Other Guys Dream About Girls

So last night, I dreamed that I had been trying to sleep outside in some North Hollywood park for some reason, and maybe about 4am or so, with the sun coming up, I gave up and figured I’d better head home and call in to work to let ’em know I wouldn’t be coming in.

I walked down Moorpark street in my pajamas trying to make my way back to Burbank (even though I don’t live there anymore), and then found myself in an underground parking garage of a large mall in Universal City.

I thought about catching a bus, but then I looked up the escalator and saw Donald Trump heading my way.

So, I went up the escalator and figured I’d meet the guy, regardless of mine or anyone else’s politics.

I introduced myself and shook his hand, still in my pajamas.

“You look really tired,” he said.

“Well, I’ve been up all night sleeping in the park, gotta get home,” I said.

He laughed and said “I hope you have a pitcher of Margaritas waiting for you there.”

I shook my head no, and then he added. “Watch, now they’ll talk about how I’m drinking pitchers of margaritas.”

“No,” I said. “I know you don’t drink at all.” (And this is true, if you’re curious.)

And then Trump added an observation that has had me pondering all day:

He began “You know when someone puts out a tray of muffins to sell, they always take the best tasting muffin and put it up front, to draw you in. But you know, it’s the best muffin and it’s only there up front to make you buy the others which are inferior. So when you think about it, that muffin is a total lie, a total lie.”

The dream breaks up after that, I woke up chuckling over the muffin speech… but the more I think about it, the deeper it gets.

It’s like a Zen muffin koan.

Avoid the muffin that LIES.

Now, I’ve had some psychic dreams before – I’ve written about them and worked them into the plots of my Wagstaff detective books – so now I’m hoping that Trump tweets something about muffins that tell lies. The more I think about it, it’d be on brand.

I also remember the distinct feeling during my dream that Trump didn’t give off a “Presidential vibe” while I listened to him discuss the muffins. Granted, I’ve never actually met a President. The closest I came was shaking hands with a Presidential candidate, Senator Frank Church, back in 1976 when he appeared at a discount store in Warwick, RI… very fitting for a discount candidate, but it was nonetheless cool to go when I was a kid.

And biggest-loser-in-history Walter Mondale attended my college graduation, and I walked by him and saw how much weight he’d put on since the previous November. He definitely drowned his sorrows in donuts. Or muffins, perhaps, who knows? I didn’t meet or talk to the guy.

But the deeper meaning of my dream is pretty clear to me, at least: when you go into the voting booth, avoid the muffin that lies.

Or just try the chocolate muffins from Costco. They’re pretty damn good, liars or not.

Friday Art: Sleeping Girl With Cat by PA Renoir (1880)

I need more sleep. Been pretty tired lately, especially around the middle of the day. Usually happens this time of year. My dreams have become more vivid and intense lately. Maybe it’s the higher frequency of wine with meals. Maybe my brain is finally melting. Dunno. But the increased quantity of plot action in my dreams has a strange psychological aftereffect of producing an illusion of experiential fatigue when I wake up. It’s like living twice or three times as many days crammed into one, every day. And since real life is rather routine, predictable and ordinary by comparison to the dream plots, I can’t help but want to continue having the vivid dreams, even if it leaves me drained instead of refreshed every morning.

And as always, I miss my kitty. I miss her waking me up at 5 in the damn AM to get fed, and I also miss how she’d sleep next to me once I went back to bed and she’d had her early breakfast.

I want a nap and a kitty in my lap. So I thought of this Renoir.

Like all Renoirs, it’s fuzzy and colorful and altogether serene ‘n’ happy. Just like the face of the sleeping kitty. You can practically hear the purrs.

WANT. KITTY.

I’ll have to settle for extra sleep over the weekend. Maybe I’ll use some dreams up for a while. We’ll see.

I Understand Some Guys Dream About Girls

But not me. I guess the subconscious reveals what we TRULY wish for.

Last night, I dreamt my front door had been left open, and I heard it slamming in the wind. When I went to close it, I saw a small siamese kitten meowing. I took it inside and petted it, figuring I’d better set up some food and water. Then I noticed it wore a collar with a bell, so I thought it must be someone’s lost cat, but that I’d take care of it anyway.

Woke up. Clock said 1:37AM.

Back to sleep.

New dream! I went to some giant office building, but when I went inside, there was a humongous black Newfoundland dog in the lobby. It butted its head against my legs, so I sat down on the floor, and the dog flopped on top of me and I figured I should just sit there so that the dog would be my friend.

This dream’s source was easy to figure, though – I’d just been asking Elinor Shapiro, the illustrator of my new book Phigg & Clyde Save Breakfast, how HER humongous black Newfie had greeted her upon her return from a month-long artist-in-residence deal in France. The answer was “She tackled me.”

This time I woke up and the clock read 4:28AM.

Back to sleep.

Last dream of the night before waking up around 8:30 was of me leaving my work, walking some Victorian-housed neighborhoods that looked a lot like Providence, and deciding to get a big pizza before having to drive all the way back to Southern California.

Got a giant pepperoni and sausage, and it was a giant rectangular Sicilian-style one like they make at Caserta’s in Providence.

Woke up for good this time.

Like I said, some guys dream about girls. I dream about kittens, dogs and pizza. The subconscious can’t lie about what I truly love, I guess.

Making some spicy chipotle chicken chili for dinner just now. I’m predicting more dreams.

Current Mood, April 25, 2018

Yeah, it’s basically how I feel about the world every day.

Maybe I should shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

Anyway, I’m still contemplating/interpreting a weird dream from last night.

I dreamed that Andrew Sarris had co-authored a piece in The New Yorker all about how my books absolutely sucked and illustrated some sort of general downfall of civilization. I can’t remember who the co-author was, but they both quoted from my books at great length to discuss how awful the writing & language was, never mind the plotting, and how I was clearly the worst writer in existence.

I read through the article, which was long and detailed (my dreams can do this, yes), but when I looked at the date of publication, the issue was from May of 2011.

I thought, wait, my first book Cut To Wagstaff didn’t appear until June of 2012.

I double checked the date and thought for a moment, and realized that I must be dreaming.

And then it occurred to me that Sarris didn’t write this nasty article intricately and voluminously describing how me & my books suck…. but that I did.

Me. MY subconscious.

And here I was thinking I was only a self-hating schmuck while I’m awake. Seems there’s no escape.

Sarris died in 2012. I’d like to think my book killed him, and now I’m inspired to include a rant against auteur theory in my next Wagstaff book, book 3 in the series, the writing of which is proceeding nicely these days.

So expect another literary abortion, New Yorker. You snobs. Maybe my next book will kill you all.

Only in my dreams.

What Are Dreams Made Of?

A quick note relating to a dream I had last night.

Not a dream with some celebrity in it where the plotline gets surreal and bizarre…. sorry, I save those gems for the Wagstaff novels.

In this dream, I met a woman who complimented me on my hair out of the blue as I walked past an old now-gone drug store in a shopping center from my childhood. You’d think I’d’ve known I was dreaming at that point, but I simply stopped in my tracks and decided to talk to her.  Hell, overcoming my shyness and chatting about my haircut with her should have clued me in that I was in a dream.  But I guess I’m bolder in the dream universe, so I talked with her about getting my haircut and checked her out and see if I could get a date out of it.

Much like what I’d do in real life, I made a point of looking at her eyes while I talked, since I either revert to my “Hey, Jim must be on the spectrum!” behavior of looking away from people as I talk, or reverting to my “Hey, Jim is a friggin’ dirty old sod” behavior by looking, well, elsewhere.

So because of that focus on her eyes, I got to study this young woman’s face while I chatted with her.  The image of that face stuck with me when I woke out of the dream and saw 5:53am on the clock. I thought about the face for a moment and it mystified me.

For  the life of me, I have absolutely NO idea who it was.

Celebrity Dreams

I remember my dreams, most of them anyway.

I dream in color, often have dreams set in the identical parallel setting which I can only describe as an amalgamation of the Providence/New England area and Los Angeles, although from what I can tell, the layout and freeway route system seem to be identical from dream to dream (!).

In my dreams, the actions of the dream world around me are separate from the stream of thoughts running through my mind in reaction to it, just like in waking life.

And then, every so often, I have dreams featuring various celebrities.

Sometimes they turn up for obvious reasons – I’d just watched a movie with them, or read about them, or some such tidbit of conscious processing during the day that churned into dream material that night. Other times, I’m not sure where the hell it comes from. Shellfish seems to have a psychoactive effect on me sometimes, but not all the time.  Taking Zantac for my stomach certainly increased my dreaming intensity, often producing lucid dreams I could direct for a while before waking up. My doc at the time looked it up in the Merck manual and, yes, around 5% of the test subjects reported the same thing.

I could have told him my brain is directly connected to my stomach.

Here’s  a typical example from the other night, after some grilled salmon: I was in a second-season episode of “The Monkees” – and how did I know it was second season? Well, even in my dream when the end credits played showing the boy’s heads, the theme song was “For Pete’s Sake” and not the first season “Theme From The Monkees.”

Yep… even in my dreams, I’m a trivia geek.

Anyway, in the episode, I was pretending to be a gangster along withe the boys, and we all wore matching black pinstripe suits for the part. The episode ended and the credits played on a wall of the set, and I wandered off the set backstage. As I wandered down the hallway, I saw Jill St. John wearing some sort of bright red showgirl outfit, and then I got to an area of another set’s backstage area.

At a small round table the size of a lunch table sat Sean Connery in his underwear, reading from a script and rehearsing with some anonymous actress (I can’t remember what she looked like, and I did not identify her in the dream).

So, I say to Sean: “Look at us. You ought to be wearing this suit, and I ought to be dressed like you.”

Sean to me: “Eeh. That suit doesn’t really mean anything.”

Me to Sean: “Really? I think I look really good in it. You’re jaded ’cause you wear stuff like this all the time.”

Sean to me: “Maybe. But what I really want is to play more sensitive guy type comic roles, you know, the kind they always give Alan Alda.”

Me to Sean: “I can’t see you like that. No one would ever believe you’d cry over a dead chicken on a bus.”

He went back to his script, and I woke up. And I thought… I’m right. No one would ever believe Sean Connery would cry over a dead chicken on a bus like Alan Alda.

I’m guessing the “Monkees” bit resulted from a recent screening of Head, which I hadn’t seen in a while & would highly recommend. It’s a mobius strip of silliness, some good Monkees tunes including a great live performance of Nesmith’s “Circle Sky” (yup, it’s really them playing) that proves they were a decent garage band when they wanted to be. It’s also one of the earliest examples of the “New Hollywood” – a film designed to appeal to the youth market with the likes of Bob Rafelson & Jack Nicholson behind it, as well as, IMHO, the only stream-of-consciousness ’60s drug era movie that actually works.

Oh – and it’s also largely a backstage deconstruction of the band – hence, my backstage experience in the dream, I’d guess.

I keep a record of the more entertaining or silly celebrity dreams I have, writing them down as immediate to the experience as I can since the memories of those dreams tends to fade with time. I mined a lot of that material for the Wagstaff Novel since the interpretation of the dreams could figure well into an offbeat comic mystery story, and I think it worked out well for the plot.

I’d recommend keeping a dream journal of sorts for any writer or artist. After all, if you have a creative mind, it ought to really get creative when your unconscious runs free, shouldn’t it?

It certainly beats the dreams I have where I’m working – dreams so detailed that after dreaming of teaching some film class & leading a discussion on something, I wake up and get depressed that I have to do the exact same thing over again and then realize, once again, that I can literally do my job in my sleep.

Tonight, it’s spaghetti with Italian sausage & I’ll finish off that bottle of Sangiovese… I’ve got a few movies in the DVR… what dreams may come? I guess I’ll find out before my cat jumps on me repeatedly @5:30am to get fed.