AND THE LONG LEGGED MAN PLAYS THE 50'S KIND OF TUNES.

I reread my last blog, especially the part about my dream, and umm…

I don’t like it. I editorialized the s**t out of my dream. Tried to find context and plot and all of that bad stuff. I didn’t change anything, but I turned it into a “story” and a story isn’t a dream. They’re totally different. To be honest, it’s the wannabe writer inside me. That’s what I do, try to makes sense out of random ideas floating in my head. Still though, it’s a bum way to describe a dream because it takes away everything that gives it power and leaves it as just a bunch of moribund words. Just dry description. It’s like talking about having the greatest sex of your life by saying: “We made love under the moonlight. I touched her chest and she stroked my genitals…”

See what I mean? Blah…

The genius of David Lynch, is that he doesn’t have that stubborn desire to organize things in his head and make them easier to express. He’s not trying to find sense in his ideas, but instead puts them on the screen as is, no matter how completely off the wall they are. He has total and complete trust in the purity of his subconscious. This is why his films appeal to us so completely, because we recognize the seed of our own thoughts in what he does. We recognize the unpolished dream or nightmare that haunts our minds.

Which brings us all to my little Inland Empire experiment and the f****d up dreams I had last night.

Now, I’m not gonna try and make sense of anything. I made that mistake last time and that’s no good. So here’s my attempt to explain it with the purity of Lynch:

The first thing I remember was seeing a man with insanely long legs playing the drums with his feet in an echo chamber kind of room. In the background were playing two identical 50’s records, not quite in sync. They were maybe half a second off and it gave everything an weird warbly feeling. The records were the old seven inch vinyl kind, I could tell because of that scratching/skipping antique jukebox quality. The guy was wearing all white and he kept repeating “I’m the real deal daddy long legs baby.” only he didn’t say it in words, but I knew what he meant. (People rarely speak with their mouths in my dreams)

Then that all dissapeared and things shifted…

Now, before I continue, I have to tell you that I woke up after this next dream and wrote it down on the computer, before laying back on the bed and falling asleep again. So the words in bold are my unexpurgated impressions of what I saw:

Its Emerald city, built in cubist white cardboard. Black windows and red highlights. A movie set miniature hundreds of feet tall and a mile wide with a path running between it. I’m only imagining it at first because it’s in the past. A particularly vivid picture in a magazine, and then I’m there and it’s real. I have my camera. I want to take a picture of this place. It’s beautiful. Jimmy Stewart is in black and white screaming something at me but I can’t hear. I know Naomi Watts is out there, but she’s in a coma hooked up to a dream machine. There are rabbits eating the cardboard of the emerald city. That’s why they’re here. There’s something more, I can’t quite remember. Two detectives are explaining to me why her EEG couldn’t tell that the readings were wrong. She rigged them to seem normal. The sun goes out and it’s night. And in front of me is a giant f*****g bunny rabbit. I know its Naomi Watts and if I could only take a picture of her in this form with my camera she’d go back to being an actress and not this rabid thing. Taking a picture would make her unreal and cinematic again, just an actress. Only my camera ran out of batteries and I can’t find any spares.

Jimmy Stewart was one of the cops.

Needless to say, I did not editorialize the above, because that is some freaky crap. I remember it very f*****g well too. Naomi Watts turning into a rabbit only sounds cute, it wasn’t. She also didn’t turn into those Rabbits from the Lynch shorts (or the little bit at the beginning of INLAND EMPIRE that I did see). It was darker, more… evil. And it wasn’t Naomi Watts per say, not the lady that’s married to Liev Shrieber and had a baby. It was the celluloid wraith of herself that’s on the screen. As if the act of acting leaves something of you behind, something not quite…

…well there I am editorializing and trying to find sense again. No good. Let’s just leave it as it is. I think the images carry plenty enough weigh all by themselves without me having to explain them.

After I fell back asleep I dreamed a little bit more. There was a homeless lady carrying a video camera stalking the streets of Los Angeles. A dirty old hag. A witch maybe. The camera had a huge light attached to the side and she would shine it in people’s face and they’d recoil. She was looking for someone in particular.

Then… nothing. Woke up refreshed and rested. The INLAND EMPIRE DVD had gone back to the title menu. I turned it off and came here to write down what I saw.

You know, I can’t wait to actually see this freaking movie. Might not live up to the dreams, but it’s gonna be something.