Art Imitates Art

This is a very long and complex dream but it is slipping away. Let me try to remember ....

First, I am a wealthy art collector in Beverly Hills. I wake up one morning and admire all my paintings. First one that hangs just outside my bedroom, then when I go downstairs, the bulk of the paintings which are in an exterior gallery on a veranda. But when I go down, I discover that the walls outside the house, including a lengthy passageway that leads out to the street, have been fantastically graffitied. A huge complex picture of incredible beauty has been painted .... and then, in the blink of an eye it seems, it is replaced by another.

I wonder who has done this. As I walk back through my art collection, I start to notice that my paintings have been replaced by other paintings. There is a huge yellow period Picasso (note: he didn't have a yellow period) - and a Van Gogh is missing. After some agony I nptice tat the old paintings are still there, UNDER the replacements. I wonder whether the new ones are real or fake.

I wake up, but no I am still dreaming and in my dream, I saty "I must write this down before I forget it." But I am no longer at home. I am in a stranger's house and my computer is gone. 

I am lying on the floor in the house of a stranger, except that it appears to be my late friend Robert Bloch (author of PSYCHO) only it;s not EXACTLY him. He tells me to use his typewriter and throws me a pile of paper.

I sit at the typewriter which is an old manual, but when I put the paper in I discover that ther things are already typed on it. When I use the carriage return, it sends me way back to beyond the left margin, so I can only type onto the platen. The ink is green. I turn the paper over to type on the other side and discover that it's one of my old music manuscripts.

It's no good, I say, I have to use a computer. Eventually I find a computer, but it's an old one, looks like an Apple II, very hard to remember how to use it. I keep thinking, the stuff I already typed, I can't transfer it to this computer's memory.

But I still start typing. I explain about the mansion and the paintings but in reliving the dream, it's different. I am married now, and my wife appears to be Elly, (Bob's wife) except she kis also conflated with the Dutch opera singer Elly Ameling. (The first time around I was living alone.)

This time around I am in my office, listing the paintings which were in my dream within a dream. The yellow picasso is held up. I point out that I bought that painting with miles, not money. There's a Chagall, as well — my favorite — yes, I say, THAT one I paid money for. Then I say but we are forgetting the Van Gogh!

In fact, as we continue to catalog the paintings and I type all this down, I am telling myself no, no, if we go on cataloguing I will forget about the art thief in the veranda gallery, because we will never get to that part of my dream! And we don't, because I wake up in mid-typing of a sentence.