Ladies in Red

My body clock is very screwed up. I went to sleep around 6 pm and had a dream and now it isn't even midnight yet.

In my dream, I've been living in a Dickensian orphanage and I succeed to busting out with a few friends and I'm living quietly in Germany when I realize it is time for me to free the other children.

I return to discover people don't really want to be freed. But I still manage to do so and stir up a big escape. However, hundreds of ladies in red, some kind of nuns, are lined up with rifles to bar our escape as we run into the street - it's night in a middle-American small town sort of downtown.

I run into one of my aunts, one who is always critical and she starts to lecture me. I say, "Nonsense. These kids were being mistreated and kept against their will. I rescued them! I'm a hero!"

The chief woman in red is the superintendent of the orphanage. I end up pursuing her to a weird room. The floor is muddy and it's being dug up to form a lower prison level. There's an upper level to my right and an inner room ahead, and the nun is backed up against the doorway.

"Let her dig!" I shout. The nun is straining against a rusted metal fence and manages to pull it out of the mud. "What strength!" I say. "Of course," she says, "I'm a nun"

A voiceover says that the rescuers later became fashion designers and the nun is giving classes in superstrength in a prison. I see a brief glimpse of her teaching chopping wooden planks with her bare hands to inmates. Then in the dream, I wake up. I find myself in a room.

The geography of the room is identical to the room where the nun was digging but now it's a child's bedroom. I think to myself, I've managed to wake up in the room I grew up in in Sukhumvit 24. Except it's not quite the right room. The walls are green tile. I think, I should go to the bathroom and there is one outside, and down the hall, but the closest one is the room the nun was standing in front of before which was a jail but now is a bathroom. I get out of bed (which was the shallowly dug area the nun was digging) and very groggily try to leave the room....

and then I wake up.

Ethnomusicology

I’ve been rather ill this week and I ended up last night dreaming all night about ethnomusicology.

Now that I am more awake I have a moment to describe these dreams. First off I walk into a huge rectangular upper balcony, like the ones movie theaters used to have and the seats are filled with musicians. They pull out something that looks like a brass spoon with a black horn handle and they all start blowing on the spoons. The sound is reedlike, a bit like Japanese Gagaku.

I am watching from a side box connected to this. We are waiting for the arrival of giant trumpets blown by people wearing feathered outfits looking like Quetzalcoatl, but sounding sort of Tibetan. There are people speaking a language that sounds like Quiché Maya.

Presently a group of science fiction fans enters my box and one has a bag of refreshments. She's a thin, blonde woman and reminds of a friend from Cambridge, Priscilla Roberts (who is not actually a science fiction person). She hands me the bag and I reach in. They look like little plastic bags of seedless grapes, but suddenly I realize they are actually crocuses.

Later that night night, I dream about listening to an impressive African male voice choir while listening to a dry, teutonic professor lecture about African music.

He's explaining about how high all their singers are, and he has a chart on a blackboard, with tenor, baritone, bass, etc and with a pointer shows us that each of the ranges goes higher than top C.

Later I'm walking with the professor through a Grecian rotunda including a building that resembles the Jefferson Memorial in DC. I say to him, "But going to school in England, we were always taught that African male choirs had more low notes."

"Ach ja," says the professor, "I can exzplain dat ferry easily. Ze English already have countertenors, so they were not impressed by high notes. And zey were mostly in South Africa, where the voices are lower."

It's an odd dream because the professor is a sort of parody of those German professors during the Third Reich who had cranial charts to show how certain ethnicities were more savage....

I didn't wake up until 1:06 pm from this long night of dreaming about all sorts of world music. I've been down with a bad cold all week, but I didn't take any weird drugs before going to bed, so I can't blame them. I feel remarkably refreshed. I also feel like I've been on a real musical journey around the world, like I've really travelled from Mexico to Africa and so on. It's quite extraordinary.

Gamanium Wine

My dream: It started like a horror film. I'm in the middle of arranging a wedding and I go down into the basement. There is a sweeping staircase but hidden behind it is another staircase, dirty-white and creepy-looking with very narrow steps. It seems to lead elsewhere. In my dream I tell myself, "I thought I was in a romantic comedy, but it turns out to be horror." And I keep remembering the name of the movie wrong (it's "Alas for" - something or other.) I'm not sure if it's in the dream or in my thoughts while in the dream, but there's a bloody corpse floating down the back stairs.

I go up the front stairs and people are saying, "Oh, this house was built on a gamanium mine. Gamanium is the rarest metal on earth and the ghosts are protecting it." The name of the metal fluctuates from Gamanium to McGammon during the dream.

I open up a French window and am on a rickety wooden balcony. A bright golden cannon made of gamanium is pointing directly into the house. Quickly I turn it around - it is really light - and point it to the dark forest beyond the balcony. I hear it go off as I reenter the house. Then a beautiful woman enters in a dress that appears to be made completely of mcgammonium. Not sure who it is - maybe my niece Mink Sucharitkul who is about to be married.

Going out to the balcony again, I move to my left and see that the terrain is changing before my eyes. The grassland and the forest are melting away and being replaced by fields of gamanium, the metal is golden and has stripes of a darker hue. The house is sitting on a huge deposit of the mysterious metal.

Jacking Orff

So this morning I dreamed that there was a rehearsal of "Carmina Burana" going on in some subterranean room, conducted by Trisdee. My mother and father and several of their friends were in the room and I invited them to sing in the chorus.

"It's all about sex," I explained. The number they're doing is "Tempus est jocundum". "The pelvic thrusts in the music, and of course "totus floreo" is obviously about arousal...." My family members are really getting into the music and everyone is singing lustily, including me.

It's sort of a very happy dream, not much of a story to it.

Old School Ties

I dreamt that my mother and I went on a trip to some huge reunion at Eton. The first scene was in some kind of hall that looked simultaneously like an antechapel and the foyer of some kind of state building, stone and gray and official.

It was very crowded and there were all sorts of people I haven't seen for decades. There was a man named Gordon, whom I recognized from his bright red hair. Hedidn't look fifty years older, though. He looked like he was in his mid-twenties. He was really big, much bigger than in real life, and he turned down his nose at me and said, "Ah, ah, but what about YOUR grades?"

It turned out that he had become some hugely famous physicist (this is not true) and had become quite arrogant. For some reason, in my dream, I hadn't gone on to university and was skulking about in embarrassment because everyone else had.

Later, walking down a very brightly lit avenue, I encountered the mother of composer Robert Saxton. She looked as I had last seen her (over forty years ago) but much more svelte. She had a booming voice and she embraced me like a long-lost relative. (In my dream, it seemed, Robert had gone to Eton, though in real life he went, I think, to Bryanston.)

We were all sitting at an alfresco dinner with wooden chairs with woven wicker seats. Robert was there and I said, "I really have to tell you about my opera, Helena Citronova, because it's about the Holocaust." (Saxton is Jewish).

It's an odd dream because I felt ill at ease in my old school, and people who didn't go there in real life were, in this alternative reality, there with me. And everyone was the wrong age because they all looked like they were in their twenties.

I woke up and I am in state of great confusion.

Caro Nome

It’s eight hours later and I still remember this dream. I wasn’t even going to write it down at first because it was so short.

So, I’m standing in an alley with high gray walls. The alley leads to a main street but there’s no traffic. And I’m standing in the alley singing Caro Nome. Only, it’s in the wrong key. For some reason, it’s in c major. Also it’s not a big soprano solo. It’s some kind of duet. But the soprano that I’m singing it with is invisible.

So the duet comes to an end with a series of chords. But there’s some extra music I have to sing. It’s basically the first two words over and over, on the note G, as the orchestra switches back-and-forth between tonic and dominant. Just over and over and over until morning.

New Repertoire

I should also jot down this dream before I forget it. I'm sitting at a bar counter with chef Christian Ham and we're discussing an international tour of the opera.

"I don't know if we can send anything," I say. I write out a list of four operas in our repertoire:

1. blurred
2. das Gläßende Haus (this is nonsensical German but this is how it appears in the dream)
3. der geile (another word or two, blurred)
4. Götterdämmerung

(Of course, only No. 4 is an actual opera. No. 3 sounds like a porno! No. 2 sounds like a portmanteau of "gläsern" and "glänzend".)

Okay so we're discussing sending these mostly nonexistent to operas in Europe, and the Christian says, "We're missing the afterparty!" We leave the bar and walk down a long sidewalk towards another restaurant. The door is open and instead I see huge breaded shrimp, stacked on an open fire which is burning furiously.

What does it mean? (No. 2 is something about glass houses, not throwing stones? yet the house is glistening.... is the burning shrimp (shrimp=small) in contrast to the the ending of epically huge Götterdämmerung - which is also about burning on an open fire? What is Christian Ham doing in my dream?

Cyborg

I need to talk about this dream before I forget. I dreamed I was a young boy helping out in a lab and they were creating big boards full of computer chips that fit inside people's chests — sort of slotted instead of hearts. Far away above us, aliens starships were circling the earth, waiting to land and conquer us.

Our city is besieged. Gunmen are running up the steps. There is a big old fashioned computer open on my desk — the kind with many slots. I have to find the right board to fit the right slot. In this dream people don't have names, they have labels: A B C iv and U are the labels I recall.

I say, "I am going to announce that the city is burning. The whole city will send police and fire engines and be busy."

I shoot a fat man who is firing at me as he comes up the steps. He is sprayed with shrapnel but seems unaffected. I see a man in a wheelchair emerge from my right from inside the lab. I cut his chest open and pull out the computer board. Blood everywhere. I slot the board into the computer. "That'll buy time," I say, "until the aliens arrive to save the world."

Motherly Love

Although it's slipping and sliding I want to remember what I can of this extraordinary dream. I'm trapped in the top floor of a hotel in a suite and I am, apparently shooting a porno video with a fat lady. It's a golden room and everything is gold, the drapes, the wallpaper. There is no way out.

I'm looking for an elevator. Suddenly a wall panel gives way. I think it must be the elevator but no, it's a secret room, a laundry room or garbage or storage but this room, too, is gold.

Back to the main room, I yank a drape aside and see that it hides a french door opening into a rooftop balcony. "Good," I say, "more shooting angles for this film."

Suddenly a voice declares: "You are imprisoned here forever unless you declare that you love your mother."

I am about to speak when suddenly I am released from the hotel room and I'm alone, driving to another location.

A whole Part II of this follows which I am desperately trying to remember - huge adventure - but it's fading fast.

Edit

Goliath, with Octopus

I'm having a scary dream last night about being thrown around and assaulted by a powerful Goliath-like figure. Then I'm watching him drag a giant octopus in a clear plastic bag around. The octopus is frozen but alive. He's going to eat it but it isn't dead. The octopus is moving, slipping out of the plastic sack.

Now I see the Goliath figure chopping up the octopus, slicing it up and each piece is still quivering. And he starts to eat a tubelike piece of it, crunching it as it fibrillates.

He turns to me and begins attacking me again. It's a scary dream because I woke up in the night and now, after sleeping again, I still remember it.

Headless Crosses

A dream: sitting at a table outside having a dinner in the middle of the night, only moonlight. A woman is collapsing. She cries out - the inverted cross - the inverted cross - the pain, the pain ... there are no inverted crosses....

Then someone notices that the table we are sitting at has trellises that are like the letter T, in black metal, and someone says these are crosses that have been decapitated. We gaze in horror at these trellises that have spread some kind of unholy miasma.

A woman shows up dragging a small flight case. "I've brought all your things," she says to me. I wonder how they can all fit.

It's a black metal case. I take it from her and it's really, really heavy, as though it contained everything in my life. Perhaps the small back piece of hand luggage actually empties out into another dimension.

Opera and Illusion

So I had a peculiar dream that went back to a familiar theme in that it was set in an opera house. In this dream I am directing a TV series, sort of reality show, about audience members in an opera house in an imaginary country. It must be imaginary because they speak English and it's a two-class society consisting only of aristocrats and serfs.

In the dream, the city has built an opera house to service both sectors of society and my TV series follows some high society, super-pretentious people and a group of ragamuffin teens who also happen to adore opera.

First we're on the "first class" part of the opera house were I and others and watching and being profoundly moved by a scene in which a dying soprano is being comforted by a mezzo servant. It's a typical middle-period Verdi sort of scene and the soprano is Leonie Rysanek - though for some reason in the dream she is known as Ingrid Bjoner. (During the dream I keep thinking that's not Ingrid Bjoner, why are they calling her that and only on awakening do I realize it was Leonie Rysanek the whole time.)

It's one of the endless and very weepy death scenes and Rysanek is just belting it out as she dies. I sneak out and descend a mysterious metal staircase to the "servants area" of the opera house. Now I am narrating to a camera, explaining how these serfs became addicted to the opera when their masters insisted on taking them to the opera in order to be at their beck and call during the shows.

I run into the excited teens who are like the stars of a typical teen series ... dressed in what in my dream is described as "delinquent" clothing, riding motorbikes etc. I follow them with my camera. They go down to multi-level parking area ringed with a metal balcony and watching across some railings, they see the same scene I just saw in the plush red velvet house — except the two singers are reenacting it on the other side of a parking lot. The teens creep closer and closer.

Suddenly the soprano stops in mid-aria and screams, "you're too close! you're too close!" and she starts to go into convulsions. She also emits strange whiffling noises, Curiously, the mezzo just barrels through the scene, ignoring the fact that the woman she's comforting is fibrillating or something.

The teenagers lean in closer and closer and suddenly the mezzo notices them too and begins screaming. And suddenly I see that there is actually a hard screen separating the kids from the singers and that the singers are in fact two-dimensional projections. The kids's world is an illusion; they're living in a space surrounded by screens and everything is just a projection. Then I wake up.

The Unknown Mozart

In last night's dream, I am about to conduct what looks like a late Mozart opera - late because it has a soprano aria with a clarinet obligato - but not "Clemenza" so this is an undiscovered work. I'm looking at the score and hearing the clarinet solo in my head and am furious to discover that two bars that are all in semiquavers have been rewritten so that the first bar has become two bars, all in quavers - slowed down to make it easier to play.

I'm screaming at everyone around me. The weird three-bar phrase is resonating in my head and I enter a glass elevator which is about to take me up to the performance space....

Yüddishe Naz

Last night's dream was in some ways a continuation of the previous night's because I'm still, it seems, dogged by Nazis in my dreams.

It starts off with me sitting in the garden of a restaurant at a table under a tree. There is a big silver platter of "weeping tiger" - a northeastern dish of rare grilled beef, delicately flavored coupled with a fiery sauce. I am sitting there with Khun Neng Paradee and we're waiting for someone else to arrive — I am not sure who.

I go to the main road (we are somewhere in the country ... it's all fields, no buildings) to see if our guests have arrived, but when I get back, the table has moved along with the beef to beneath a different tree, with branches that are really in your face. Khun Neng is sitting at her old table.

"Let's wait inside," I tell her, and we go up some wooden steps into the restaurant itself. It's a narrow, long room with a bar on the left. RIght in front of where the bar starts there's a table with noisy women eating a platter of shrimp. The shrimp are on the bar. One woman reaches up for a shrimp and accidentally flings a weird slimy creature in my face - not shrimp.

There is a wall to the right and tables (booths) each wide enough for only one person a side, so they are seated in facing couples.

As we enter, however, the right wall flings away and I hear a chorus of the Horstwessellied - the Nazi Anthem. Suddenly everyone is standing up. I look and there are people seated at desks and a huge whiteboard.

A teacher with a big pointy stick is pointing to each of the notes in succession which are written on the board. It's not just the melody of the Horstwessellied but other nationalistic tunes of many countries.

Above the musical notation there are long bars with annotations written upwards in German script. The annotations aren't in German but in some kind of fake pan-Germanic language. I see for instance:

Dænske Ærm
Beljissche Oeg
Yüddishe Naz

The professor is equating each note of the song with a racial stereotype and a part of the body. It is a hideous quasi-science lecture - a nightmarish conflation of a music lecture with Nazi racial theories. I am so terrified that I wake up.

A Certain Shade of Blue

This particular shade of blue must mean something important as this is the second dream that has featured it in a couple of days. This time last night it's about a huge sky-blue snake wriggling on the wall to wall gray rug of my L-shaped bedroom.

I jump up and succeed in chopping it in half and both halves slither away. I realize I did not see a head on either half. They're now moving swiftly around the room and I follow into the other side of the L, where there is a bed. Mikey is sitting on the edge of the bed. He asks me what is wrong and I say the snakes, the snakes. One of them wriggles on the bed. We're chopping the pieces up and thrusting the pieces into a metal bowl. I pour acid no them, and then a white powder. As I do this, they go on wriggling, and I still see no head. In my chopping spree I have a vision inside my dream … in an almost identical room in the same house, another me is chasing around an identical snake, except it is pink.

In the next part of the dream, I am part of a team of youthful Nazi hunters that has just come back from a secret Nazi-slaughtering mission. We have returned to the steps of a kind of temple. We are filled with guilt because in getting rid of evil people, we ourselves have committed evil.

We stand in a row and are undergoing a ceremony of atonement. We bow (in a very Japanese way) and a man with very short hair in a black suit (maybe like a Jesuit suit) is pouring water over our heads, water he takes from a huge earthenware vat like a Thai rainwater jar, in a plastic bowl (like Thai people upcountry use to wash themselves from the jar) and all the while he screams invective at us for committing these terrible crimes, and splashes more water over our heads. Further up the steps, a tall, lean man dressed like the one in front is doing the same thing to other young people. This stereophonic shouting resonates as I wake up.

The blue I spoke of was a major color in the last dream I remember, where it was the color of a sort of filing cabinet or cupboard of cubbyholes. I called it Mykonos blue but it's actually a little paler than that, more the color of a brightly lit sky, but it still makes me think of Greece.

In the Massage Parlour

I have an acquaintance who owns a massage parlor on Sukhumvit Road and weirdly, I dreamed about him. In my dream, I've gone over there ... limping just like my real knee-injured self right now … to get a massage, and he tells me that he has given me a room on the second floor.

"You can come here whenever you want, just to get away and you can use it for writing."

There's a staircase (wooden) up to the room which is on the left side of the upper hallway; I don't see the right, which is dark. The room is very airy and pleasant. Someone starts to carry in a bright blue (I think of this as Mykonos blue - a Greek blue of the trim on white buildings or of the Mediterranean sky) metal thing which is a kind of wall rack containing metal cubbyholes, like a mail sorter or mini-locker. He starts to put it up and I say No, no, this will eat up the space in the room.

He says, But we took it from the downstairs hall and there's nowhere to put it up.

On the wall by the staircase, indeed I see a bright blue metal frame where the thing used to hang.

Maybe you'd prefer another room, he says. I walk up to the third floor (well, limp, actually) and right above the first room is a beautiful white room with dark wooden beams, and I like it better because there is a door leading outside, further left, to a rooftop veranda. I go out and I see that the wall of my room has a fading mural, graffiti maybe, of green and red mostly, once these were bright flowers but now the paint is corroding. The sun is warm and comforting.

I go back down to the ground floor which (being a dream) isn't the floor I started from but a big eat-in kitchen. My mother is sitting at the kitchen table. She asks me, "What is the Thai for allysergeol?" I have no clue, but a housekeeper, behind a kitchen counter, who has been making breakfast, says, "I used to take that." Then I wake up.

Climbing the Walls

What a weird dream. I'm casting an operatic adaptation of THE EXORCIST. In the dream, I offer a soprano the role of Regan but she's not interested. Then she finds out she is going to get to climb up the wall with suction cups on six (!) legs. She accepts with glee. She is rehearsing the scene and I wander over to the orchestra pit (it is the cultural center) where the pit has not yet been lowered. A pianist is playing the inside of the piano (by plucking). He says to me, "I wouldn't climb up a wall for 4,000 baht, haha, 20,000 please."

In an MC Escher Opera House

I have had a LOT of dreams over the last few weeks and yet they were quickly forgotten. This morning's dream stays with me though.

It is set in a huge opera house, all gold and red velvet and extending many many levels, and I think it's somehow "my" opera house. I have come to the opera house with my mother, for a premiere of "Madama Butterfly."

Before the opera starts, I find myself walking around in an upper hallway — my mother is waiting in the theater. Walking in a circular balcony that encircles the theater towards the right, I meet a pale boy with dark hair (a page boy haircut) who is also here with his mother … but he's left her behind in her seat in an upper level of the opera house.

"Can I watch the opera with you?" he says.

"I don't mind," I tell him. I lead him down passageways to a huge staircase in the basement that takes us up to the level of the "boxes" where my mother is sitting. Here's the odd thing: We go UP to the level, but that level is the lowest level of the opera house — it's a curious M.C. Escher-like building.

The "boxes" aren't what you find in a conventional opera house. Each one is shaped like a huge coffin with red velvet walls. Bench-style seats line the walls. My mother sits in one, and in another sits a high-society woman with one of those huge hats, perhaps Edwardian. I bring the (nameless) boy into the box and my mother looks up. I suddenly realize that the music is beginning but that this coffin-shaped box actually affords no view of the opera itself....

Three Books about Einstein

my dreams were complete and long but quickly forgotten. One was about a colleague and me, searching a house for a possessed child. We found him There was a black devil mask on the floor and he was sticking pins into his eyes, Somewhere, a victim was writhing in agony. It was 4 am and I woke up sweating and scared but only that final scene remained in my memory. Towards 8 am, there was another complicated one, but all I remember is three books about Einstein coming out at the same time, and my asking "Why three books about Einstein?" I think Einstein was in the dream himself.

A Visit with Harlan

Okay. I had a really strange dream about Harlan Ellison.

First I dreamt I received a phone call from him. "I'm dead," he said. "I want you to have my books … or some of them anyway."

In my dream, I drive up to his house which is not, in fact on Coy Drive but somewhere different, somewhere on the side of a long empty country road, surrounded by forest. My mother and father are with me. When I enter the house, several fans are already there, picking off books, like vultures. Oddly enough I am on an upper level, without having climbed up any stairs.

I wander through the rooms (my parents are resting in a room with a big bay window) and I enter a side room where there are some white wooden shelves. The shelves have been cherry picked and I find a huge nude male calendar leaning against the wall. I think, Wait, this is not like Harlan. I furtively take the book and put another fat tome on top of it, thinking that I should somehow "protect" Harlan's reputation.

Then I see other encyclopedia-sized volumes and I take a few. I go back where my parents are, the books weighing very heavily on me. We all talk about how these fans are just picking the house clean. I say to parents, I didn't know him that well, but he was from Painesville. I tell my parents my relationship with Harlan is a bit strange at times. I tell them, "We will go down later to a room these fans don't know about, a room with 30,000 more books stashed away."

Then I walk into a darker room which is on the opposite side to the white room. It has no windows and there are people sitting on the floor including a really fat woman with blonde hair, eating noisily — food from McDonalds. To my right, there is a huge untouched complete collection of the Loeb Classical Library — Greek texts — hundreds of little green volumes. I decide to gather up some of these and I put the books I am carrying down on a part of the shelves already picked clean. As I step towards the classical library, however, I slip on a huge criss-crossed streak of ketchup. The smell is hideous. The color of the ketchup is pale orange and it is watery, more like tabasco, but it my dream it is called ketchup.

"You bitch!" I scream at the fat lady. (She is wearing a green cardigan!) "I have ketchup all over me and my books are stained and my ass is completely covered and I'm ALLERGIC to ketchup!"

She starts to apologize and then she begins to wipe the seat of my pants frantically with her long blonde hair — making me think of the woman in the New Testament wiping Jesus' feet … and this is the image that starts to fade.…

As I start to wake up, I'm remembering a REAL phone call I received from Harlan Ellison once. This is before I ever met him. He was saying with passionate enthusiasm, "You're brilliant! I must have you in the Last Dangerous Visions even though the book closed years ago!" So I sent him this story, "The Fallen Country", which I had just written. He called back and screamed that it was the worst piece of shit he had ever read, and went on and on about its bad writing, it's clichés, compared it to Pete's Dragon … indeed, made me feel like shit. His invective was so over the top I wondered if I had somehow struck a nerve. Okay maybe it wasn't such a fine story yet somehow, it managed to get reprinted a few times, adapted into a novel, and even made into an opera. This whole incident was running through my head when I woke up.

It is a really peculiar dream.… I felt Harlan's death keenly, but it was some time ago and it's like I only really felt it last night.…