mare imbrium
Thursday 21 August 2008 | 4 cookies in the jar
When I wake with a start at the sluggardly hour of 9:00 am, catty perched on my chest wanting her late-morning kibbles, I immediately retrieve the light box from the closet and set it up next to the bed. Welcome, autumnal anxiety! So glad you are here to visit this year. Now go away please.
In my nightmare, the Brujo and I are clambering around in a trash-filled arroyo, scavenging for cacti. He’s staring at the ground and so doesn’t see what I see: a man, his face and shoulders popping up suddenly above the rim of the earth. The man gazes at me without expression. “Um, there’s a person?” I say, pointing. The Brujo looks up, shrugs, and resumes his search. “Whatever; okay,” he says, ignoring the man, who has done or said nothing; but I feel deeply alarmed. “Well, I just thought you should know….”
Eventually we finish our search. We leave the desert and walk back into town. The man follows us, gradually joined by half-a-dozen others, emerging from behind trees and rocks. They’re all wearing different long cream-colored flowing garments, like Española Sikhs, but their faces and hands are dirty, with unkempt long hair, beards, stubble, braids, dreads. And they’re every ethnicity but white: Indian, Native, Afro-Caribbean, Latino, Mideastern. (Roll of the eyes at my predictably bigoted dreaming mind.) (Actually more than anything they remind me of the male cast of Rang de Basanti.) The men aren’t overtly threatening, yet they unnerve me; they don’t smile and they don’t speak; they just follow us, at a respectful distance, but they won’t go away, these Jesus-men. I think I even try to shoo them at one point: “Quit following us! We don’t have anything!” But they walk all the way with us to our friends’ house, and sit down on its porch quietly together when we go inside.
The clapboard frame house, with wrap-around porch, is brightly-lit, warm and inviting. There’s a neighborhood party going on, so our new collection of followers doesn’t seem that out of place, but I hiss to our (white, middle-class, overweight) host that we have to use the telephone. The Brujo’s already eating and talking with the other guests by the time I call the police and explain our strange situation. When I peek out of the window to describe them, all the men have left and only the first one remains. Rather than drive all the way out there, the dispatching policeman decides, he wonders whether the man would be willing to talk to him on the phone? Befuddled, I lean out onto the porch, repeat this question to the first man, the Sunlight Man, and then wordlessly hand him the phone when he nods, yes.
After a while, he hands the phone back to me and walks out. The policeman is jubilant. It was a good sign, he exults, that the man was willing to do this over the phone, so we have nothing to fear—he’s agreed to leave. I feel confused but relieved, and ask the Brujo if we can just go home now. The whole experience has me unsettled and rattled. I want it to be over.
We drive our separate cars home and I arrive first. I walk into the house, keys in hand, and the men are in the kitchen waiting for me. I understand immediately, impressed despite my dread: “You planned it this way all along! You came straight over here and left the other guy as a decoy!” They laugh and admit this is true. “You’re smarter than we are….” I’m dismayed: we’re so first-world and bourgeois, with our social solutions like telephones and policemen; whereas these man have an innate tribal canniness and can outthink us effortlessly. Now they grin and seize my wrists, not gently. They draw me back toward the bedroom for the inevitable rapings, to which I feel numbly resigned. But then through the living-room window I see the Brujo’s little white Honda pulling up in the driveway, right about the same time that I intuit the rest: The Sunlight Man is driving the car, not the Brujo. “What happened to him?” I ask, breathless, tugging my wrist against the encircling dirty hand; not pausing, ineluctably, they lead me deeper into the dark house. “We laid him to rest,” explains one man solemnly, making a curved, patting gesture in front of him, as of smoothing earth over the mound of a grave.
Something in my mind goes pop, becomes unendurable. This was not the surprise ending I ordered. I check out, exit, quit; I return my ticket.
4 cookies in the jar
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Have I told you my theory on dream interpretation? No? It is really simple. The rule of thumb is, you are everyone in your dream, that is, every character in your dream is some facet of your personality, and they are having a little Hootenanny in your head while you sleep. The hard part is to seperate out those people who are closest to you, and realize that they are you as well. So if I dream about a fight with J., J. might represent relationships, or, another way of saying it it, by fighting with that part of myself that represents all the relationships I have ever had, I am trying to resolve deficiencies in my ability to have good healthy relationships, J. aside.
In good Freudian fashion, everything might be part of you, cars, deserts, the clapboard frame house, or none of it. I try to focus on animate characters in my dreams as they seem to have the most to tell me. Unraveling how each of these things is you, reveals what you were trying to tell yourself in your dream. (Or you can just pop some popcorn, pour on the extra butter and salt, and snuggle in for Hitchcock’s Spellbound.)
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Well-trained child of Carl Gustav: Yess, I vonce had patient in Zürich like ziss….
On the other hand, don’t even get me STARTED on Spellbound. Because dear LORD I think this film is goofy. I invariably crack up when the “scantily-clad woman” dances through the Dalí sequence; and when Peck and Bergman hurtle dramatically towards the cliff’s edge at the end, “skiing” against that super-fake snowy pine-tree background. To say nothing of the film’s pompous and completely dunderheaded ideas about “psychiatry.” It’s only watchable because of the silvery photography and because both of the leads are so gorgeous—when they’re onscreen together you don’t know who to look at more: the alabaster Bergman, whom the worst DP in the world could not render homely, or pretty-boy Peck, gayer than springtime, a mussy-haired big-eyed ingénue who had not yet learned how to act. (When asked lated by James Agee about his performance, Peck said only, shortly, “I was awful.”)
O.K. O.K. so you didn’t like Spellbound, and who can argue with you after watching the tireless montage of Bergman scenes pleading for her boyfriend’s sanity….but dream movies are hard to come by. How about—What Dreams May Come, or Field of Dreams, perhaps Un chien andalou?
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Snobby former movie reviewer: Buñuel! Now you’re cookin’ with gas.
Ditto on Jungian dream analysis AND on Spellbound. My first—and sadly, last—Hitchcock movie. The end.
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Snobby etc.: Oh noes!! This cannot be allowed to continue. I’ll give you twenty bucks if you watch Notorious and don’t like it. Or Rebecca, or The 39 Steps, or The Foreign Correspondent. Hell, even Strangers on a Train. You just had a bad first time, baby—it’s not always like that.
Ditto on 39 Steps and Rebecca and..
Notorious. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. Sigh.
(P.S. if Hitchcock Thrillers aren’t your bag Mr. and Mrs. Smith Is a funny motion picture about a divorced couple who just can’t seem to get rid of each other. and one of my fav.)