:: The short happy day of Francis MacMorland ::

Sunday, April 20, 2003

I present a study in contrast.

The dream I remember from last night's sleep:

I was at a summertime party at some unspecific person's house, and was sitting on the couch watching some late-night talk show, being re-aired during the day, with the toddler son of the house's owners. One of the guests happened to be actor Tim Robbins. The show broke for commercial and an ad for the Intel Pentium 4 processor appeared, punctuated by the standard branding jingle at the end (doo-dink-doo-dink!), which seemed to greatly trouble the young lad at my side. When the talk show resumed, he gently tugged at my sleeve.

"Who is that?" the doe-eyed child inquired.

"That's Tim Robbins. He's an actor."

"Can you take me to see him?"

"Ok."

At this point, I put the young boy - in his stroller - in a enormous attaché case and (after flippantly remarking to the parents, "it's allright, I'm not going to molest him") hauled him down to Mr. Robbins' office. His assistant let us in immediately.

Tim was sitting at his desk, with a cigar dangling from his lips, in what seemed to be a remarkably similar approximation of his office in "The Player". In response to his (justified) question as to why I requested to see him, I produced from within my case the young child, still in his stroller.

At that point the boy confessed to Mr. Robbins and myself that he'd hacked into several US department of defense supercomputers and ("Wargames"-style) initiated the launch of our entire nuclear arsenal, thereby provoking a Russian counter-strike, in an attempt to annihilate all of human existence. Why? Because his parents, scared of his nigh-preternatural intelligence, had hired several teams of psychologists to analyze and study him. These teams had run a variety of tests on the child from infancy onward, one of which involved being locked in a cage with rabbits (he showed us some video footage of this and I can confirm it must have been unpleasant). Upon seeing the advert for the Intel Pentium 4 processor, he came to the realization that technology, ever-advancing, would continue to provide new tools to be used by these scientists tasked with getting inside the inscrutable little tyke's head. He couldn't let that happen, and had decided to kill everyone on Earth as a result. The missiles were on their way already, and this fate was inevitable (at this point I became detached from the physical location in which I'd found myself, as is common in dreams, and scenes of what people were engaged in as the rockets detonated flashed before me, the only one of which I can now recall being a mariachi band playing in the desert).

I reacted insouciantly. Mr. Robbins turned a ghastly shade of white, his jaw slackening just enough to let the cigar drop from his mouth. He pointed out that committing species-wide genocide for the sake of getting the psychologists off of his back was a bit selfish. They boy replied that he hadn't thought of that.

To make a long story slightly less long, the entire dream turned out to be a trailer for some post-apocalyptic piece of cinematic hack work. All the events up to that point were merely the prologue to a bizarre movie about rival warlords (played by Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin) feuding for scarce resources in the aftermath of nuclear winter. From what I saw in the rest of the trailer, it didn't really look like a winner; it relied too much on star power and some really graphic gun-fighting.

One could use this as a soapbox to rant about the pervasive and insidious nature of the modern entertainment industry inculcating my mentality to the point that I can't even have a simple dream about nuclear holocaust without 1) it involving movie celebrities, 2) it being a awful patchwork amalgamation of hollywood films (replete with tired plot lines), and 3) having the dream eventually spiral into a meta-dream where the previous dream turned out to be a movie itself. I won't do that though.

The actual events I remember from last night:

Having breakfast.
Drinking all day.
Losing a game of darts. Continuing to drink.
Embarrassing myself in front of coworkers.
Maybe getting pizza.
Seeing a crappy concert by a good band. Frustrating.
Going to another bar.
Embarrassing myself in front of friends (piggy-back rides? wtf?)
Sobering up just enough to realize I should go home.

So now, in terms of the memory allocated for remembering the events of the past 24 hours, about 20% is dedicated to real-life events with real consequences, and about 80% to some weird it's-the-end-of-the-world-but-not-really-psych! subconscious fantasy. There's also plenty of irony involved, as the dream was far more vivid than the real events and the real events far more oneiric than the dream. Awesome.

Posted by morland @ 12:00 PM

:: Comments ::

nice use of the word of the day.

Posted by: josh on April 20, 2003 05:50 PM

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