Monday, August 9, 2004

Dreams

1. Dream sequences in movies and novels are always a bad idea. Either it's some obvious and pointless commentary on the "real" events or it's completely unrelated, though you're left trying to decide if it is in fact unrelated. It's tempting to say that a dream sequence is an inappropriate en abyme for the dream that is a movie/novel but I'm not sure how well that would hold up. For one thing I'm almost as suspicious of movie/novel as dream as movie/novel as myth; these rarely if ever add anything, create any resonance. (Most critics in fact seem to think that the mere connection--"Eraserhead is dream-like"--is somehow profound when it fact it's little more than a highly compressed abstract for the essay the critic should be writing.)



2. The only reason I wish I could draw is to document images from my dreams. They're not any kind of weird, faux surrealist thing but I have very concrete dreams about places: last night an oddly-designed apartment but other than that they're usually places that could actually exist.