So, today I woke up at 2 pm and I would like to tell you about my dreams. I woke up a few times in the night and mumbled-dictated them into my phone but some of it is garbled.
But first, we were all prisoners of war and there was a dancing king who danced wildly in the distance, we were a long line all waiting for something. Suddenly a big piano composition in B flat minor wells up in my head, big bass octave melody with punctuating chords, the melody leaping up and then with a downward leap of a major seventh from F to G flat and a plangent, romantic rich chord above. I am playing it in my head and the ghost of Chopin appears. We are both lying on a bed and Chopin is completely black, more like a black void in the universe that happens to be shaped like a person. I want to get up and he says no, no, play it again, and pulls me down with tremendous force and I struggle and struggle while the B flat minor progression repeats over and over, he keeps pulling me down and I keep struggling …
I wake up briefly to go to the bathroom and I wonder whether Chopin is a personification of sleep paralysis versus my need to go....
I fall asleep again. Now, I am lying in a large bed in a hotel or luxury apartment building. My mother is there too. We are watching a TV show on a screen so huge that it extends past the wall and all the way into a side room or corridor, so that we can only see half of the picture. I really want to see the other side, so I get up and walk across the room and follow the screen which stretches down the corridor to my right, and the corridor opens onto a large living room which huge french windows, some semicircular steps leading into a garden where children are running past.
One of them says to me, "Show me your movie! Show me!" I let the group in and they watch a movie I made. Then they run off and others come. "Our friends told us about your movie," they said. "May we watch?"
I leave them at the vast screen and I go wondering and I find myself in the downstairs of a huge complex of buildings with warm golden-colored walls and a swimming pool. The place is very echoey. I run into Sun, my violinist adoptee who lives in my house. He is very happy to be here and I really want to show him this incredibly building we are in. We wander around and I say, "I have to show you the apartment" (that's where the big screen is and my mother is watching the show and the kids are watching the other show.) And we walk past the echoey swimming pool area again, but I make a wrong turn and now we're in another corridor with lower ceilings and at the end there is a Chinese restaurant with red lanterns, but this corridor is colored a rich turquoise with a few gold highlights. There are two elevators with blue wooden doors and a counter in front of them with uniformed Chinese ladies. I realize these elevators don't go to the right place. The number 17 is clearly visible on an ivory button. The ladies don't seem that communicative. I say to Sun, "We're going the wrong way," and we walk back and pass the swimming pool in another direction, back towards the warm golden-colored walls and the right part of the building, but I wake up for a moment.
So then I go back to sleep and dream again. In this dream, Mikey and I are guests of a totalitarian government and we are being forced to watch a propaganda movie. Then the movie turns into an opera and a baritone on stage is singing a melody that sounds very much like a melody from Verdi's "La Forza del Destino" but minus the triplets. (I have to check this melody later.) The melody is in B flat major. (I actually think it might be a different Verdi opera, but in my dream I am thinking of Forza.)
The theater is circular - half-circle stage and half-circle auditorium We are brought forward to the railings of the balcony where we have been watching to be able to look down into the orchestra pit which seems really far away. Suddenly, we are somehow caught in the stage machinery and the railings become rails and we are in a sort of private tram moving from a desolated war-torn city (I am a bit reminded of a tram going through the Krakow ghetto in WWII).
There is an explosion and I find myself on the ground with shells going off. I have been sitting in the tram with a older man with thinning hair, but what remains of his hair is long and golden. He is desperately trying to comb what little hair he has left.
"Please don't worry, you look fine," I try to reassure him as explosions go off everywhere.
"You don't understand," he says. "This was all foretold. Disaster was predicted."
Then I woke up for the third time last night. I may have dreamed again, but I don't remember the fourth one, and anyway, three is a lot of dreams to remember in one night.