cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dreamscape I'm looking forward to 'Tin Man' on the Sci Fi channel this weekend. I read most of the Oz books when I was a kid and I've always thought that the movie kinda sucked, in the sense of completely not getting the books. 'Return to Oz' was much, much better. Tin Man is very dark. Which is good because Oz is a very dark, scary, fucked-up kind of a place. About once a year or so I have a dream about Oz. There's no Tin Man or Scarecrow or Dorothy or Tik-Tok or any of those other characters in these dreams. I come upon Oz suddenly and unexpectedly and am thrust into a very wild, living place. Once I was traveling on a raft down a swift, rocky river through Oz. The banks were mostly very steep, rocky bluffs that were 10-20 feet high. Glimpses of ancient Oz civilizations greeted me briefly before I shot past them in the churning water. A few collapsing pillars from a bridge long since washed out. Elaborately carved, but the detail on the lower parts of each column was weathered to near invisibility by centuries or possibly millenia of rushing water. Another time I was walking through a field across the street from one of the houses where I grew up. I came to the other side of that field and looked down to see an enormous drop. A very steep, grassy hillside that went down at least a thousand feet into a valley that I knew, just knew, was Oz. It was so steep that you could not possibly walk straight down it. Perhaps one could roll down it. That seemed like an appropriate way to enter Oz. Certain dream landscapes reappear for me. Often years after the first time I visited. And I don't mean dreaming about places that I remembered physically visiting in real life. I mean places that only exist in my dreams. One place alongside a river (I dream about rivers frequently) comes to mind. Every few months I think about a dream I had when I was about 7 years old. I walked up to a dumpster that was inside of a multilevel parking garage. It was night and the inside of the garage was lit by buzzing overhead lamps that cast that vaguely orange, eerie glow. I looked inside of the dumpster and saw something oval and dark in color, which I quickly realized was the back of a young black woman's head. Her hair was pulled back into some sort of tight braid or something. She was lying face-down, dead. I saw that there were 2 other bodies partially hidden under some trash. My parents minivan was parked somewhere nearby. They were nearby, too. The dream made me sad. It still does every time I think of it. It wasn't scary. It was just very sad. My daughter will be 4 years old in a month's time. She speaks clearly and concisely. Her thoughts are complete and rational. She knows all of her colors, shapes and so on. She can count and knows how to write her first name. Her thoughts are not the hazy, drifty thoughts of a toddler any more. They are concrete ideas connected with and often shaped in language. She is forming memories now that will be with her for the rest of her life. A momentary argument about walking on the back of the couch in which her mother plucks her off of it and demands that she never do that again. Half an hour later it is forgotten by my wife forever but perhaps persists in Ida's mind for the rest of her life as an eternal meme of injustice. Perhaps she had a dream last night that she will think about when she is 90 years old. In 50 years, will she remember me as I am right now? I've been dreaming lately about a couple that killed themselves a week apart last July in NYC. Both highly successful artists, attractive and intelligent. Sharing a belief in a bizarre conspiracy theory targeted at them which nobody else believed in. They grew cultish and apart from friends when their theories were met with disbelief and pity. Her blog is still there online at http://theresalduncan.typepad.com/ I love reading her stuff. She is complex and articulate and expansive. Somehow, despite her diverse topics, reading all of her different blog entries feels like being guided into some kind of mystery that she has only half solved. I dream about this dead woman and her dead boyfriend. I had never even heard of them until reading their obituary in the NY Times last summer. But I find myself thinking about them often. Last night, I was having an affair with her. She was preparing to introduce me to the boyfriend. Somehow, it was ok that she was having an affair with me. Somehow, she was trying to inject me into this strange world of conspiracies and clever art. This tiny culture that she and her boyfriend shared. Their names, I have deliberately left out here because I don't want their real life family members or friends googling them and stumbling across this. Am I becoming obsessed with this dead woman? 2:22 p.m. - 2007-11-30 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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