Usually I don’t remember my various mini dream movies. Most of them over the course of my life have typically been mundane and banal—a typical post-Star Wars Hollywood film--and most of them have been mundane and banal for the last two or three years too despite their lack of resolution. This morning I did remember my nighttime reverie and I wrote it down as it was one of the more vivid of my dreams and I wanted to make sure I did not forget it it so I could write it down and think about it some more.
In this dream I was in lovely house with at least two storeys. There were a lot of people in the house taking and moving about. I seemed to have been plopped down in the middle of a crowded party. Eventually I made my way upstairs to a room with very few people in it who were watching classic movies. A reflection of my general dislike about being around too many people particularly at mundane and banal parties and a reflection of my longstanding cinephilism? Soon an announcement appeared on the television we happy few were watching that Michael Powell’s classic Peeping Tom—a film that deserves as much recognition as Alfred Hitchcock’s much better known Psycho—would be on next. I immediately headed downstairs and sought out two young French lasses. Did I assume they were cinephiles like myself because they were French and France—where I lived briefly and a country I have always been fond of—was well known for its cinephilism and film criticism in the 1950s and 1960s? I told them that the rarely seen and rarely shown Peeping Tom was going to be shown in a few minutes on the small screen upstairs. Initially, they berated me. Did they think I was trying to pick them up? Did they think I was ill? Did they not believe me? I left them immediately and climbed back up the stairs to watch the film. The two French lasses eventually followed which pleased me. Am I not as averse as I thought to watching small groups of others if they are also intelligent cinephiles? Then the dream ended.
As I thought about this dream I began to wonder if my endlessly repeating dream experience—dream ends before resolution—is a reflection of my age—I am not 69—and a reflection of my somewhat conscious concern about the end of my life.? I have long thought that I had resolved any issues concerning my mortality. Perhaps I haven’t managed to do this fully, however. One thing I do know is that I am weary and bored by the banal mundanity that is contemporary life in anti-intellectual America, a land where many right wing populists, many of them right wing know nothing theocrats, fascists, and xenophobes, seem to think that the stone age life was the best of all possible worlds in which humans had ever lived. As for me, I can’t imagine a much worse “utopia”, a utopia not that different from those when Christianity and Christian inquisitions ruled Europe, when Hitler and his inquisitors ruled Germany, and when Stalin and his inquisitors ruled the USSR, and I certainly don’t want to live in it now or at any time in the future or the past should the Doctor of Doctor Who really exist and can take me there. I would definitely want him to take me to almost anywhere else.
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