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Fascist dream

In the mountaintop stronghold of a eastern-European fascist dictator in the 1940s -- so everything was in black and white, naturally -- a female journalist was talking to the dictator himself. He was bald and had a fencing scar down one cheek and wore a general's uniform and a monocle. In case this left any doubt as to his irredeemable villainy, his right hand had been replaced with a steel claw, with which he gesticulated while he told the journalist, who resembled Lauren Bacall, that she would use her radio programme to broadcast pro-dictator propaganda or else something terrible would happen. Either he didn't specify what it was that would be terrible or I have forgotten, for which I apologise.

The journalist went directly to the radio station and, shoving past the protesting staff, entered the studio, which was being used for a drama production that was being recorded in front of an audience. She took the microphone and spoke rousingly to the listeners, ending up by saying, "The war is nearly over! Forget about Mussolini! He's all washed up!"

The audience left the studio, slightly confused.

Notes for Freudian Analysis

One of those rare dreams in which I do not feature directly. Also noteworthy for being in black and white.

Last night, before going to bed, I watched "Dark Passage", with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Bogart had busted out of San Quentin and Bacall was helping him evade the police because she's the kind of girl who has a thing about guys who've murdered their wives. It's a sick set-up, which the film does its best to normalise but which there is simply no getting away from.

A short documentary on the DVD mentioned Lauren Bacall's second film, "Confidential Agent", which was the only film she did in the 1940s in which she did not appear alongside Bogart. I've never seen it but, for some reason, I always get it mixed up with Hitchcock's "Foreign Correspondent", which ends with a stirring scene in which Joel McCrea's character uses his radio broadcast to try to get America to enter the war against Germany. It's bold propaganda, filmed just days before the Germans started to bomb London. I've found the script online, so I'll quote the end of his broadcast because its tone was exactly the same as the tone of the speech that the journalist in my dream madem, but which I have forgotten most of.

"I can't read the rest of the speech I had, because the lights have gone out, so I'll just have to talk off the cuff. All that noise you hear isn't static - it's death, coming to London. Yes, they're coming here now. You can hear the bombs falling on the streets and the homes. Don't tune me out, hang on a while - this is a big story, and you're part of it. It's too late to do anything here now except stand in the dark and let them come... as if the lights were all out everywhere, except in America. Keep those lights burning, cover them with steel, ring them with guns, build a canopy of battleships and bombing planes around them. Hello, America, hang on to your lights: they're the only lights left in the world!"

I attribute the pulp imagery in the dream to the fact that, when I got home from work yesterday, I finished reading Michael Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay", which is about two Jewish guys in the 1940s, one of whom is a refugee from Czechoslovakia, who write and draw comics in which anti-fascist superheroes battle Nazi supervillains. After I finished the book, I flicked through a book I have on the history of comics. One of the strips that it included was "The Steel Claw", which is about a crime-fighting secret agent who could turn himself invisible apart from his prosthetic right hand, which, of course, was made of steel.

Mussolini appears in the journalist's broadcast because the playground song, "Mussolini's dead", which I have on a CD of songs sung by Scottish children that Alan Lomax recorded in the 1950s, was in my head all day yesterday, for some reason. It goes:

"Now the war is over, Mussolini's dead,
He wants to go to heaven with a crown upon his head.
The Lord says no, you'll have to stay below,
All dressed up, and nowhere to go."

South African Dream

I was on my way to meet Ellen after her orchestra rehearsal when she phoned me to say that she wouldn't be finished for a while as the conductor was keeping the orchestra late. He was furious because most of them hadn't been there for the first half hour. I told her to call me when she got out and went into a newsagent's to get a paper.

On the front page of the first newspaper that I picked up, I read about a rich, white South African guy who had loaded up on drugs and driven his car madly through the suburb that he lived in before running across a footbridge over a river and trying to escape somewhere on the other side. He collapsed shortly afterwards and was caught by the police. A map of his rampage showed that he had driven up the river to the bridge and had then run down the other side of the river as far as the point at which he had got in his car originally. This seemed to be the important part of the news story.

Later, I went to bed (still in the dream) and dreamed that I was the South African guy. When I woke up (again, still in the dream), I remembered very clearly the part where I collapsed by the river, surrounded by police, and was able to describe the dream in detail to my parents, who were sitting at the end of my bed.

Notes for Freudian Analysis

At the weekend, I walked Ellen to an orchestra rehearsal. She was probably a little late but said that, although some conductors get annoyed and give people rows for such unprofessional behaviour, the one she had that day didn't. The night before I had the dream, I listened to an interview with Daniel Harding, who is, apparently, some kind of wunderkind conductor. He said that he'd quit his job conducting the Paris Opera because the orchestra was determined to antagonise him by playing what he regarded as childish games with him. While he was speaking, I was practising "Anarchy in the UK" on my ukulele, which is, I suppose, quite a childish thing to do. In my defence, I was also cooking dinner and therefore very capably multi-tasking.

I'm not quite sure about the South African story. It appears two times in the dream and one of those times I play the guy, so it's obviously of great importance. South Africa entered my mind twice during the day. The first time, I was reading in the paper that some James Bond fans think that Daniel Craig will be a terrible Bond. I remembered having seen Daniel Craig recently in "Munich", in which he played a South African. Could I be using him to illustrate something to do with people not approving of someone -- me, in fact? Perhaps. I don't think I'm particularly bothered by issues of approval at the moment, but it would explain why my parents -- the primal dispensers of approval -- show up at the end of the dream, wouldn't it?

The other time I thought of South Africa was when I was in Thresher's, weighing up the ethical issues involved in a choice between Chilean and South African red. Oh, how such things trouble my mind.