More than you needed to know

Soon to be a Major Motion Picture

In this dream, my sub-editor, Murdo, came to see me at my desk to tell me about a dream that he'd had. He'd written down the dream on a page he'd torn out of the Yellow Pages. It went like this:

There's a girl on a train. She arrives at a station where she waits for another train. On that train, she eats a sandwich. She gets on another train.

Murdo wanted to know whether I agreed that the dream would make a brilliant film. Oddly, I did. It had everything that a fantastic screenplay requires. Murdo got quite excited and said that it would be important that the film conveyed the almost unbearable sense of sadness that he'd felt when the girl ate the sandwich. I agreed that that would be great and then told him about Freud's theory concerning dreams in which strong emotions attach themselves to seemingly inappropriate events. The theory would suggest that the sandwich was a stand-in symbol for something about which Murdo genuinely felt unbearable sadness. Murdo was quite pleased with that idea and thought that that could be in the film as well. Perhaps the girl could be reading Freud on the train.

Notes for Freudian Analysis

The only time Murdo has come to see me at my desk recently, we talked about the house that some friends and I rented on Eigg, of which I have a postcard on my desk. I gave him the website address of the person who rents it out as he was thinking about going to somewhere in the isles for hogmanay. The night I had the dream, I had talked to most of the rest of the people who had been with me in the house.

Murdo used to be in a punk band. He writes songs, so why not films? Apparently, my subconscious sees no difference between the two activities.

I use sheets of paper torn out of the Yellow Pages to polish etching plates before taking a print from them and, that day, I had used many more than usual as I was printing a plate that I had etched very badly. I'd been very demoralised. Why am I still so bad at printmaking?

I had dropped into work briefly during the afternoon (I'm on holiday). While I was there, I tried to convince a colleague who was reading a book by Jung that she'd be much better off reading the Freud book that I had left on my desk. I don't know much about Jung, but I doubt that his books have as many dirty stories as Freud's do.

Dead and Gone in Paris and London

I dreamed that I was watching a film about George Orwell. He was walking through the slummy backstreets of 1930s Paris. Everything was in a perfectly beautiful state of decay and, despite being too poor to buy food, he was enjoying himself as he bummed around. How much better it was to be George Orwell, the penniless tramp, than Eric Blair, the Eton-educated colonial policeman!

However, entering a small cobbled square, he watched in horror as a rotting corpse lurched into a crowd of people and tried to eat them. Paris, it seemed, had fallen victim to a plague of zombies! Knowing that he had to get out of the city, Orwell rushed through the winding, narrow streets, desperately shoving zombies and panicking Parisians out of his way.

Later, having escaped into the country, he walked through fields towards a grand house on a hill. Evidently, a ball had just come to an end and dozens of finely dressed rich young people were relaxing on the lawn. As Orwell approached, a group of zombies came out of the house and started eating everyone. The security fence around the house was too high for people to climb.

Orwell returned to Paris very early the next morning, hoping to be able to make his way around unnoticed before everyone was awake. He walked through the same streets as before, which were deserted. He heard the noise of a crowd from around a corner and, entering the street, found that it was as busy and bustling as Paris ever was. There were still zombies around, but people had got used to them and simply bashed them over the head with sticks if they attacked. Orwell watched this happen a couple of times before he dared to walk down the street. He discovered that it was quite hard to tell the difference between some ordinary slum dwellers and zombies and, at one point, struck out in alarm at a man with a deformed face. The man didn't mind and said it had happened to him a lot that day.

As an undead punk in a Misfits t-shirt grabbed hold of a man, it occurred to Orwell that things like this prove how resilient the working class is. He helped a couple of labourers drag the zombie away, thinking something along the lines of "Now, this is what the proletariat are all about."

Notes for Freudian Analysis

The night I had this dream, I had finished reading Down and Out in Paris and London, which was much better than I'd thought it might be.

There are no zombies in the book and I doubt if their inclusion would have improved it.

Grammar Noir

A very short dream. I was intrigued to see that the menu of the Double Indemnity DVD that I had just put into the machine offered a special feature that would allow me to watch the film with all the transitive verbs corrected. Cool! The line read "Transitive Verb Correction On/Off".

Notes for Freudian Analysis

During the day, I met Alan, who told me about the changes that he'd noticed had been made to the original Star Wars films when he'd been watching his new DVD box set of the trilogy. It occurred to me that I had still to watch a few of the films in the film noir box set that I bought a couple of months ago. No time!

Don't ask me what a transitive verb is. I'm sure they're extremely important and interesting.