More than you needed to know

Short story dream

The other night's dream took the form of a complete short story. Here it is:

An old man walked down a street by a derelict factory somewhere in Manhattan. As he walked, he remembered when he was a young businessman, and his partner had come to him with a proposal that he buy a certain vacant lot in an unfashionable part of town while it was cheap to do so. He’d hesitated, then agreed to visit the site, which was an undeveloped strip surrounded by large apartment buildings. Looking at it, he had an idea. 

Years later, the idea had made him rich. He’d built a small community of luxury houses on the lot and sold them off to millionaire executives. Sure, lots of people would have built skyscrapers, but he’d figured that, his way, he would get nearly as much money without having to spend so much on the buildings themselves. 

He became wealthy, but he didn’t live in any of the houses. He kept his modest place in New Jersey and travelled into the city only to do a little business now and then. Looking back, he remembered that as a perfect time -- his house by the sea, his young family, his health; what luck he'd had! And smarts, too, naturally. 

Until today, he hadn’t returned to the area since he’d sold the last luxury house. He’d heard that the houses had been torn down in the 1970s and that a factory had been built on the site. That didn't bother him; cities change. Now, though, after everyone he knew had died and his children had all grown up and moved far away and he found himself all alone in the world, he’d decided to take a walk down to see what had become of the old place. 

A shut-down factory. Weeds and broken windows.

That everything he might have recognised was gone, he could handle. He’d been expecting that. But that the factory for which the houses had been cleared had itself been abandoned was somehow almost too much for him to bear. He walked slowly on, unable to think of any way of expressing any of what he was feeling, and absolutely unsure whether there would be any point in doing so. 

Notes for Freudian Interpretation

I've woken up countless times with the absolute conviction that the dream that I just had would make a wonderful story, only to realise once I wrote it down that it doesn't make sense and it has no proper narrative and why would a cow be sitting in a restaurant anyway?

This one seems to hang together pretty well, though. If you like that sort of thing.

It's inspired by -- or stolen outright from -- the book I was reading right before I fell asleep: Ethan Canin's "Carry Me Across the Water", in which an old man goes from place to place, reminiscing about his youth in Long Island, his family and his old brewery business. It's full of melancholic ruminations about the passage of time and musings about all the things that go together to make a life. There's some dismemberment, stabbing and violent death in it, too, but I hadn't got to those bits when I fell asleep that night, and the prevailing mood of the book is exactly the mood of the dream.

The next night, I read more of the book and was pleased to come across a bit that could have come straight out of the dream. Towards the end, the old man walks through the neighbourhood in which he grew up, which has gone downhill in the decades since he last saw it. He's obviously unhappy about what he sees, but he tries to think himself out of it: "There was enough in the world to feel sorry for without mourning the change of one small neighborhood. People came and went; buildings fell and rose. Sorrow was irrelevant, at least for a thing like this."

That's just what the old man in my dream was thinking. Or, at least, it was what he was wondering whether he should be telling himself to be thinking. 

To be fair, an astute reader would probably have realised after 20 or so pages that this was precisely the kind of book where, at some point, the aged hero goes for a wander around his old neighbourhood so that the writer can wring some extra pathos out of the ironic parallel between the character's decrepit state and that of his childhood home, so it's not too surprising that my subconscious, which tends to be more astute than me, was able to predict something in that line. 

Another story idea just occurred to me: a man finds that he has the power to predict the future through his dreams, but this power extends only to the plots of books that he's currently reading rather than to lottery numbers, stock market fluctuations or preventable terrorist attacks. He resolves not to tell anyone about his gift, and stops reading books.  

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.