Weird Oscars Dream

So last night we had a fun low-key Oscars party – thanks to Hugh, Renee, and everyone who came out! We were happy that Slumdog Millionaire just about swept the Oscars – it’s a great film about inner-city India, despair & hope if you haven’t seen it. (For a much more erudite take, listen to Jet Loe & Gareth Higgins’ The Film Talk podcast – their show in general is really a must-listen if you haven’t heard yet) I don’t pay any attention to when most films are released (for some reason, I can tell you about a ton of 1999 releases, but that’s about it) and know next-to-nothing about how the Oscars process works, so can somebody tell me if City of God would’ve been eligible this year? Ah yes, that’d be 2002. I’m disappointed it wasn’t in the running – (was it in 2002?) it’s Slumdog-esque, but decidely more depressing (though still hopeful at the end). I’ve probably answered my own question as to why it didn’t place.

Anyway, for some reason, I had the strangest dream last night following the Oscars. My wife Jasmin & I were actually there, as well as our little girl Jubilee. There was a minister there too, from my past – though instead of having wiry white hair, he’d died it jet black and hat it nearly shaved. His mustache was dark too – made him look decades younger. After the awards were over, Jasmin & I got separated – I was in the car waiting for Jasmin, then I realized she wasn’t coming so I parked it and looked around. Adjacent to where the awards were was this huge coliseum-like structure, made of clay or grey concrete or something. I went inside looking for Jasmin, and it was some kind of coercive cult disguised as a radical labor movement. Most of the crowd – and there were tens of thousands – were working class people, blue-collar on “up.” From the center of the coliseum the speaker was talking about workers’ rights and organized labor and dignity, but there were blue-uniformed policemen at all the doors, preventing people from leaving. But then it got more bizarre; there were lots of kids in the crowd too, and they were encouraging the kids to make ‘scary’ sounds; I think training them for whatever they might be doing once let out of the structure. While most of the people there were ‘ordinary’ workers, there were Hollywood types in the crowd too (just being the Oscars and all). Jack Black was there, sitting in one of these stone-hewn rows, with lots of kids surrounding him – he seemed to be leading some of the scary-sound-making.

I still couldn’t find Jasmin, but I had Jubilee with me; I wanted to find an escape route, and I’d also left some stuff at the Oscars nearby apparently. so I went up to an exit and asked to leave. “Why should we let you leave?” the security officer asked. “Because I left some stuff out there…look, I’ll back: You see this baby? Her mom’s still in here. You don’t think I’d leave & try to raise her by myself, do you?” This seemed thoroughly convincing to the officer, and he let me go. When I got outside, Brittian Bullock was also there – he had apparently witnessed the bizarre goings-on inside and got out too. We were trying to figure out how to leave the whole complex – and grab my things – when Hugh Grant joined us. He seemed to be in the same boat as we were, disheveled and frazzled by the indoctrination/brainwashing going on inside. He urged us to go back in so we could find Jasmin. Once we got back inside, the ringleader – I think his name was Richard (Gere perhaps? Or Simmons?) – was recounting how this group got its start a decade ago as a role-playing game that went awry; what began with a board and dice and some nerds never actually ended, and it grew into this. Then Richard said that the founding member was Hugh Grant. We looked at him, stunned. He gave a guilty shrug – “I’m afraid it’s true, boys.”

And then I woke up.

Dreams, They Complicate My Life

You get me?

Intelligent Paper

So the other night I had a dream that there was a new commodity on the market called Intelligent Paper, an invention that did for books what Director’s Cut DVDs do for film. It was for all intents and purposes regular paper, except when you tapped a sentence–any sentence–twice with your finger, all kinds of little multicolored errata would pop up, like those old VH1 Pop-Up Videos, or the Comments feature in Microsoft Word. What would these “extras” say? Definitions of words, author’s commentary, you name it.

Upon waking, I was at first stunned at what a revolutionary invention Intelligent Paper would be. But then I realized that the new crop of electronic paper eBooks, and indeed the Web page probably trump Intelligent Paper in terms of functionality–it’s as fruitless as a visionary dream of 8 Tracks 2.0

In my dream I was passing a newsstand at an airport, and there were several paperbacks and comic books, available in two editions–regular, and Intelligent Paper! Was that a nerdy dream or what?

Dreams Deferred and Trees of Life

I’ve been revisiting Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes‘ brief-but-powerful poem “Dream Deferred.” It evokes so much for me in this season, from marriage to eschatology to relationships to community. I’ll let it speak to you:

What happens to a dream deferred?

 

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

 

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

 

Or does it explode?

Dreams need to be translated into fulfillment, into reality, before they simply die, or worse. Mr. Hughes echoes the proverbial wisdom “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but fulfilled longing is a tree of life.”

So to all my friends who are hurting and hoping: Here’s to sweet dreams, and the salty journeys that evoke our thirst for fulfillment–only in sugar and salt can we be parched enough to drink together of Life’s Common Tree!

I Dream of Pasta Flies

I’ll continue my “where I’ve been” series a little later today, but for now I wanted to share a snippet from one of those random, dissociative dreams we all have.

There was a pile of wagon wheel pasta in a corner, and there were flies, who were made of pasta, swarming around and eating it. Just picture one of the endless variety of kids’ custom-shaped pastas, these in the cartoony outline of a house fly. They were alive, flying, moving around this pasta…and when they bit into the wagon wheels, the wheels would bleed…pasta sauce.

Do I need help?