More than you needed to know

Fear of Flying

I was waiting in line at the gate in a small, foreign regional airport. One of a group of young but traditionally dressed Asian Muslim guys came over to me and whispered in my ear: "Don't get on the plane." He went back to his friends, who were sniggering and glancing in my direction. The dream faded out as I stood in the line, absolutely certain that they were just messing around but with a small, maddening, paranoid doubt: what if he's telling the truth?

Notes for Freudian Analysis

The week before I had this dream, Raj Jandoo, an advocate who I seemed to always end up talking to in the pub in the first year of the Parliament, appeared in court on charges relating to a flight to Stornoway on which he "conducted himself in a disorderly manner." This appeared to involve him speaking loudly about a bomb, "repeatedly pressing buttons on his watch while looking around" and standing in the aisle to search the overhead lockers. Everyone who has ever got on a plane, especially in the past few years, must have considered the comic possibilities that are presented by people's ever-growing terrorist paranoia but, obviously, it takes a wag of Raj Jandoo's powers to translate whimsy into action.

As the case is currently sub judice, I can't comment further.

The Burger Van

I'm not particularly desperate to see The Station Agent, which appears to be a film about three lonely misfits, one of whom is a dwarf, and I haven't thought about it except when I've seen the trailer in the cinema, but I had a dream last night that seemed to be about it.

I was watching a film set in a town in one of the southern states of the USA. Laura Linney was playing a woman who was going out with a man called Lance, who was a useless drunk. In his favour, he was good looking and owned a burger van, which he and Laura Linney drove all over the local rural area.

One day, the sheriff met Laura Linney as she was shopping in a convenience store. He said that, although everyone had always known that Lance had once been married to his own daughter, they had only just found out that the girl had been underage at the time. Not only incest (which nobody seemed to care about, I note) but paedophilia too? Laura Linney was badly shaken. She noticed that everyone in the store was staring at her. When she went into the street, everyone stopped what they were doing and stared at her, too.

The next scene was set some months later. Laura Linney was running the burger van herself; Lance was in jail. She pulled into one of her regular pitches, a lay-by in a forest, and I remember thinking that one of the signs that this wasn't a good film was that they had chosen to tell the audience that Laura Linney was happier now that Lance was out of the picture by making her dust the merchandise in the van in an unrealistically carefree way.

One of her regular customers, a rather simple truck driver, bought a burger. The burgers, pre-cooked, cold and already in their buns, were piled on the counter. They didn't look delicious. As she talked to him, telling him that Lance had died -- a story that she preferred to the fact that he was doing time for being an incestuous paedophile -- I realised that this must be the prequel to The Station Agent, as she didn't seem to have met the dwarf yet.

Presently, another burger van pulled into the lay-by. The driver, an angry and uncouth thug, shouted at Laura Linney, asking her why she hadn't been to visit Lance in jail. The man who had bought the burger realised that he had been lied to, and I got the impression that he was going to tell everyone else.

Notes for Freudian Analysis

Yes, it's another dream where I simply watch a film. Freud has done little work since the advent of cinema (although his performance as Slouching Reading Man in Tolkovaniye Snovidenij was highly regarded), so we shouldn't expect him to have any great insights into the reasons for such dreams. I think I recall a bit of The Interpretation of Dreams that deals with a patient who dreamed the plot of a novel, but I might be wrong. I suspect that he'd say that dreams in which the dreamer doesn't appear are the result of a distancing tactic on the part of the subconscious, which has stronger reasons than normal to distort the actual subject of the dream and dissociate the dreamer from it. Probably.

Although I attached the name Laura Linney to her, the actress in my dream was Patricia Clarkson, who actually plays the woman in The Station Agent.

I believe that one of the characters in The Station Agent works in a hot dog van.

While surfing aimlessly yesterday, I came across someone's strongly held opinion that 'WOODY ALLEN IS A SCUM SUCKING PEDIPHILE!!!!(sic)'

Documentary dream

I very much enjoy dreams in which I am simply watching a film, especially when I'm not aware of the presence of myself or the room in which I must be watching it, which is the case with this one, in which I dreamed I was watching a 1960s black-and-white drama-documentary by Peter Watkins (click for more). At various points, a voiceover by Watkins would make statements in his typically measured yet quietly angry and condemnatory style. The documentary, which consisted entirely of acted reconstructions, dealt with the theft of a small oil painting from an art gallery. The thieves, a man and a woman, had worked out a plan with their accomplice, who was waiting a few streets away in a barge on the Thames.

Before the thieves were introduced, the voiceover drew our attention to the fact that a drain pipe that had been leaking for days had created a puddle in the disabled access ramp but that, today, it hadn't leaked as there had been no rain.

The thieves loitered in the gallery until it closed, then took the painting from the wall and hid in a dark corner, planning to escape once the police had arrived and had gone into another part of the gallery. I noted that the oil painting was not very good.

Euan Robson MSP, who, in real life, is the Deputy Minister for Education and Young People, entered through the back door of the gallery. It appeared that he was also the minister with responsibility for art theft. While he searched the gallery, the thieves ran out of the door through which he had entered and clattered down the stairs. The noise alerted the police, who chased them.

A hand-held camera was used for this part and the picture was very shaky. As the two thieves ran across a cobbled square, the man stole a lady's shopping bag and drank from the whisky bottle that he found inside. The voiceover solemnly stated that so depraved was this man that he didn't even break his stride as he stole.

With the police catching up with them, the thieves jumped on a bike that they found as they turned out of the square. I don't know how they both fitted on it, but I think that they must have. The voiceover told us that their plan was to get far enough ahead of the police so that they wouldn't be seen when they reached the Thames and jumped onto their accomplice's barge, which would be floating past a certain wharf at a pre-arranged time. The accomplice would then shout to the police that the thieves had run off down another street.

The thieves should have been able to ride their bike off the wharf and onto the deck of the passing barge but, because it hadn't rained that day, as had been pointed out earlier, the Thames was lower than usual. When the police arrived, they found the thieves stuck in the exposed muddy bank a few yards short of the barge.

Notes for Freudian Analysis

I have decided that Peter Watkins is a great film maker and have watched a few of his films recently. A few days before I had the dream, I saw The War Game, his 1965 documentary about the aftermath of a nuclear attack on Britain. A building in which the police burn hundreds of dead bodies vaguely reminded me of the Thames warehouse where Alec Guinness is tied up after the gold bullion heist in The Lavender Hill Mob, which I saw a couple of months ago. I didn't think anything of it at the time, obviously, and wouldn't mention it were it not for the fact that I think that the heist and chase elements of the dream also strongly resemble parts of The Lavender Hill Mob. During the heist, one of the gang, played by Stanley Holloway, absent-mindedly walks off with a bad oil painting that he has been examining at a street stall and is arrested, nearly ruining the whole scheme. Just after that, as police scour the docklands, Alec Guinness is blindfolded by his accomplices (it's all part of the plan) and ends up blundering off a wharf and falling into the Thames.

The heist in The Lavender Hill Mob takes place in the area around St Paul's cathedral, which still hadn't been rebuilt after being bombed in the second world war. The ruined buildings reminded me of some pictures of Hiroshima, which links back to The War Game, I suppose.

I can't account for the presence of Euan Robson, other than to say that he is simply the latest in the gallery of B-list politicians who parade uninvited through my dreams.

No time like the past

I was standing in the graveyard behind my parents' house, leaning on the old wall that separates it from their garden. The ground in the graveyard is higher than that on the other side, which means that there is quite a drop down into the garden.

My dad was standing below me in the garden, pointing out where the wall had been undermined by the roots of plants and trees. He said that he thought that it would collapse at some point. When I was small, I often hoped that it would collapse because I imagined that, if it did, some old coffins might tumble onto our lawn, which would have been pretty exciting.

I crouched on the wall and jumped into the garden, which I used to do all the time when I lived there. My younger brother was in the garden, but I noticed that he was about 10 years old. Evidently, I had travelled back in time. For some reason, this seemed unremarkable until I saw my older brother coming out of the house carrying a little red football. It appeared that my time-travelling had affected everyone differently, as my older brother appeared to be only six or seven years old.

Notes for Freudian Analysis

Another dream about my brothers! I had no idea that they occupied such an amount of space in my head until I started writing these dreams down. The immediate source for the dream, however, is probably a phone call from my mum last night, in which she passed on news about my older brother still being off work with his injured knees and tried to goad me into saying unkind things about my younger brother by persisting in her bizarre claim that he is a genius.

The Beast in Me

Only a fragmentary recollection of last night's dream: Near the end of the second world war, in a bunker in a Bavarian forest, Adolf Hitler was conferring with his advisers about where the German army could hide if, as was looking ever more likely, they lost the war. Looking through maps of Europe, Hitler pointed out an island off the coast of Scotland called Findhorn and said that it should be possible to fit almost all of the army into the middle of it, if they were packed tightly together, and that, as the locals lived only on the coast, it should be possible to keep them hidden for years.

By this time, I was also in the room and I knew that Hitler's plan wasn't as clever as he thought. Perhaps no one travelled around the isles much in 1945 but I happened to know that, pretty soon, tourists and hikers would be all over the place and that it would only be a matter of time before they came across the hidden army.

I saw my face in a mirror and noticed that I hadn't shaved and that my stubble was most dense just under my nose on my top lip. Looking closer, I saw that it looked just like Hitler's moustache. In fact, I was Adolf Hitler!

Presently, still as Hitler, I was alone in a dark Scottish glen, struggling against the knee-high heather and the wind as I tried to cross the country.

Notes for Freudian Analysis

Yesterday, I read about an old Australian man called Alex Kurzem. In 1941, when he was five, Nazis came to his village in Belarus to kill all the Jews. He escaped and hid for months in the nearby forest until he was found by German soldiers who, incredibly, instructed him never to tell anyone that he was a Jew and adopted him as their mascot. He was given a little Nazi uniform and appeared in propaganda films. He emigrated to Australia after the war and, quite reasonably, decided to keep his past a secret until quite recently. (Click here for more.) Ellen and I talked about it while walking home late last night. To what extent does it make sense to say that someone is Jewish if they were raised, after the age of five, as a German Nazi? Is he German? Belarussian? Australian? I think that that conversation, rather than any suppressed desire of mine to invade Poland and secure lebensraum for my people, accounts for the identity crisis in the dream.

In the afternoon, a colleague of mine, who has volunteered to visit the Manx Parliament (somebody has to), was looking at a map of the Isle of Man. We talked about the alleged fact that the entire population of the world could fit onto the Isle of Man, which is not true, apparently.

Perhaps unfairly, I always associate the Isle of Man with vaguely new-age or hippy ideas. In Findhorn, in Moray, there is a spiritual community of some sort that I visited once when I was a kid.

In the evening, Ellen had told me about a programme on Robert Louis Stevenson that she is going to work on that will involve a well-known survivalist tracing the journey across the Highlands that David Balfour makes in Kidnapped.

Holding the Baby

I was holding a baby in the back seat of a car while my brother, Douglas, was trying to teach it to count by talking about Asterix books.

The baby's mother, who was driving, said to Ellen, who was in the passenger seat, that I seemed to be getting on fine with the baby but that it probably just wanted me to catch the fly that it had been looking at earlier.

I said to the baby, "Is the fly your friend?"

"No," said the baby. "It's an advert-eyes-ment."

"What?" I said.

"It's an advert-eyes-ment."

"An advertisement?" I asked, correcting the pronunciation.

"Yes, the fly is an advertisement."

"What's it an advertisement for?"

"It's an advertisement for the fact that it's a fly."

I was sure that, whatever the point was, it was exceptionally profound.

Notes for Freudian Analysis

This is the second time this week that I've had a dream that featured my brother. In the first, which I had a couple of days ago, I met him in the Royal Mile. He was wearing his police uniform and we talked for a bit before arm wrestling on the bonnet of a car. I beat him, which is very unlikely in waking life. In both dreams, he had shaggy hair instead of his usual policeman's cut. Why did he have someone else's hair? Freud once described a dream of his in which his friend had his uncle's beard. With a virtuoso display of analysis, Freud comes to the conclusion that the beard of his uncle symbolises, for him, idiocy and criminality as his uncle had "allowed himself to be involved in transactions of a kind which the law punishes severely" and had been described by Freud's father as "not a bad man, but, after all, a simpleton". Why should his friend have his uncle's beard? Freud recollected that the man had that night revealed to him that, having once more failed to be appointed to the professorate, he had cornered a gentleman and forced him finally to admit that the authorities wouldn't make any Jew a professor. Freud accepted this news glumly, but it evidently threw his subconscious into a state of quiet alarm that resulted in the creation of a comforting dream that provided him with a spurious reason why his friend had been unsuccessful: he was either a simpleton or a criminal, like uncle Joseph, which meant that Freud's being a Jew needn't necessarily stop him from becoming a professor. Freud was a genius, of course, and I am not, which is why I have no idea why Douglas should have shaggy hair in my dream.

Douglas and I used to read Asterix books in the back of our parents' car when we were kids. Actually, now I think about it, Douglas used to have pretty shaggy hair back in the 1970s. Perhaps that example from Freud isn't as relevant as I thought it was at first.

My younger brother was born when I was 11 and Douglas was 14 and was therefore a baby around the time when Douglas and I stopped having to go places in the car. However, I had the impression that the baby in the dream was a girl.

Street Fighting Men

In Northern Ireland, masses of unionists and republicans were facing each other across a terraced street, shouting furiously and incomprehensibly. Judging by everyone's hats, flat caps and overcoats, it appeared to be sometime in the 1940s. I happened to be on the republican side of the street, but I was trying to calm down the two leaders, who were screaming in each other's faces in the middle of the road. Jesus Christ, why can't everyone just get along? I desperately wanted everyone to understand that the two men were simply having a personal argument and that no one needed to start throwing bricks or whatever.

Somehow, I made everyone understand that and the crowds became quieter. My diplomatic skills are enormous, clearly, but I was too full of dread to be proud of myself. I had a terribly oppressive feeling that something awful was about to happen and, sure enough, it did. As the two sides stood silently, a man came from the back of the republican crowd and walked into the middle of the road. He raised a pistol and fired three times at the unionist front line. Everyone flinched, but no one was hit.

As the republican walked around to the back of his crowd, three unionists with pistols walked across the road, firing at him as they came. Unbelievably, the republican calmly walked behind the length of the crowd to the end of the street as the three gunmen stood and fired at him over the republicans' heads. Again, no one was shot. I couldn't tell whether everyone was a terrible shot or their guns were broken, but I was glad in any case.

The first gunman entered an old shop and we watched through the window as he took a jug of beer out of a cupboard and poured himself a pint. The three men fired at him but, again, nothing happened -- the window didn't even shatter. The republican sat down to drink his beer and one of the unionist gunmen, exasperated, said, "I feel like shooting meself, only I doubt the bloody gun would work!". Everyone laughed.

When I got home, I told Ellen what had happened and that I reckoned that it would make a great short film. However, we abandoned the idea when we discovered that the only actors that were available this year were children, which would mean that the film would come out like Bugsy Malone.

Notes for Freudian Analysis

In the days before I had the dream, I'd been reading a lot about Aristide being overthrown in Haiti and the military forces behind the coup and about the bombings of the Shia mosques Baghdad and Karbala. It crossed my mind briefly that, if I were involved in some sort of sectarian struggling in Northern Ireland, I'd be kind of embarrassed at how petty my set of woes might appear to someone from Haiti or Iraq.

That night, I had closely examined the picture on the front of the DVD of Miller's Crossing as I pondered whether to watch a bit of it while I waited for my pasta sauce to reduce. Miller's Crossing is about Irish gangsters in 1920s New York and the cover of the DVD shows Gabriel Byrne in a trenchcoat and hat pointing a gun at John Turturro's head.