VITAL STATISTICS
Dreamer: Helen
Date: Mar. 21, 2001
Title: Reanimated in Australia
The first part of this dream is very sketchy and incomplete, but I vividly remember certain images.
I lived in a rural area of eastern Australia, and I recall such events as going to see a movie in a multiplex that recurrs occasionally in my dreams.
(I go to the movies a lot in my dreams and several dream-geography movie houses turn up again and again. There's the cheap little movie place with a juice vending machine in the lobby that's located in a strip mall in Essex Jct. that I only ever go to in the dark of night; there's two versions of an incredibly huge single-screen movie theatre; and there's an immense megaplex that shows mass-market cinematic product which occasionally have a mind control component to them - the films themselves are mind-control devices - like for example the biography of Jesus film made by the Korean fundamentalist Christian, which turned out to be subliminally embedded with mind-controlling elements. But this is off-topic.)
I went to a coffee shop filled with college-age people where we got into a discussion about older movies and I tried to explain what repertory houses were to a young woman who seemed interested.
I went to a function at a synagogue and they started playing an odd piece of rock music, the vocal part of which was a prayer (maybe Aleinu, but I can't recall), and Brian M. tried to tell us they were singing in Hindi, from the Bhagavad-Gita . He meant Sanskrit, first of all, and he was still wrong.
Then I went to a cabin or quonset hut type of structure which was one of the synagogue's social areas and read the Albay Times Union with some senior citizens and discussed current events with a woman who said she wished she could meaningful conversations like this with her cousin.
Things really start to break apart at that point: I got a into a van with a beefy Austrailian woman and we picked up her kids from a Little League baseball game. I ran into my parents who said they thought the Olympic Complex in Sydney was beautiful and I should visit it sometime. I rode in the van some more. The woman let me out in town. I took a bus up a stretch of rural road that was busy for such an isolated area. We passed cars and bicyclists. It was a very hot day. I might have bought some ice cream along the way.
Then I went home to a farm building which had been converted into a commune where most of MHANYS' (my place of work) staff lived and worked. And somewhere along the way I died. I might have gotten hit by a car on that busy stretch of rural road. I was dead, but had been reanimated. I didn't even realize it at first. It just slowly dawned on me.
I attended a MHANYS staff meeting in the living room. Liz Smith, the gossip columnist, lived with us and she might have been MHANYS publicist. As I was listening to the people talk I noticed the collection of marriage self-help videos, which had been selected by Ellen R., that we kept under the TV. As I was staring at the covers in boredom I realized for the first time from the very graphic artwork that they were Victorian-era period piece pornographic videos. And I thought to myself: “Are we supposed to be loaning out porno to people?”
The meeting broke up and I went to my room. Everything I owned had become unfamiliar to me. I forgot how to get around the house. I knew I had to do something, chores or something, but I couldn't remember what they were, and I wasn't sure I would able to do them correctly. Slowly it dawned on me; I was dead.
Somebody came to visit me, and I followed them out into the main part of the house. I saw David K.'s room and I thought he could help me. I went in and tried to talk to him, but everything I said came out stupid. I could not communicate. I could only express myself symbolically, for instance, by touching the round tops of the dozens of multicolored floating votive candles he had on his shelves, or putting his little action figure guys on top of stacks of paper and placing books at perpedicular angles to one another. Finally, using all my effort, I managed to say, “I'm dead,” which of course he didn't believe because I was walking and talking and generally carrying on like the living.
I left David and behaved so incompetently in the kitchen that one of my other co-workers, a composite of Cristina N. and Patty C., took me aside and asked what was wrong. I told her I was dead. We went into another room and I told her to look into my eyes which I thought had become all-black - proof of my deadness. She said they were just bloodshot. She left to get another person - a semi-dream person based on the black, gay clerk at Romeo's Gifts, but darker-skinned and an employee of MHANYS in my dream. He told me that Patty had said I thought I was dead and he wanted to talk to me about (meaning he wanted to talk me out of it). I insisted I was dead, but because of my difficulties communicating it took a long time. Finally I held out my hand for him to touch, which would be cold and that would prove it - except my hnds are always cold. However he did notice that I had no pulse. He listened to my lack of heartbeat, and we determined that, while I could breathe, my breath was not warm enough to create condensation on a mirror.
I was happy to learn that my impressions of being dead were factual, but I became sad because I wondered if I would begin to rot and putrefy. Even if I didn't decompose totally, would I begin to stink like the dead? And who would still be my friend after that? Would I still be able to keep my job at MHANYS?
We called Jackie M., the company's managing director, into the room to tell her. She became quite excited, but didn't know what we should do next - if we should report my death to anybody and so on. Liz Smith, the gossip columnist, wanted to know what we were up to, but first I had to go back and tell David K. it was true, I really was dead. I got as far as saying “Hi, I really am dead,” and seeing his surprised reaction, and then I woke up.
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