Stuff and Moonshine

I don’t usually have dreams within dreams, but I kept trying to tell various uninterested parties about the dream I’d had about a Saturday matinee on a spaceship, with a handful of kids down in front watching some old black-and-white serial on the screen, and a throuple of shapeshifters making out in the back row.

Lots of scenarios, including a family reunion where I didn’t really know anyone, examining some white flowers growing by a wall, and various ghosts. There was a bit where the new pop-culture test for sexism in a movie was “how many times do we see the main female character get in or out of bed?” I was upset by the premise that someone in bed was inherently titillating to the audience, or that it could never be depicted in a non-erotic way. Then I was watching/experiencing the first episode of a new horror/supernatural anthology series, and thinking it had a parallel in my own past, because my family, when we lived in Japan for a while in the ‘eighties, had first moved into one house, found it “unsuitable” in some weird unspecified way, and then moved to the place that became our home for the rest of our time there. I never found out where the ghost story went, plotwise, but the ghost had quite a specific and detailed identity—a British South African named Neil Dacre who’d died sometime in the early ‘sixties. I’m not sure exactly how he’d died, but it was after a somewhat tempestuous life, career, and marriage. He was just walking into the room—through a closed door—looking exactly like the framed black-and-white photo of himself (at a car rally or something, mouth open in a yell) that still hung on the wall. Then I wokeup, and remembered there’d never been a “first” house, we’d lived in the same house the whole stay—the university provided accommodation to visiting professors.

Just before waking, I dreamt I was traveling through a downtown neighbourhood, buildings in ruins. A lone woman in a building (sort of deco/neoclassical bank-building style) whose entrance was now a vertical crack shouted something at me.

I was walking, thinking to myself “politics-formal politics-is granular”— and a bunch of stuff about why you have to start at the local level to influence things. I came to another building site where the whole superstructure was gone. The same woman asked me if I’d seen any squatters in it lately. Obviously no. She cackled something about how nice and quiet the neighbourhood was now, and how maybe the building would learn to be a good building and be allowed to have tenants again.

I’m afraid the best retort I could come up with was “fuck you, lady.” The past few years have made me much swearier.

I climbed across the building’s site— there was a deep crack in the ground and I approached with caution to look over the edge to see how deep it was. The crack had exposed a cliff face of what looked like cuneiform that went down into the ground.

“Do you have any silver paint?” Inside the crack, I think on a sort of scaffolding, there was a woman with short white hair and a hawklike profile, very dark eyes, who was painting a silk banner that hung down into the depths. I wondered how she managed but realized she must pull the sections of fabric up towards herself. The thin fabric was covered in a grid of little multicoloured squares and triangles and it seemed to me she’d have an easier time painting it if she used an embroidery hoop to hold the fabric taut.

I now remembered an earlier scene of the story in which the painter had attempted to kiss me, but I’d fled and she’d kissed a (male) police officer instead, leading to some kind of transference— she was using that power to make this banner, with protective but ruthless intent.

“Perhaps it’s better I kissed Officer [name],” she said to me. “The [name of ancient civilization we were dealing with] approved all sorts of couplings for pleasure; but for inward journeys, they were more conservative.” (Not the word she used, been trying to think of something not quite as slangy as “normie.”]

“And what happened to Officer Name’s mind?” I asked.

“There is something in there now. A substitute. The difference is hardly noticeable.”

“Then you’ll pardon me if I’m happy, too, that he was the one you kissed.”

I thought of offering to get her an embroidery hoop for the fabric, but i wasn’t sure if I should be helping her.

This dream was probably influenced by having watched the Dr Phibes movies back-to-back before bed.

Dream I had just before waking this morning:
There was a house— someone later in the dream referred to it as the Lantern House. I never got a look at the exterior; the interior decor was luxurious, colourful, and of no particular era. At the start, the occupants were a middle-aged woman (who was sometimes me) and her mother (who I don’t think was my real-life mother). They were carryovers from an earlier dream I don’t recall, except I think it took place in a printing house.

The  mother and daughter were not the owners of the lantern house, which was for the accommodation of guests, more of whom arrived as the dream went on. I think the house got bigger to fit them and added extra rooms. I began to wonder just who owned it, and studied the newcomers for clues. They were mostly young and mostly white. They wore expensive-but-sloppily-casual clothing (high-tech workout gear, that kind of thing) which in this day and age often denotes wealth, but I didn’t get the impression they were particularly rich— they seemed too surprised and happy to be there. I began to suspect the house, if not an afterlife exactly, was some kind of liminal space; and that of the original mother-daughter duo, the mother was a ghost.

The daughter worked in the publishing business and very much didn’t want children: she downed birth-control pills like candy even though she wasn’t sexually active, and was annoyed she hadn’t yet begun menopause so she could stop worrying about all that biological nonsense.

I said the other guests were mostly young — the one who wasn’t looked to be in her late sixties or early seventies, a handsome woman with long grey hair and a slightly patrician manner— I got the feeling she might be some kind of academic, perhaps a historian. As we all headed toward the back of the house, I heard her telling one of the other guests a story about a game she used to play as a teenager, one of those “who will I marry” fortune-telling games that usually involve looking in a mirror in a dark room. In her variation, though, you couldn’t talk to or even look at the lover who appeared in the mirror; you couldn’t ever. You had to marry somebody else even though you knew they weren’t the mysterious figure in the mirror you were really supposed to be with:
“—and just that’s what that fool is doing!” she said of the daughter, who was getting married in the back yard to please her ghost-mother.

We were all out back now— the yard, of course, was a park that seemed to go on forever. I was still trying to figure out how all that worked.

“It’s like a park,” I said to somebody, “Except generally a park this nice, in this weather, would be crowded, and here— there are other people in the distance, but far enough away they’re just... picturesque?” We were climbing a steep incline now; I could see a group in skeleton costumes doing something agricultural a ways off, which was not as ominous in the dream as it sounds typing it out now.

We reached the top of the hill. There was a deep crevice in it, through which I could see a cavern with a large fireplace set into one wall. After I woke up, I realized I still had never seen the exterior of the Lantern House, and wondered if that whole landscape may still have been part of its interior.

 Took a mid-afternoon nap and dreamt about a ship on which a mutiny was being plotted. Any attempt to describe one of my dreams is a kind of lie, because I’m trying to impose a narrative structure, grounded in my waking knowledge of stories, on a lot of random and looping images, but let’s say that it was a scene from a prequel to Peter Pan about where Hook’s pirate band had come from, and how they ended up in Neverland, and my viewpoint kept switching between the amateur stage adaptation I was involved with, and the big-budget movie version made a few years earlier and now considered a modern classic, though at the time Hollywood had been rife with gossip that it was going to be a disaster.

The ship was passing over waters whose exotic sea life included at least one dinosaur remnant, and the mutiny’s chief architect — if this was a prequel he must have been Hook, though I can’t recall his appearance; perhaps Hook was a persona he’d yet to invent— was persuading the more sapient ones to enlist with him and attack the ship when the time was right. In the stage production, we were going to do these with puppets. The stretch of water had also, in an earlier age, been dry land, and the location of a legendary cave that went deep down into the earth. On deck, someone was quoting to a passenger a line of poetry about it that I could still recall when I woke:


I think the next line would have been something about said rats having done this without ever having seen the sun. Jim Broadbent was somebody in the movie. It all felt as though a dream intended for sovay  had been shipped to me by mistake.

 Last night's dreams included a plot thread where I was trying to track down a... smuggler? Somebody involved in the shipping trade, anyway. In the dream, I could search the records of different voyages online, which included any ebooks downloaded by the crew during the trip: so I ended up tracing one captain by her taste in literature.

Jumbled, but a detail stands out – I was in a shop that did custom clothing for werewolves, and noticed a sign on the wall that said ATTN CUSTOMERS: BITING THE SEAMSTRESSES WILL NOT MAKE THEM WORK FASTER.

Started watching Boardwalk Empire. Steve Buscemi isn't haunting my dreams yet, but John Waters is. Last night he was dj-ing.