While you were sleeping

I dreamt that I was in a musical theater production -- something I often dream. As the play went on, it had aspects of rehearsal at the same time as it was being performed: people would comment on each other’s performances, there seemed to be a director, and yet it also seemed we were doing it live, if not for an audience, then for cameras. In other words, the play was being rehearsed as it was being performed for the one and only time. I realized this was a metaphor for life.

In the second dream, Marilyn had produced a documentary film about a famous sex expert who had also had something of a cult around him -- a bit like Kinsey, perhaps, though I didn’t see the film about him that came out last year. The end of the film was about the Waco-like attack on the cult by the government, though the cult leader, his wife, and several of their core followers survived. They had their headquarters in a Russian River former tourist resort, and behind the signs on the roof of the ranch-style restaurant that was the main public building were anti-aircraft guns they had intended to use in defense; but the people who were supposed to man the guns were shot down before they could fire. There was a creek in front of the building, across which were the feds, and the cult leader and his wife waded across the creek to surrender.

The third dream might have been an extension of the first; I might have been watching the credits for the film, or I might have been watching a film that was actually an extension of the theater piece in the first dream. At first it started out with normal credits, and then a fantastic animated sequence began showing a little child in a dreamlike environment where he could use handkerchiefs as hammocks or magic carpets.

Somewhere in my dreams, there was also a scene in which I was waiting at the end of an Andean valley where there was a runway for large planes -- it was Argentina or Chile -- and they were taking off over my head. It was my responsibility to somehow monitor these takeoffs, but I was partly afraid that I was watching a film about a plane crash, and the successful takeoffs I witnessed were merely preludes to the eventual crash of one of the planes.