Dream Factory

You keep telling me it might help if I tell you my dreams. I told you I don’t remember any. But you know, last night, I had a vivid one, the kind that stays with you. When I woke up, I took some notes, so I wouldn’t forget.

I keep one of those cool black journals next to my bed, to write down ideas that come to me. Usually for plots I’m working out while I’m lying there before I’m fully awake.

See? It’s one of those hardback notebooks with an elastic you put around it to keep the pages shut. I heard a lot of avant-garde artists and writers used this kind of book for drawing or writing.

How does that make me feel? Oh, I hate that question. So manipulative. Okay, I’ll humor you.

Somehow it makes me feel validated. Even though I have degrees in writing and painting, and even though I can’t afford to be like Hemingway and write full-time, or paint full-time like Matisse or Picasso, at least I can use the same kind of notebook they did. And for that I’ll splurge a little, even though I can write or draw in a less expensive journal.

Here’s the first thing I wrote this morning: “Black white silent.”

The dream was like an early movie, before color and before sound. This dream even had title cards! Weird, huh? The first title card gave a woman’s name I don’t remember ever seeing before, and I didn’t write it down when I woke up. All I’ve got here is “Title card.” So, I can’t remember the name now.

Then, let’s see. I wrote here, “Big woman.” A woman steps out from behind a velvet curtain. She looks to be in her mid 40s, a little above average height and a lot above average weight for a woman, I’m guessing maybe 5 feet 7 inches and about 200 pounds. Her outfit is gypsy style, which I somehow know is in fashion whenever the time period of this dream is set.

Here’s a little sketch I did. She wears a patterned blouse open at the throat with a lace insert. The blouse’s sleeves end at the elbows with two rows of puffy organza ruffles that cover the tops of her forearms. One scarf wrapped around her waist is layered over another scarf that is draped over her full hips and over the top part of her patterned full skirt.

Her dark hair is styled close to her scalp with finger waves. She wears rouge, red lipstick, dark eyebrow pencil, and eyeliner—it looks like stage makeup. See?

Next note is “Screen test.” I think she might be taking a screen test, and she seems a little nervous. She looks up and then from left to right, at first avoiding the camera. Then she pauses, smiles directly at the camera, extends her arms to the sides, palms forward. And then she clasps her hands together, and mouths thank you a few times, followed by some other words I can’t make out.

“Fade.” The image of the woman fades—into another image of the same woman, “in character” this time. She is wearing a torn apron over a ragged, striped housedress. The right sleeve of the dress is cut off at the elbow and is ripped, so the torn parts flop when she gestures.

When we first see her (my dream mind knows I’m in an audience), her arm is covering her face as she places a dark lumpy hat with peaks in odd places onto her head. When her arm comes down and her face becomes visible, she looks at us with a downturned, sad-clown mouth. Her suspicious eyes are lined with black and shadowed with deep circles. She slumps and bugs her eyes out, her mouth falls partly open, and then she looks off to her right, takes a hold of the stage curtain with her right hand, leans back a bit, puts the left hand on her left hip, and sighs with a resentful and reluctantly resigned look on her face.

“Hoe.” The scene fades to the same character standing close to the corner of what is probably a house with some bushes, grass, and a sidewalk off to her right. She is holding a hoe instead of the bit of stage curtain. When she starts to come to herself in the new setting, she sighs again. Then when she spots the hoe, she gives one double take, then another, and then a disgusted look.

“FATHER.” A new title card. A man who doesn’t look all that much older than she is comes into the scene from my right. He’s wearing a beard with his upper lip shaved, Amish style. He’s got on beltless loose fitting pants, a homespun white shirt without a collar, an open vest, and a soft dark hat. He gestures angrily for her to get going off stage left. Wait! Is stage left the same as my left? I can never remember.

The daughter looks outraged. She mock-threatens him with the hoe, but she predictably ended up doing what he wants and leaves to my left. The next thing I see is that she is standing in a weedy patch of land. After wiping her face with her apron, mouthing some angry words, and directing some more eloquent gestures with the hoe back in her father’s general direction, she begins chopping hard at the weeds.

“A STRANGER.” Another title card. We first see him from the back, a diminutive, slender man in his mid-twenties. He is gazing down a slope at the farm building, left hand folded back on his left hip, right hand holding a cane. His pose reminds me a little of her earlier pose with the hoe—but reversed, seen from the back.

“Boater. Smoke. Cane. Mustache.” That’s what I wrote. The little man has dark hair. He is wearing a flat topped summer straw hat with a thick hatband. I think that kind is called a boater. His jacket is long in the back, which technically makes it a tailcoat, I guess, but it’s much too scruffy looking. The right sleeve of his jacket has a rip starting from near the shoulder seam and running along the back of his upper arm for a few inches.

Smoke billows around his head from a cigarette I can’t see at first. He begins shifting the cane from hand to hand behind his back and twitching it up and down. Sometimes the cigarette appears in one hand, then in another. In one of the twitches of his cane, he inadvertently taps the back of his own hat, and he slowly turns his head around to scowl suspiciously over his shoulder as if to see who touched him. That’s when we see his small black mustache.

It’s taking a long time for me to tell you this, but it all happened quickly in dream time. No, don’t interrupt, I don’t want to break the flow so I don’t forget anything.

“Tight jacket. Loose bow ? and pants.” When he turns around we see his jacket is open, it is too small and is shorter than his shirt. A floppy bow is tied untidily around the neck of the shirt. Around his waist he is wearing what looks like a flat cummerbund above a pair of exaggeratedly baggy pants.

He also wears a sullen expression. With hooded eyes, he continues to suck deeply on his cigarette and blow out clouds of smoke. He pauses, then looks as if he has decided something, straightens up, tips his cane up over his right arm, and strides purposefully out of the frame to my right. He reminds me of Charlie Chaplin’s little tramp. But he’s villainous looking, instead of guileless. And he’s wearing a boater instead of a fedora.

“Fetch.” Oh yeah. I see the daughter again. She starts playing with one of two big dogs who come running to her, hugging it, kissing the top of its head. She throws a piece of wood off to the left, where it lands on a dirt road, and the dog fetches it and brings it back to her.

The stranger walks down a slope onto the empty road, strutting, and twirling his cane. His oversize shoes point in different directions. She doesn’t see him, and the second time she throws the block of wood for the dog, it bounces off the man’s nose. The dog grabs it in his mouth when it hits the ground and runs back to the woman, while the man staggers, grabs his nose, tips backwards onto the ground, and does a backwards summersault flopping his legs back over his head. The woman rushes over and pulls him up, puts his hat crookedly on his head and steers him over to her garden. He is tenderly holding his nose. When he takes his hand away from his face, she gestures effusively in apology and whacks his nose again—with the back of her hand, knocking him backwards and knocking his hat off again.

What do you mean, “That’s enough”?

Oh. I forgot you are an old movie buff. Okay, it isn’t really a dream. You’re right.

I just decided to write you a scene by scene description of a movie I watched last night on the Internet archive. Yes. Tillie’s Punctured Romance. I thought it was interesting, for a lot of reasons. Did you know it was the first feature length comedy produced by Sennett’s Keystone film company? Yeah, I know, they did those movies with the Keystone Cops. Some say it was the first feature length comedy ever. It had that big actress I never heard of, Marie Dressler. She was quite famous in her day.

And it’s interesting because it’s the only movie I ever heard of where young Chaplain played a villain. Do you know he played a villain much later in life who seduced widows, married them, then killed them for their money? You do.

Why’d I go through all that trouble? I told you I don’t remember my dreams. But you kept asking. So I thought I’d humor you.

This isn’t the first time I did this, actually. When I was a psych major for a year as an undergraduate, the professor told us to turn in a record of our dreams. I suspected he was trying to get free research material to write up. “On the dream life of university juniors.” So, I did the same thing with him. I remember, one dream I made up had three white horse on a beach, with a gray sky . . .. I forget, but one of the dream symbols books I read at the time said women dreaming about horses means something deep. I thought he’d like that.

You stopped me before the good part I really wanted to get to. The stranger starts leering at the daughter and chasing her around after she brings him into the house. She mistakes his leering for loving looks, and humorously starts responding romantically. He then discovers that her father has a huge wallet full of cash that he is using to pay his farmworkers. And the plot is afoot.

He convinces her to take her father’s money and elope with him. Then he steals it from her. But then her rich uncle dies and leaves her $20,000. That was a lot of money in 1914.

And then . . .. Oh right, you know the ending.

No, I don’t want to tell you how that made me feel.