I was fascinated with Sparky’s recounting of his dreams, and even told him I was a little disappointed that I rarely remember mine. And when I do, they’re pretty standard anxiety dreams that usually involve something like losing my class schedule in high school.
But then coincidentally, I found in some old files something I’d written about a dream I had. Obviously I wrote it out because I so rarely remember them, and I wanted to remember this one. So here it is:
I was this vain, good-looking movie action star. I was shooting a sort of medieval Mad Max movie, where the setting was sort of medieval but there were guns and motorcycles. There was this group of people trying to kill me because they thought my movies glorified violence. Some of them may have been extras on the movie set. I remember trying to look in a mirror because I wanted to see what I looked like, so I looked at my reflection in a window. I looked sort of like me, but a good-looking version of me. At one point I did a thing I called “running the gauntlet,” which meant riding my motorcycle down this street that was lined with screaming fans, and they were all trying to touch me and get me to talk to them. Also people had baskets that they would hold out, hoping I would toss change into them, sort of like people hoping for candy tossed to them along a parade route. Then on the set, once in a while an extra would come out of the crowd and try to attack me, and I would use karate moves to fight them off.
In other words, your dreams are not much different from your real life, right?
You know, you’d think I’d dream more about penises, public bathrooms, murder and sideshow strongmen, but I don’t. I usually dream about work, and about my family running underground American Indian casinos with tribally-painted surfboards on the walls and bowling alleys where you can use whatever object you like — softballs, chairs, babies — to knock down the pins.
The other night I dreamt a scene from a movie, apparently a remake of “Summer of ’42.” That was odd enough…but what really surprised me was that I woke up singing an original theme song, complete with lyrics.
I should have recorded it right then, because it was pretty darn good (bouncy and upbeat, a far cry from Michel Legrand) and now I can’t remember it at all.