The Glass Character: nightmares

Showing posts with label nightmares. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Last chance: a bad dream

I had a strange dream about a bookstore. There were two women looking after it, a blonde woman in her 50s and a darker-haired woman, tall and thin, who reminded me of my kindergarten teacher. It was one of those rare private stores, a specialty store of some kind, though I knew not what - the kind of store where you could browse around for hours and no one puts a trap door under your feet or spikes on your chair.

I was leaving my lunch with them in a brown bag for some reason, knowing they had a refrigerator and would keep it cold. I was trying to write my name on the bag, and one of the clerks provided a label. Then the scene changed. I had a precious ticket to a concert, a Beethoven concert in a hall far away, and this was the ticket that was going to change everything. My estranged family of origin was going to be there, and this was my very last chance to connect with them before they cut me off forever. I gave the blonde-haired clerk the ticket and said, "Can you keep this for me?" "Of course," she said very seriously, fully realizing the importance of it, and put it in an envelope for safe-keeping.

Then on the day of the concert, I came in to collect my ticket. The blonde-haired clerk wasn't there, no one knew where she was, in fact no one was even sure she existed, and no one seemed at all concerned about it except me. In fact, they seemed irritated and offended by my concern. "But you don't understand," I kept saying. "I've got to have that ticket. It's my last chance."

It had been hours until my concert, but now time had shifted and it was suddenly only about 45 minutes. . . then half an hour. . . and then I realized I had to walk there if I was to make it at all. I noticed the envelope was still there, and my heart jumped with hope. The clerk refused to open it, knowing the ticket wasn't in there because there wasn't any ticket. Finally she did open it, and it wasn't in there. There were only a bunch of miscellaneous papers and receipts that she barely looked at.

Meanwhile she was becoming more and more offended, then quite angry that I wouldn't accept what she said. She was offended at the very idea that they had "lost" my ticket, as such a thing could never happen. Another clerk came out from nowhere and was very angry at me that I would even THINK that they had "lost" the ticket, and that a ticket likely never existed in the first place. I was only there to make trouble and upset everyone over nothing. They began to abuse me loudly in front of the customers, to make sure everyone knew what a nasty person I was and how I was manipulating them just to make them look bad.

Finally I knew it was hopeless and began to walk to the hall, realizing it was miles and miles away and I would probably be late. Maybe there would be a cancellation and I could still get a seat? But it would be too late for my family, who would likely think I had forgotten about the concert or didn't care enough to show up. I walked and walked, my dress shoes blistering my feet, then realized I had no idea where the hall was and I would never get there. I looked down and realized that, with my fancy lace concert dress, I had worn knee socks and Mary Janes. And that was the end of the dream.

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Alice in Horrorland - revisited

I was going to play the lead in a stage play about Alice in Wonderland.

I don’t think I was me in this dream. I was much younger than my present age, and in fact, much younger than I have ever been. I was some sort of innocent, almost a waif. I was running around with long blonde hair flying behind me. Other people from the play were kind of milling around in various settings, mostly in a high school (I think this was an amateur performance), but I had no idea who they were, even though we had apparently been rehearsing this play together for months.

Though I remembered the rehearsals and I seemed to remember knowing the play very well, I suddenly realized I had no idea how the play started, what the first couple of pages of dialogue were. It was simply blank. Since I was playing the lead, I had to know. I knew I was in it somehow and wondered if it was kind of like the scene where the White Rabbit (always late) rushes past her before she falls into the rabbit hole. Or did she step through the mirror?

There was a director of the play somewhere but I couldn’t find him. No one seemed to know where he was, but I could picture him, what he was like. None of the other players seemed to recognize or acknowledge me and brushed off all my anxious questions. At one point I (who at this point looked like a little girl living in the 1960s) went on a sort of strange computer that reminded me of the Wizard of Oz's contraption behind the curtain, and tried to find out something about the play on the internet. I thought I could download the script so I could at least read it onstage and not be a total fool. I pictured myself just improvising my lines but realized it would throw the other actors completely off and infuriate them and bring the play to a grinding halt.

I saw a sort of glass plate with lettering embossed on it and wondered if I could make one with my name on it, if it would somehow help. The glass was sort of amber-colored and it was plate-sized but irregular, like a blob of sealing wax. I think it had some sort of emblem or crest on it. As I became more bewildered and frantic about what was going on, I suddenly realized I had no idea of the content of this play. I could not remember a single line in it, though I still remembered rehearsing for months. I started running around desperately asking people if they had a copy of the script. All of them shrugged and went on talking to whoever they were talking to. (All these people were young adults, maybe 20s or early 30s, much older than me.) They acted as if I had no connection to the play whatsoever and should just go away.

Then I found a plastic bag and it had some sort of report written on it, printed on it. It said something along the lines of: when she first arrived here, she looked very unkempt and dishevelled. Now she has improved her appearance greatly and is obviously much more attractive. I realized I was reading a psychiatric report and that it was about me.

I kept trying to figure out who the director was. He had an unusual voice and it seemed English. I kept thinking of the movie/book 1984 and George Orwell. Though I never saw him, I kept thinking I heard his voice. I thought that if I asked HIM if he had a copy of the script, I could at least get the first page. I knew he didn’t have one however, because nobody did. Then I decided he must be that guy on Mad Men, the Englishman they called Moneypenny, Lane Pryce. Lane Pryce committed suicide by hanging himself in his office during the last season. He tried to commit suicide with carbon monoxide in a new Jaguar his wife had just given him (Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce had just landed the prestigious Jaguar acoount), but it wouldn’t start, one of the drawbacks to effectively marketing it.

Just now I realize I only saw this Lane Pryce actor in one other thing, the movie about Sylvia Plath with Gwyneth Paltrow. It was a very poorly-done thing and Paltrow was pallid and uninteresting as Plath, but in one scene, this Moneypenny was talking to her about suicide and how he had tried it once, “but you’ve got to keep going!”. This seemed ironic in light of the Lane Pryce character’s suicide.

But maybe it wasn’t Moneypenny at all: it seemed more like Oliver Sacks, the bizarre genius who studies people with mental disorders like so many insects impaled on pins.

The whole dream was a vague nightmare of pointlessly bustling around, realizing that the play was about to begin, that I was playing the lead, and that I had absolutely no idea of what was in the script. I was trying to scrape together some sort of knowledge of Alice in Wonderland and kept coming up with a rabbit. At one point all the cast members were supposed to produce a picture of what their spouses looked like, and I tried to find a picture of a rabbit, just the face, a brown one.

It wasn’t until I woke up and grogged out of bed that I made another connection, with the Marina Bychkova Enchanted Dolls. My current favourite is a doll named Alice, who represents Bychkova’s “reimagining” of Alice in Wonderland. The doll has enormous blue eyes brimming with tears, elaborate costumes and long blonde hair. She both enchants and scares me because along with abandonment and terror, I see anger in her eyes, even a hint of rage.

Unlike Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Alice does not have comrades or companions, just a series of encounters with grotesque figures like the hookah-smoking caterpillar, the Queen of Hearts and the Cheshire Cat whose smile hangs disembodied in the air. She fell into this twilight nightmare down a hole, or, in another story, was sucked into a reverse world behind the mirror. In neither case did she choose the journey.