Sunday, January 11, 2009

Amateur Dream Analysis

DREAM: I'm in a giant Twin Pines Mall-esque mall, going from 'The Beyonce Store' (which seems like a cross between Urban Outfitters and Wal-Mart) into an adjoining book store, though I'm not sure if it's an entirely separate store or just another section of The Beyonce Store. Anyway, I pull a book off the shelves and bring an entire wall of books down on me. I'm pulled out of the wreckage by Matthew Lesko, the question-mark suit guy from TV

ANALYSIS: This doesn't take a Frasier Crane to figure out. I reach for a book, get nearly crushed by a mountain of books, and am saved by a guy from TV. Or, a guy in a question mark suit, sort of like the Riddler in my blog profile picture. It's all a metaphor for how I've let my pile of library books stack up over the weeks while I've been filling my time both watching copious amounts of television and writing copious amounts of blog posts. The books are angry --- I must appease them. I'll finish that George Saunders short story collection by next week, I swear. Don't break my spine with your spines, my pagey masters! I don't know where the hell the Beyonce part comes in. Maybe my subconscious is telling me that I should buy the Sasha Fierce album. Or maybe it's saying I should find a single lady and put a ring on her.


DREAM: I'm in a Legion hall, specifically the one off of King Street in Toronto where I went for a Halloween party last October. But this is no party --- I'm there for a UFC event. And not to watch on pay-per-view, I mean the actual event is taking place at the Legion. The cage takes up literally half of the place. I'm sitting ringside next to UFC president Dana White and, oddly enough, L.C. from The Hills. The ring announcer (not UFC regular Bruce Buffer) is introducing the main event, first introing the unknown fighter who's already in the ring. The announcer then suddenly breaks out a slide projector and starts giving a lecture on ancient Rome. This brings out the other fighter (Chuck Liddell), who's angry over the delay in being introduced. He and the announcer get into a shoving match, and the main event is canceled due to the melee.

ANALYSIS: I'm at a UFC event at a bar and sitting next to the star of a reality series. Ergo, this means that the winner of the next season of The Ultimate Fighter will be a former bartender. Can I place a bet on this outcome in Vegas? Anyway, this dream is, again, pretty non-sensical. Maybe it's some sort of commentary about how the UFC fighters are today's modern-day gladiators, like the gladiators of ancient Rome. That's a concept that certainly has never been explored before....except on literally every single UFC broadcast with their 'gladiators' intro. Man, my subconscious is lazy. Wait a second. It's lazy, just like L.C.! She just sits around and shops, goes to the beach, goes on dates, etc. right? (I've never watched the Hills,* so I'm just presuming this is her daily routine.) Perhaps my subconscious is telling me that laziness is the key to success, as evidenced by L.C., and I should stop worrying about working hard to make something of myself. I should just sit back and let myself fall ass-backwards into fame and fortune! Great idea, subconscious! Usually being a layabout would mean that I would end up drinking at a bar, but as this dream shows, even the dreariest ugly duckling of a bar can be turned into a beautiful swan of a professional fighting card! Hot dog! This laziness is reinforced by the fact that I'm probably the one straight guy in the world who dreams about L.C. but in a completely non-sexual way.

* = I have, somehow, watched the whole first season of Laguna Beach. I'm still not sure I can piece together the chain of events that led to that happening.


DREAM = It's the world of Lost. The Island, it turns out, is actually a Truman Show-esque fantasy world set up for Ben to control the actions of the other characters. Everyone comes to terms with this (except for Locke, who is given a lobotomy), and the series ends with a big cocktail party for everyone involved. Things go sour, however, when the smoke coming off of one of the candles turns into the Monster --- the origin and purpose of which never was explained --- and everyone is killed. End series.

ANALYSIS = I think this one falls under the category of 'nightmare,' since if Lost actually concludes in such a shitty way, I'm going to fly out to Hawaii with a shotgun. That's the odd dichotomy of being a Lost fan; at this point it's certainly one of my favourite shows of all time, but if the series doesn't resolve itself in a satisfactory way, it will plummet down the rankings faster than you can say the Alabama Crimson Tide. It's a different situation than, say, when Buffy sucked during its last couple of seasons. That was just the natural result of a show that had stayed on past its expiry date and suffered the natural degeneration that befalls most programs. With LOST, however, a bad finish will hit much harder. The show has been building for four years and has created all of this mystery about 'the answer' of the Island, even to the point where it has become the only network show ever with a strict end date that the producers have promised us will streamline and focus the storytelling process. It would be like reading a mystery for 400 pages, really getting into it, and then it turns out in the last 100 pages that the killer was actually the dead guy's evil twin that nobody had mentioned in all of the previous chapters. Or, it would be like reading The Broom Of The System (sorry Kyle).

2 comments:

Hal Incandenza said...

[shakes fist] meh...it's actually not very good (note that on my list of 12 essential DFW readings, TBOTS is nowhere to be found.

Note that I have Lost dreams all the time. Nothing ever gets resolved mind you (for whatever reason, the vast majority of the dreams involve all of us marching to (or away) from somewhere). What I enjoy is that I'm always myself--and never, say, Boone--and everyone is always like "hey, Kyle," as if I've been there the whole time (a la Nikki and Paolo--minus the poisoning/fanhate).

Hal Incandenza said...

also: 10 days!