Hutt in his palace as he describes their mission to them. Suddenly, some cowled figures behind them remove their robes and reveal themselves to be imperial stormtroopers. Everyone then begins to sway from side to side as they sing a sort of barbershop-quartettish song outlining the history of the Star Wars saga so far, which goes on and on and on.

The chunk ended, the lights came up, and the audience removed themselves from the cinema, grumbling about how dreadful the thing had been. I walked through the dark streets along with them, on my way to the next cinema to sit and watch the second -- and possibly worse -- installment.

Notes for Freudian Interpretation

I'm not going to go on about George Lucas and his stupid films, as there's quite enough of that on the internet. I'm a male who was born in the early 1970s, and my opinions about the first trilogy and the second trilogy are exactly the same as those of every other guy in that demographic. 

Grrr.

 

Two obvious things during the day resulted in this dream. The first was that I listened to Mark Kermode's review of the Clone Wars cartoon. He explained that it was a very poor piece of film-making, and I was sure he was right.

 

The other thing was that, in the evening, I was scanning through a DVD of The Adventures of Robin Hood, the Errol Flynn film from 1938, looking carefully at all the people in the crowd scenes to see if I could identify a certain extra who I've discovered was working on the set of the film when he was picked up on a murder charge (it's for an Unsung Joe post, obviously). I couldn't find him -- there are hundreds of extras in that movie! -- but I kept noticing scenes and shots that were obviously, you know, influential on the Star Wars films. For instance, when the merry men ambush the sheriff's troops by jumping on them from the trees, my mind immediately flashed on the bit in Return of the Jedi when the ewoks attack the stormtroopers in the forest. Also, the scene where Robin Hood is about to be executed but escapes with the help of his friends, who are in disguise in the crowd, is exactly the same as the scene where Luke Skywalker is about to be thrown into the Sarlacc pit -- I mean exactly.

 

I doubt I'm the first to notice any of this, so I assumed that a little light googling would immediately confirm my theory, but I couldn't find any reference to the steals. Perhaps there isn't a great crossover between the Star Wars fans and the Errol Flynn fans. Although there should be.

 

The picture above is a detail of an annotated picture on this page, which is absolutely fascinating, if you're a certain type of person.

Sgt Pepper's dream

I was in a large concert hall, watching the Beatles play a live version of the whole Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album. The band, who had reformed for this tour, were dressed in the colourful, shiny costumes that they wear on the album cover, and were about three songs into the set.

John Lennon sure looked great for his age. But wait a minute -- isn't he dead? That couldn't be John Lennon -- it was a fake! And, if he was a fake, were any of them who they said they were? Was the whole thing just a gigantic fraud? Was I the only one who knew?

Notes for Freudian Reflection

The second Beatles dream in six months (the previous one is here.)

The evening before I had the dream, the thought crossed my mind while I was washing dishes that my past six months of vegetarianism must have had some sort of beneficial health effect. That led to me thinking of Paul McCartney, as I always think of his vegetarianism as one of the reasons why he looks as good for his age as he does.

Anyway, I realised that I was assuming that Paul would outlive Ringo. Then I decided that wasn't a bad bet, so I didn't feel at all guilty about it. The last stupid thing I thought in this little train of Beatlesy nonsense was that, when Ringo dies, any Paul McCartney solo concert will effectively be a reunion of the surviving Beatles.

Was George Harrison a vegetarian? No idea. He probably was, which kind of undercuts my Beatles-based theory of the health benefits of vegetarianism.  

Colin dream

I was walking back to my flat on a sunny afternoon when I noticed my friend, Colin, sitting in a cafe. I waved, and he quickly finished his cup of tea and came out. He'd been in Edinburgh for a work meeting that morning and was just about to go to the train station to go back to his office in Bath. I said I'd walk him to the station if we went via my flat, as I had to pick up some stuff for work.

I left him on the pavement while I rushed up the stairs. On the way up, it occurred to me that I should thank him for sending me a collection of Ivan Brunetti's Schizo for my birthday, which I'd incredibly rudely forgotten to do last time I saw him.

Notes for Freudian Interpretation

I'm always coming across people who are fiercely resistant to even the most simple and, to me, uncontroversial of Freud's theories about dreams. Perhaps it's the way I explain them. This dream shouldn't cause anyone any difficulty, though, as it's a fairly literal realisation of something I was thinking about earlier in the day.

After work, I went down to the printmakers workshop to keep on working on a large screenprint of 50 or so mugshot drawings that I've been doing for a while. The print is, basically, a grid of small portraits. The various layers of colour and the grid fit together quite precisely, so it takes some time to register each layer before printing it. Here's a rough summary of what went through my mind as I was carefully adjusting the first layer I was printing that night:

"It's tricky, this, but the grid will look great, so it's worth it. Didn't I read an interview with Ivan Brunetti where he was saying how he liked to arrange wee graphical elements into grids? Yes, it was him, in that book of interviews with comic guys that I bought.

Yes, Ivan Brunetti. Colin gave me that book of his collected comics. That was really good, wasn't it?

Yes. But did I mention to Colin that I'd liked it?

No. Hmm, that's bad. I meant to. But I didn't. I should have.

Could I thank him now, after all these months?

Yes. Better call him, I suppose.

I'm always saying that I should call people, but I never do. Bad. Why do I never call people when I know that I should? Because I'm a terrible person, that's why! Very bad!

Oh, that's all very depressing. Concentrate on the print, Diarmid, instead of all this self-indulgent recrimination. Work! Work!"

So I put it all out of my mind and forgot all about it. Now you know the context, it should be obvious why, later that night, my subconscious created a fantasy wherein not only did I not have to call Colin, because I actually met him, but I remembered to thank him for his present. Obvious, I tell you! How could anyone have any difficulty with that?

I should note that the first two prints were very badly registered, due to a small, idiotic mistake I'd made when setting up the press (I hadn't tightened a couple of clamps). In his Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud interprets similar "mistakes" as being punishments that people subconsciously inflict on themselves to atone for sins that they know they've committed but shrink from facing up to, like being such an appallingly dreadful friend that you never phone people you ought to phone. In that light, the two ruined prints become a sort of sacrificial offering that enabled me to clear my conscience.

Now, that's the kind of theory I can understand people fiercely resisting.

PS -- Colin, if you're reading this, thanks for the Ivan Brunetti book, which was great. Also, sorry for not phoning more often...

London dream

I was walking through a particularly posh bit of London after dark, looking at all the incredible town houses and idly peering into people's windows as I passed by so I could check out their expensive tastes in interior decoration. It was the sort of neighbourhood that has a lot of embassies, and I noticed that each embassy had decorated its front door with some of its country's local produce. The Norwegian embassy had two large filets of salmon nailed to the decorative carving below its brass knocker; the Indian embassy had a pile of jelly-like sweets in a stone urn, and so on.

I took a short-cut through a big book shop that was still open. In a room at the back of the shop, I had to squeeze through a crowd that had gathered to hear a talk by Paul Simonon, of the Clash, on how the group recorded "The Guns of Brixton". I stepped on someone's foot, and turned to apologise to them. It turned out to be an old friend of mine from school. "High Chair!" I exclaimed, because that was his nickname. He hadn't aged well at all, and looked like one of those faded, gone-to-seed punks who, despite spiking their hair and wearing tartan trousers, otherwise look like they're a little too tired of life to bother making much of an effort. We were very pleased to have bumped into each other, but, although I would have liked to hang out for a bit and perhaps even listen to Paul Simonon's talk, I had to go. 

Notes for Freudian Interpretation

Here's a picture of some gravadlax, for that is what was nailed to the Norwegian embassy's door. However, I hadn't seen any gravadlax or even thought about salmon, as far as I know, the day I had the dream. This would disappoint Freud, who was firm in his view that dreams dress their deeper concerns in "day residue". He wrote: "I believe ... that for every dream, a dream-stimulus may be found among those experiences on which one has not yet slept".

So what's the deal with the salmon? A mystery.

I'd thought about London a little, though, as it'll be the starting-off point for our summer holiday. It had crossed my mind that I'd better try to find out what astonishing London activities are available for the day or two that we might be there, because I'd hate to discover only after we got there that, for example, Woody Allen and Robert Crumb were playing a one-off benefit gig or something and I was too late to get tickets. That's the kind of thing that's always happening in London. In my imagination, if not in real life.

Why the Clash? Well, I suppose I think of them as a particularly Londony band. The other week, I bought a Nouvelle Vague album that has a cover version of "The Guns of Brixton" on it, so that's where that element came from. To what end, though, I have no idea.

The guy I called High Chair wasn't called that at school, or ever, I'm sure. His name is Bob, and he was in the year above me. We were friends for a couple of years before he went off to university, and I never really saw him again after that. When I was 16 or 17, I was pretty sure that he was a genius of some sort, and that he'd become a tremendously successful writer or journalist or something. With hindsight, the fact that he doesn't appear to have done so shouldn't be surprising; it was simply that I hadn't met many people at that time, and I innocently assumed that the first person I'd ever met who not only voluntarily read poetry when not in a classroom, but also had all the Pogues albums as well as a couple of Motown records was clearly an individual greatly removed from the herd of uncultured low-brows, myself included, with whom he shared his schooldays. By giving him an infantilising name, I am no doubt criticising him for not being as advanced as I once thought he was, which is pathetic of me, and something that I am terribly ashamed of. However, as I've said before, I will not be held responsible for views expressed while I am asleep!

Hope dream

Ellen and I were attending a family gathering in a country house -- that's to say, it was a gathering of somebody's family; I don't think we knew many of the people there. Perhaps because of that, we'd elected to look after people's kids while the grown-ups went off for a walk or hung out elsewhere in the grounds.

I noticed that one of the kids we were looking after was Hope, the newish baby of my friends, Alan and Jane. The other thing I noticed was that, somehow, she was sitting on a grassy embankment that sloped up from the top of a nearby wall. How on earth had she managed that when she's only a matter of months old?

I went over to the wall and asked her how she got up there. She explained that she'd flown up there, and could fly down again, too, but only if I closed my eyes. That was important, because she's only able to fly when no one can see her.

It seemed fair enough, so I closed my eyes until she told me to open them again, whereupon I saw that she was down on the ground beside me.

Pretty smart kid.

Notes for Freudian Interpretation

The day I had this dream, I'd seen this picture of me and Hope on Alan's Flickr site. In it, I'd twisted my hair into a peculiar quiff in mocking imitation of the remarkable spike of hair that Hope was sporting that day. What kind of feeble individual mocks a six-month-old baby girl? She doesn't look too impressed with me, that's for sure.

The other element, about looking after people's kids at a family gathering, is no doubt inspired by the rather kid-heavy time I had when we went down to Canterbury for Ellen's brother's 50th birthday event the other week. Somehow or other (probably because I don't like to say no to children, or even know how, really) I ended up talking pretty much constantly about fairies to a couple of Ellen's nieces, who believed me to be the world's greatest authority on the subject, with my expertise being matched only by their enthusiasm.

The unseen-flying business, I can't explain. Not a bad idea, though.

Underground zombies dream

I was in my office in the Parliament. The underground parking area -- a large concrete chamber, about as big as the footprint of the whole building -- had been turned into a makeshift prison for zombies. The way it worked was that, whenever the police or a concerned citizen came across a zombie shuffling around in the street, they would bring them to the Parliament, and the security guards would prod the zombie down into the car park.

Obviously, the zombies weren't particularly dangerous, but their bites were still incredibly infectious. It was pretty easy to avoid getting bitten, as they were about as agile as a housebound 90-year-old. Also, some of them didn't even have any teeth, what with the rotting gums and their non-existent dental hygiene regime. You still had to be aware of them, though. You couldn't relax in a place that you didn't know for sure was completely zombie-free and you had to check constantly that there was no way for any zombies to get into wherever you were.

The office was absolutely secure, as long as you took simple precautions. At the far end, there was a lift that went down to the parking level, but, obviously, nobody used that anymore. Except for one person. None of us knew it, but one of our colleagues had been secretly using the lift to go down to the car park to visit her boyfriend, who had become a zombie a few months previously and had recently been captured in the street. Several times a day, she sneaked down, risking death or infection, to see the guy, even though he no longer had sufficient brain capacity to recognise her as anything other than lunch.

It was quite romantic, in retrospect, but nobody in the office thought so when we found out. There was a lot of hysterical shouting, and hurtful things were said by everyone.

The dream ended with a soundless image of our paranoid fantasy of what she might have brought about: the lift doors opening and dozens of blood-spattered zombies stumbling out into our office.

Notes for Freudian Interpretation

First, I have to make clear that the idiot with the boyfriend in the basement was a generic human-type person, not a genuine colleague of mine. In fact, none of the people in the office were people I know in real life; they were like central casting office workers. The car park was exactly the same in the dream as it is in reality, though. Here it is, sans undead:

Secondly: zombies again. As I've said before, zombies appear to be my subconscious's default signifier of impending doom, and there's nothing I can do about it. Perhaps the fact that the zombie plague in this dream doesn't appear to be too big a deal says something positive about my current mood.

I saw Diary of the Dead a few weeks ago, and wasn't particularly impressed. A few days before the dream, though, I'd read an interview with George Romero in which he'd stressed the need for zombies to be shambling, unhealthy-looking things who walk terribly slowly and fall over occasionally. He said that it made no sense for them to come back from the dead with super-athletic abilities (as in Zak Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead). I thought that was a great comment because it suggests that, to George Romero, zombies make sense. On another level, though, I liked it because it showed that he agrees with me about how an audience's suspension of disbelief works. Basically, there should be only one unbelievable premise in the story. To put it more simply, you're only allowed one "What if?" In Romero's case, this is, "What if people people could come back from the dead?" The answers to that question (however unbelievable the premise of the question might be) must be more or less believable.

What if people could come back from the dead? Well, they'd probably be brain damaged, as their brains wouldn't have been getting any oxygen and would have decayed somewhat. Also, they'd want to eat, as that's one of the most basic human impulses. Can we make our zombies threatening, for the sake of the story? Well, we can if we suppose that this brain damage has wiped their higher thought processes and left them like uncivilised savages, trying to satisfy that basic human impulse by eating anything that moves, and also that they exist in overwhelming numbers. However, we can't make them threatening by giving them super strength, the ability to outrun cars or, say, fly. Even though we would be genuinely terrified if we were somehow confronted with a super-strong, super-speedy, flying zombie in real life, we would be entirely unafraid of the same thing in a film, because it requires a succession of suspensions of disbelief, rather than one big one.

I should point out that Dracula, one of the most popular scary fictional characters in literature, is, effectively, a super-strong, super-speedy flying zombie, so perhaps I'm full of shit.

Cloverfield dream

It was dark, the only light coming from distant burning buildings. Somewhere out in the ruined city, an enormous monster was lumbering about, smashing things to pieces. The slow, booming thud of its steps was very loud, even though it was somewhere across town.

I was standing with a group of other people (all different ages; all strangers) near a shattered tenement. We had decided that we had to get out of town, but no one could agree on which way to go. Everyone was sure that everyone else's ideas were certain to get us squashed or eaten.

It was really important that we started moving in one direction or other, though, because the streets were crawling with beetle-like creatures that grew into vicious, bear-sized creatures with snapping pincers when they realised that they were close to people. We all agreed that our prospects were bleak.

Notes for Freudian Interpretation

If you've seen Cloverfield, you'll guess that I must have seen it as well (the giant, unseen monster, the scary smaller things and the bickering people will have given it away). If you haven't seen Cloverfield, I can't really recommend that you do, as there isn't much to it beyond the inventive first-person camera work and a couple of decent shocks. The characters, even though they're pretty lightly sketched, are immensely annoying. After the film, I decided that I wouldn't have found them so bad if I'd been, say, 10 years younger -- more their age, in other words. Can it be that I just don't like films with young people in them, I wondered? The more I thought about it, the more likely that sounded. Then I remembered that I'd liked Juno, though, and it's full of young people. And This is England was great, too, of course. Perhaps, I reasoned, I don't mind films about young people -- that is, films in which the fact of being young is the subject of the film -- but can't stand films that simply star young people because the filmakers don't want to make people look at old people.

I suppose I thought about that on and off throughout the rest of the day. Age. Being young. Being old. A few days earlier, I'd read an (surprisingly unsubtle) aphorism in a Philip Roth book: "Old age isn't a battle, it's a massacre," which probably connected itself in my mind to the massacre in Cloverfield and sort of justified my preoccupation with the issue of the age of the characters. After all, in the long term, what does it matter if the beautiful young men and women in Cloverfield escape from the city alive? In a matter of only a few decades, they'll be decrepit, perhaps senile and facing death all over again, but this time without the benefit of youth and beauty!

I think that my subconscious took Roth's observation and mixed it with what I'd seen in the film, producing its own version, which would be something like: "Old age isn't a battle, it's a huge lizardy monster rampaging about, squashing people and setting things on fire."

Elephant Dream

It was near the end of dusk, but not yet dark, and I was walking through the meadows in Edinburgh. Looking behind me, I saw two huge, indistinct shapes under the trees. I stopped and peered into the gloom, trying to make out what they were.

Grazing rhinoceroses.

I remembered that rhinoceroses are just about the most deadly animal in the world, after the hippopotamus and the mosquito (everyone knows this fact) and decided to get out of there as quickly as I could manage without tipping them off to my presence.

I quickly reached the edge of the meadows and glanced back to see if I'd been noticed. Bad news - the rhinoceroses were now a couple of elephants, and they were heading my way. I should have kept moving, in order to keep the elephants behind me, but I'd stopped to stare at them for too long, and I found that they'd cut off my way out of the park.

I pressed myself against the wall as they drew nearer, their trunks waving around curiously. They didn't appear to be angry or violent, but they were massive and heading towards me and I felt trapped and pretty small and squashable. Indeed, I was going to be squashed! By strolling elephants! This was it! Help!

Notes for Freudian Interpretation

And then I woke up. Or Ellen woke me up because of the enormous fuss I was having.

A day or so before the dream, I'd flicked through a big hardback book about elephants that I'd spent 20 quid on back in the days when I didn't have enough money to be wasting it on big hardback books about elephants, so the purchase had been pretty significant. I was clearing out a bookshelf -- culling neglected books to make space for yet more books -- and filling a bag to take to the charity shop. Would the elephant book go to charity? When I bought it, I justified the purchase by telling myself that it would be an essential work of reference for my artistic career, which would probably involve my doing lots of pictures of elephants. I rarely buy any expensive book unless I can somehow convince myself that it will come in handy for a practical purpose. Sometimes, the book actually does prove to be of some use, but not in this case. The elephant book has been used for precisely no artistic works, although I've read it and thought it was quite interesting.

I decided to save it. I have no plans for any elephant pictures at this point, and I can't see myself doing any in the future, but I like the pictures in the book.

I don't know why the elephants started off as rhinoceroses. Freud says that transformations in dreams are a form of grammar, though, so the "sentence" would go something like: "rhinoceroses, BUT elephants" or "rhinoceroses, BECAUSE elephants". Of course, we'd have to attach some interpretation to each of the other two elements in the sentence in order to interpret it.

And my subconscious was utterly wrong about the degree of deadliness of rhinoceroses, although it correctly placed mosquito first. The real list, approved by science and everything, is this:

1 - Mosquito. 2 - Asian cobra. 3 - Australian box jellyfish. 4 - Great white shark. 5 - African lion. 6 - Australian saltwater crocodile. 7 - Elephant. 8 - Polar bear. 9 - Cape buffalo. 10 - Poison dart frog.

George Harrison dream

I was watching a pretty good documentary about the Beatles, which was full of never-before-seen footage of recording sessions and television appearances. One old clip showed George Harrison performing "Within You, Without You", one of his terrible Indian-influenced, droning sitar things (it's on "Sergeant Pepper's"). He was standing in a circle of sitar and tabla players, all of whom were wearing wooden masks of Hindu gods - I remember seeing Hanuman, the monkey-faced god and Ganesh, the elephant-faced god. Was it blasphemous, in India, to impersonate deities like that? I wasn't sure and, anyway, the genuinely shocking thing about the performance was the fact that George was wearing brown face-paint and a tuxedo, to make himself look like an Indian waiter. That's the 1960s for you, I thought.

Notes for Freudian Interpretation

Earlier that evening, before the dream, Ellen and I had had dinner at Ford's house. He'd just come back from visiting his mother in Wales and didn't want to cook, so we ordered in curry from a takeaway. It was, incidentally, completely delicious, although I ate too much, as is often the case with takeaway Indians.

Ford's kitchen stereo is refusing to play CDs at the moment, so the radio was on while we ate, not that we were listening to it with any great attention. The programme that we were ignoring was about the making of "Segreant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and had lots of short bits of the songs in various pre-finished states. I don't think I heard "Within You, Without You", but it's not impossible. I remember thinking of George Harrison just once, in the context of Beatles who were dead compared to Beatles who were not dead.

There's a pair of recurring nonsensical thoughts that often pop into my head when I think of anything to do with the Beatles, and, as ever, they popped into my head that night, too: What will we do with the last Beatle? and Will what we do differ depending on whether it's Paul or Ringo?

Penny Farthing dream

With some difficulty, I rode a small-scale penny farthing bicycle down a sunny country lane somewhere in England. I turned off the lane and cycled into the well-kept graveyard of a large parish church. Gathered around the door of the church, evidently waiting for me, were lots of my uncles, cousins and assorted family members, who had all gathered there for a family reunion. I knew they wouldn't mind that I was a little late because, for heaven's sake, it's really hard to travel by miniature penny farthing.

Notes for Freudian Interpretation

Just before going to sleep, I'd been reading a book made up of extracts from the Illustrated Police News, the Victorian newspaper that printed sensational crime stories accompanied by often quite lurid engravings. Here are a few of the things I read about before turning out the light, any of which would have provided material for an absolutely gripping dream: a man being thrown into a copper vat of boiling water by his boss; a depressed mother who threw her children into the Thames and another who threw her baby out of a tenement window; a savage mob trying to burn an adulteress alive; and a madman imprisoned in a cellar beneath a domestic kitchen. Odd, then, that I should choose to have a dream inspired by the short and puzzlingly unsensational piece about a cyclist in Brentford who was almost toppled from his penny farthing by a ruffian, but did not, in the end, suffer any harm whatsoever.

It's always surprising what the subconscious decides to fixate on. It's like an annoying child playing with the wrapping paper instead of the present. Bloody ingrate.

However, I expect the bike story ended up as dream material because, at a deep, tribal level, I identified with the Victorian cyclist due to the fact that I've been cycling to work for a few months now. Evidently, while the reports of manual labourers and mentally unsound poor people murdering each other and being executed perturbed me not at all, the notion of a middle class cyclist -- one of my own! -- being roughly treated by a hoodlum caused my primitive brain to experience a degree of agitation that could be soothed only by the creation of a pleasant fantasy in which a bike ride ends in a much more agreeable way.