maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

Last night I surprised myself by having a minor bit of dream control. I didn't control my dream. But I kind of determined the subject.

Kaomea had posted a few cool songs in her dream journal a few days ago. So I wanted to share one song in particular, too. But I would only do it, I told myself last night, if I had a dream about the song or artist.

The first dream is the result. But I guess -- you can see that it's not very good control at all, though.

Here is the video. It's by the Malaysian rock singer Monoloque.



Dream #1

It was a grey-white, partly cloudy day. I was in a car with some other guy. The guy was driving us through some kind of downtown area of a city. We must have been on the outskirts of the downtown area. It felt pretty quiet and desolate.

There were a lot of warehouses and small factory buildings on either side of the streets. The warehouses either looked closed down or vacated. Their gates were all pulled down. On a lot of the buildings' walls and gates, there were also a lot of posters advertising, I suppose, either rock concerts or movies.

We had driven up a slope, then around a block, then back down another small slope. We were -- or at least I was -- looking down the streets for something. I don't know if we were lost.

The man was talking this whole time about how arrogant the singer Monoloque was. It occurred to me from this that we were looking for the location where we were supposed to pick up Monoloque. We were either going to take him somewhere else, or spend the day with him, like we were collaborating with him on some project.

But the man was really not looking forward to picking up Monoloque. He thought Monoloque was really arrogant.

As an example of this, the man said, "One time Monoloque told me, 'A man hasn't really done anything with his life until he's directed a film.' As if anybody who hasn't directed a film really isn't a man! Well -- this was only right after he'd directed his first film!"

I think I may have seen a tall-spired, stone church in the distance, down the block on the left side of the car. I looked at some of the posters on the wall again. I realized that they were all for Monoloque's film. They were done in a kind of psychedelic, 1960s style, with block printing, big, chunky letters, and a swirly circle of color in the center.

Dream #2

I was in a bedroom. I stood before a dresser. I think I had just pulled something out of it or put something into the top drawer. I was now closing the drawer.

I must have been getting ready to go somewhere, although it turned out that I wasn't going to the place I'd really wanted to go to. My mom was taking me wherever I was now going. And she'd told me she wasn't taking me to the other place.

I looked to my right, to the doorway. The living room, apparently, was right outside this bedroom. There was a couch against the wall opposite from the bedroom door. A young Muslim woman wearing a head covering sat quietly and patiently on the couch. On the wall behind the woman was some beautiful, possibly iridescent, piece of artwork.

I walked out of the bedroom. I was frustrated that my mom wasn't taking me where I wanted to go. But the Muslim girl was so gentle-acting that I tried to mask all my frustration, and just smile gently, as I walked past her.

I was now in some kind of warehouse. The warehouse was huge -- maybe as huge as an airplane hangar. Where I was standing, it seemed like there was a living room set all laid out, with a bunch of stage lights cluttered around it.

My mom stood off to my right, about thirty meters or so away. She seemed really impatient for me to get started with something. She was being really insistent and mean -- almost like my mom had her spirit combined with one of my old shithead co-workers. My mom also seemed a lot skinnier than she is IWL.

I was frightened into doing whatever it was I was supposed to be doing. I turned around. There was something like an entertainment center -- it looked more like a TV and a bunch of other junk all piled up randomly on a cheap desk.

But over that stuff there was a huge tangle of old TV-top antennas. I knew I was supposed to be doing something with these TV-top antennas. But I couldn't reach them from the front of the "entertainment center." I had to go around.

I walked around to the back of the "entertainment center." I walked into the thick of all these old antennas, as if I might have walked into the center of a tall, brambly shrub.

I must have tried to arrange some of the antennas or something. But suddenly some of the antennas started throwing off fountains of sparks! I thought the antennas must all be catching on fire. I was really afraid. But, like an idiot, I think I grabbed a paper cup full of water and actually threw it on the sparking antennas!

Things were really a mess. My mom, madder than ever, called me out to the front area again. The living room, I now saw, also had one setup on either side of it. These setups were like cheap offices: there were a desk, a computer, and a kind of flimsy desktop bookshelf. There may have been a man working at each station.

Things were a big mess. In some weird clutter of technology surrounding the office on my right side, another fire, or some other kind of malfunction, was raging. Whatever I'd done in the antenna-nest had probably started this mess, too.

The person working at that station looked like one of my old co-workers. He seemed to be just about as mad at me as my mom was. My mom may have been standing behind him and on his right side.

I turned around, backwards and clockwise, to face the office station that had been on my left side. The office worker here was just as panicked. He looked like the 1980s actor Andrew McCarthy. He had shoulder-length hair and wore a pale-blue, button-up shirt.

This guy was on the phone with someone. But he was also dealing with some major computer issue he was having. I knew that all this was probably my fault, too.

Finally the guy started slamming his mouse against the desk, as if he were trying to aim it against something. It was like whatever the problem was with his computer, it had turned real and left the computer. The guy was trying to smash it and kill it, or poke it back into the computer, or something. He really seemed to be raging.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I needed to go to the bathroom really bad. I was running into a public restroom. Some woman, possibly a pretty, young woman and possibly my mother, was using the first stall I saw.

I was apparently wearing a pair of pink panties under my pants, and I didn't want there to be any chance of the woman in the stall seeing me. So I ran to a set of stalls at the far end of the restroom.

Two stalls were inside a larger, stall-like area. One of the stalls didn't have any lock, or even a handle, on its door. I had gone inside it, but now I ran out. I ran to the next stall. The lock on this stall's door was really loose. But I decided it was good enough. If somebody tried to push it open, I'd have enough time to reach up and push the door closed.

I sat down on the toilet and started peeing (?). Before my eyes I now saw a list of films by Werner Herzog. They all seemed to star Claudia Cardinale, as if she were Herzog's main actor. Each film would have a description below it. The descrption was in a thin column. Some descriptions were just a small paragraph. Others were almost a page long.

I caught sight of a few descriptions of some films. The films all had a theme of a woman sinning or doing something to betray somebody, usually a man, and then having to go through retribution for all this, apparently from fate, by being put through all kinds of weird, embarrassing, or painful situations.

I couldn't quite remember what the Herzog films were which I'd seen starring Claudia Cardinale. But it didn't seem like this was the theme of those films at all. So I scanned through the list (how? It seems now like the list was just some image scrolling in the air before my eyes), looking for the films I was familiar with.

Something I read said that Herzog's later films with Cardinale got weirder and weirder, and that the women characters kept being put through more and more absurd situations. I saw some later films, some as late as 1986. But then I saw "one of Herzog's first films" listed. It was called Yvonne Rainier, and it was from 1910.

Apparently this film had something to do with a nun who'd betrayed a man, probably a priest, and the trials she'd had to go through as "fate's retribution" after this.

I now had a vision of a black and white film, almost as if I were watching from some place within the film. There was possibly some old, small chapel that had something of a medieval style to it. Some nuns were standing outside the church, talking to each other. The film was a sound film, and it seemed like the setting was America in the 1950s.

There was a nun in white. She was the main character. Now a couple of priest-like men walked past the nuns with a group of schoolchildren. The group walked into a spacious, lawny cemetery that was right next to the chapel.

The priests stopped the students in front of what was an apparently important grave. The grave had some kind of tall, church-shaped marker. Before the marker were two rows of small, stone markers.