A frequently updated blog about the movies my mind shows me while I’m trying to get some rest.

My brain seemed to have some trouble making up its mind.  This was one of the jumpiest nocturnal narratives I’d experienced in quite some time.

I started off in the Recurring Hotel.  I call it that because I have stayed there before in other dreams.  It must be part of a chain – whenever I’ve dreamt of travelling, I’m always checked in at the Recurring.  The reasons for my staying there were unknown, and apparently outside of my concern, because there was something else on my mind, something far more worrisome, intimidating, and impending. I hadn’t been to work in a week, and was due to go in that Friday.  That day was dragging inexorably towards the present, and it hung over my head like an anvil suspended by fishing line.

Like the hotel, the theme of inevitable doom would pop into my dreams frequently. I know that there’s some big thing coming up.  I also know that I either cannot handle it, or that I can handle it, but I find doing it repulsive.  Opening night in front of a live audience is coming, but I realize I’m unprepared, don’t know my lines, or am sick of the theatre.  That kind of thing.

So, I had to go to work in a few days, which I was dreading.  I was working in a movie theater, and I did not want to go back.  My managers were strangely tolerant as I had played hooky for several days.  Inexplicably, not only had they not fired me, but they seemed eager for my return.

The whole dream was permeated with a sense of overwhelming tension and anxiety – I really did not want what was going to happen to happen.  What made it worse, however, were the delays.  Something would always crop up to distract me from my dread. For example, a friend of mine had approached me at the hotel.  She was grim and worried, asking me for help.  Her husband had downloaded and installed something in her computer, and now strange files were showing up on it.  I tried to explain that he was probably downloading the new files himself, but stopped short of making him seem like an unfaithful husband (the real-life counterpart to this couple couldn’t be happier with each other).

But enough of that! The scene suddenly jumped, I was off to the boonies of New Rome, located just beyond the west side of Columbus.

Hovering above the landscape, I was perusing a living model of the rural territory, dotted with a small neighborhood, some home businesses, a fast-food restaurant or two.  When I say ‘living model’, I mean that the things on the model were actually alive – except for the O-scale train set that circled a small house off to one side. My first introduction to Google Earth just an hour or so before hitting the sack can be thanked for that.

So then – jump – I was at the home I grew up in – another frequent occurrence – in the kitchen with my dad.  In reality my dad has sadly been gone for eight years now, but that wasn’t stopping him from making me some bacon.  I didn’t want bacon; I didn’t like bacon – in my dream.  I feel that it is of the utmost importance here that I stress the point that it was my dream-self that wanted no bacon; real-life, flesh-and-blood, corporeal KM Scott loves bacon, and if you were to have even the slightest desire to buy me bacon upon encountering me in person, you should feel free to indulge that desire in the most recklessly exuberant way you can manage.

So dad was making me breakfast, including bacon, and my world was blinking in and out. The schizoid editor of this nighttime head movie had apparently tired of jarring jumps between settings, and decided it would be more fun to quick-cut between the eerily mundane and the chillingly dark.  Blink and I’m in the house, only this time without my dad.  The narrative had switched to a horror film where I was being menaced by a current coworker who was actually some kind of conscious zombie.

Blink again and I’m back in the kitchen, horror movie totally gone, protesting dad cooking up the pig flesh, watching a politically-charged news show wherein they wanted to smear their philosophical enemies by showing Indiana Jones in reverse, so that Indy was chasing the boulder instead of the boulder chasing Indy even though that’s not how the film was shot and MAN THIS WAS A WEIRD ONE. 

It was around that point that I blessedly woke up.  Well, in a manner of speaking.  More like I stirred myself into a middling-space between being awake and asleep, while nailed down by the pinning sense of anxiety that had haunted me throughout the experience.  Finally my bladder conquered my dozing and I woke fully – at 5:41 AM.  In a defiant stroke against the night’s freakout, I got dressed, went downstairs, and got an early morning snack.  I kept myself moving to clear my head.  Victory.

And then I went back to bed for a quick nap before work.  Brilliant idea.  I emerged once again into the land of undefinable shadows and dread.

Only this time … I was back in school.

I didn’t wake up screaming.  I’m too strong for that.