Thursday, December 25, 2008

old friends

i am in the bedroom i had when i was a teenager. i am kneeling down and trying to choose the next lp to put on. i am alone, but not for long. a succession of people come into the room, as each one comes in and settles down on the spare bed i make some sort of comment along the lines of “as i live and breathe”. some of these people are friends, some are characters from entertainments that i have liked, and some are people i no longer know.
when it has all stopped and people have introduced themselves one of the girls gets around to telling us that she has a problem with someone she knows. we hatch a plan to impersonate policemen to put the frighteners on the miscreant.
dressed as policemen we are out in the street going towards the home of the person in question. it looks as if it has been filmed on a handheld video camera and posted on youtube.
this then switches to a glossy csi type look as the view is now of a large messy cluttered room/house. there are piles and piles of things. there is so much stuff it is hard to make out what should be there and what not should be there, where one thing ends and another thing starts. among the chaos are a number of people searching and clearing – the two acts seem to go hand in hand. it seems an impossible task.
they are looking for evidence that is important in an on going court case.
we are looking down on what they are doing. next door we can see the court in session.
now the view is among them. they are talking about what they are looking for and how hard it is going to be to get it to the attorneys, and how hard it is going to be for the attorneys to get to them. they start pushing things to make space, to make walkways. they move a large sideboard, some drawers and a draw are missing from it, and there is a lot of bric-a-brac in it. they can now clamber over this, into a new space.
it is a dark and moody scene, low lights and long shadows.
the light changes to sunny bright and clear. another friend has turned up and wants the return of a bag he leant me a long time back. i can remember where it is but i am pretty sure that i can’t get to it because of the junk that is in the way.
the place has changed it is now a large place with more rooms than enough. i tell my friend to wait while i go get the bag. i rush through the building/mansion. i arrive at the room i believe the bag to be in and i enter.
it is the right room, but not how i expect to see it. the pale wooden floor is clear, the cream walls glow delicately from the clear sun coming into the room. it is neat, clear and tidy. i splutter, i stutter and then i gasp. there is someone in the room just putting the last of the stuff away. they smile at me, i ask them about the bag. they point to cupboard. i go to it. open it, half expecting to be buried under a pile of junk, what i get is a neat rack of bags. i easily pull the bag i need from the rack.
the voice behind me is telling me that they took the liberty of clearing up.
i thank them.

(dream ends)

faker (snippet)
the character is out taking photos. stumbles on an interesting building, it looks like a brutalist version of a castle set in the middle of a street of shops. he looks for an entrance and an idea of what the building is for. he can see the name “mel savage” on the walls and above the very large doors. it seems to be a mix of youth/social club and church. once inside he is greeted with very dark wood floor, doors and panelled walls, the lights are very low. there are a few rugs on the floor. there is a reception desk but no one at it. the room is very small considering the size of the building. there is a noise from below, he turns and sees an ornate set of banisters that lead downstairs. slowly and carefully he takes the stairs down.
at the bottom he can see a young boy at a desk, he asks who is in charge.
the boy leads him to an office where a young man is seated at a desk dealing with a phone call.
he waits for the call to finish. the call goes on, the man has to move his chair to across to a filing cabinet to get something, he is wearing a t-shirt of black and red hoops, his jeans are baggy and artistically ripped, but such that large patches of flesh are exposed.
the photographer thinks this is odd.
(the rest of the dream is hazy in terms of what happens and the order it goes in. the photographer meets mel to ask if he can take photos of the building, he is at a service given by mel, there is a feeling of something being totally wrong about what is going on, there is a confrontation with mel, it is all in a gloomy half light of horror movies that have no budget to show the sfx in.)

(dream ends)

Thursday, December 18, 2008

stalk and slash

this is the closest i think i have come to a nightmare in years. strangely (or perhaps not) it is pretty much a stalk and slash horror movie. the dream seems to be disjointed as if trying to make it an art house horror.

she is confronted by a large steroid buffed up madman. he is wearing a grey t-shirt and a checked white shirt over that. his skin has a stretched waxy look to it. he is telling her to run, to get in her car and go, that he will chase her, that he will give her and her child a head start, but then he is coming for her. he throws her the car keys. he writes down his name so she can tell the cops who he is (tony styles/smiles/stevie it is something like that), he gives her the pen, he tells her it is not poisoned.
she runs.
time jump. the killer is facing a man and he is telling him what is going to happen that he will not be able to save his friends, but the killer will give him a chance, though he doubts it will be taken. the man is tied to a chair; he is looking around for his friends. he is gagged, in a trailer, tied to a chair. his eyes bulge with fear and there is spittle all around the gag.
time jump. the man is outside the trailer on the grass he is unconscious, his leg is chained to the trailer so he can’t run if he wakes. his hand is lying on the foot of his male friend. the man is looking up at the night sky; his friend is lying on his front. they both seem to be stirring. they whisper to each other to see if they are ok, if they know what is happening. they are, they don’t, they just know the girl is gone and they are in a shit load of trouble. they hear the killer approach and they both pretend to be asleep.
time jump. back inside the trailer both the men are being spoken to be the killer he is telling them the only way to stop him is to kill him, but it might mean one of them dying and it means that they will become killers too. compared to the killer both the men are weedy emo kiddies. they are scared, they know they have to do something but neither of them is brave enough. the killer tries to goad them. he goes mad, he offers them weapons, he attacks them, and he offers them bigger weapons from sticks, to knives to swords. they hold each in odd ways it is the first time they have held such things for violence. the killer throws things, he pulls out a huge great big claw weapon to go after the men.
time jump. outside the trailer are a couple of cars, there are a few rickety buildings nearby (somewhere to buy some food, somewhere to rent a trailer), a little beige and cream car pulls up and parks near the cars. a little old woman jumps out of the car (she looks for all the world like the old ladies in a gary larson cartoon). she is making lots of noise and she is talking angrily at her husband (never seen) and she makes her way over to the shacks.
time jump. the men and the girl are driving along a mountain / hill road. windows open, wind in their hair. the men in front, the woman in the back but she is leaning forward to look out the front window, all their faces are in a line. they are chatting animatedly about what they are going to do with their free time. they have just finished a big show. they are bitching about the people they work with, but all of them are looking elated to be on the road. there is a little bump in the road. that gets the male passenger bitching about the car, the driver tells him to shut up as he loves his car, he cares for his car.



as they drive along the mountain/hill road they see a group of body builder types moving things from a van. they are all uniformly dressed, jeans and a leather waistcoat. they then notice one of them is using his arms to walk with, as if pushing a wheelchair, but there is no chair, his legs are being used to hold the large bundle. he walks by them and looks at them; it is a fleeting and sad look.
he throws the bundle down to a lower a level, there another muscled man catches it and repositions it.
they are building something. it is not clear what.
there is just a feeling of foreboding.

war
a bizarre war story. a solo character is walking through a victorian housing estate. it is much bigger and denser than any estate that ever existed but it is obvious what it is. he is sticking to the shadows; he is trying to get somewhere to meet up with his comrades. there is an internal dialogue going on describing the war that is going on. it appears to be between man and machines. it has been going on for a very long time but it seems to be concentrated on one block of the estate and it takes place in the garden area on a very traditional battle-line to battle-line type way.
he is talking about how they have collaborators in the machines.
but he is lost on the estate.
a wrong turning has taken him to a different part, somewhere he has never been before, and the door he has gone through seems to have led him to a dead end, a large walled space with a playing green and a tree. he is going to explore it.
something alerts him and he knows he is being watched he tries to escape, he can’t. he can hear the machine coming for him. he runs. he is backed into a corner, out of the darkness it comes the machine rumbles up to him, it is a little mini tank that is something that looks like it could have been the offspring of tanks from the first and second world wars and a childs pedal car. it is no higher than his knee. the gun points at him. no matter how hard he dodges the gun keeps him in sight. finally he ends up in the corner.
“kill me then” he says. a female voice says i don’t want to kill you i want to help you escape, but to escape you need to run and forget. the voice tells him he needs to repeat a special phrase (something that had a couple of colours and numbers in it) several times while he ran. if he did this he would be free of the war.
the machine disappears and he starts to run down the block (which now looks remarkably like part of the housing estate i used to live on, this one was built in the 60s) he starts to say the phrase, he notices that from a tree there is a bolt of electric blue cloth is spills out into a large pool that almost covers all the green. he runs to it and he can see that there are words stitched into the cloth. they give him hope. he notices that it has all gone quiet. it is light. he sees movement. he ducks for cover and then sees if he can follow the movement, he walks around a group of sheds, his feet gently walking on the grass there is no one: just empty street.
there is a cool breeze.
there is a voice over thing that makes it all feel like this was an episode of a dodgy tv show.


not sure if these are supposed to be connected or not.